If you’re anything like me, an all-white room is a nightmare. After purchasing our first home in 2021, I decided to finally design the dark lair I’d always dreamed of. So began the transformation of our elegant goth vampire bedroom!

But how did we do it?

The short answer is a lot of hard work and some money. We probably spent less than you think – I’ve given an estimate at the bottom of this post. We did a lot of the labor ourselves (or with the help of my general contractor father) to cut down on costs. Eventually I’ll post DIY tutorials for all the things we did ourselves, but for this initial post, I’ll just detail the eight steps of our specific process below and share the products we used.

Sidenote, you may not be able to do all these steps if you’re renting and have a strict landlord. But many of the steps can be done regardless of your budget or current living situation. Find what works for you at this moment in time and remember you can always do more in the future! We started in a small apartment with popcorn ceiling, vertical blinds, and off-white walls and carpeting. Sometimes it just takes time 🙂

But I digress! Here’s the process we took:

1. Buy/rent a home with good bones and potential.

Ignore the wall color or the flooring – those can all be changed. You’re unlikely to find a home that already has a goth vampire bedroom, so just look for a home without any major damage. Make sure it has a layout you can see yourself being able to work with. We actually ended up purchasing the second house we looked at with a realtor. Something about it just felt right the moment we stepped inside, and I was already picturing what we would do with the house. Like they say…when you know, you know.

2. Choose your theme/style.

This part is probably my favorite part of the whole process, because it’s when the character and style of the room are created and discovered. This is the time for your creativity to really run wild!

So what theme did we pick for our lair? We obviously decided to create a black and red goth vampire bedroom. There are four words I’ve kept in mind while designing this room because they really define our style and aesthetic. My four descriptive words are: dark, elegant, sexy, and dangerous.

If there’s one thing you remember from this blog, make it this: choose a few key words and colors that define how you want your bedroom to look. They will be the bar against which you evaluate any potential decor, furniture, or color choices. For example, I have a lot of dark art, but not all of it will be cohesive with the theme of our vampire bedroom or my four aesthetic words. Adding items that don’t fit your theme/style kind of “muddy the water” and often end up looking like clutter instead of contributing to your beautiful interior design.

Whether you like minimalist or maximalist design, the more you go into your interior design with a specific vibe/feel/color scheme/theme in mind, the easier it will be to create a beautiful and aesthetically pleasing room.

Want to know the specific products we used for our goth vampire bedroom? Check out #8 below!

3. Decide on flooring.

As someone who’s lived for 30 years with dingy carpet and ugly yellow/green linoleum from the 70’s, I knew I didn’t want to have carpet or linoleum. Linoleum isn’t super durable and tends to wear down quicker than other materials. If you have pets, then you already know how disgusting carpet can get.

Since we have four cats and I hate vacuuming, carpet was definitely off the table. I’ve always loved the look of hardwood and stone, but those can get expensive really quickly. So instead I went to budget-friendly vinyl, which can be very durable depending upon the type. It’s also water-resistant, insulating, and easy to clean up, which means you can use it in any room of your house.

We decided to floor our entire house (minus the garage) in a black/gray wood-pattern vinyl plank flooring from Home Depot. My dad, who’s a general contractor, installed all the flooring for us. However, from my understanding, click-lock vinyl could be installed by someone who’s not a professional. So if you feel like taking on the challenge, installing your own flooring could be one way to save costs!

4. Decide on paint color.

The next step is to decide on the color you want your walls. We went with a flat black from Behr, and ended up painting our ceiling that color as well. We’d heard that painting everything black would make the room shrink, but we actually felt it made the room bigger. It also had the nice side effect of turning into a void at night without lights. I definitely scared Scott more than once by mysteriously appearing from the darkness, haha.

This was another project my amazing dad helped us with, but would be easy enough to do on your own. If you don’t think you could go all black with your own bedroom, try doing an accent wall in a dark color that’s complimentary to your lighter color.

Pro tip: take a picture of your bedroom before you paint it. Your “before” photo can come in handy if you’re having a hard time deciding on paint colors. Simply edit that photo in Photoshop or your photo editor of choice to try out different wall colors. Home Depot also has an app called ProjectColor that lets you browse their available colors, match colors with your camera or on Pinterest, and test out paint colors on pictures of your house.

Check out the crazy before/after of our goth vampire bedroom! *oooh, ahhh*

For your info: This post contains affiliate links, which means we may earn a small commission on eligible purchases at no additional cost to you. See our full disclosure here.

5. Pick out molding/decorative elements.

By molding and decorative elements, I’m referring to baseboards, crown molding, and faux tin ceiling tiles. To start, we picked a baseboard from Home Depot that felt a little more elegant than what was already installed in the house, and my dad again installed those.

Sidenote: We painted the walls AFTER installing the baseboards and flooring, so we had to cover the floor with Ram Board and tape off the baseboards with masking paper and painter’s tape. Not the fastest process, but we saved money by doing that ourselves.

Once all that was done, we started on the decorative elements. Since we have 9ft ceilings, we decided to go with a 3-3/4 inch polyurethane crown molding from Lowe’s. It’s made of a light foam-like material and is more budget-friendly than wood, but still looks amazing. It came primed white, but we used a black satin spray paint to turn the boards black. We installed them ourselves with only a few little mishaps along the way (to be detailed in a future post).

For the ceiling, I really wanted to sell the goth vampire bedroom fantasy, so I looked for ceiling tiles that would look elegant without breaking the bank. I eventually landed on some black faux tin ceiling tiles from Home Depot, though you can also find them on Amazon. Scott ended up gluing all of them to the ceiling while I worked on other projects around the house (thanks, Scott!) The tiles themselves are really lightweight and made of a thin plastic, and Scott was able to glue them (with just a little trial and error) to the ceiling with DAP black caulk.

6. Decide on lighting.

So our house was actually built without any lighting in the bedrooms (I guess the contractors thought everyone uses lamps now?) Anyways, I’d always wanted a chandelier in my bedroom, so I searched until I found the perfect one from Alibaba.

Since there was no pre-existing lighting in our room, we had to hire an electrician to create a new lighting fixture and install the chandelier. That’s one project I definitely could not have done myself, because I am NOT an electrician, haha. The chandelier also came in about 1000 pieces from China, so I was more than happy to let the electrician assemble it. The cost was somewhere around $1250 for the install.

Word of advice: if you’re going to install ceiling tiles, make sure you have them BEFORE installing a chandelier in your ceiling. Our electrician was able to center the first tile above the chandelier when he installed it, and we just based the rest of the tiles off that one. It was also way easier than if we had tried to install that tile after the chandelier was already in the ceiling.

7. Choose your furniture.

We knew we wanted a bedframe that would be super elaborate and gothic, and really just the focal point of our room. I found the perfect one called “Queen of the Damned” at Haunt Cult. It practically screams goth vampire bedroom, which is exactly what I was looking for. This was by far the most expensive item in our room at approximately $5k, and is probably the only bedframe we’ll own for the rest of our lives.

Our experience with Haunt Cult was pretty positive. We’ve heard that other people have received damaged items, but we didn’t notice any cracks or damage on our bedframe. From our experience, their communication was pretty good, and the bed shipped to us sooner than expected. It arrived in a gigantic, HEAVY wooden box that we picked up at a warehouse near the Los Angeles port. The bedframe then sat in our garage for about half a year until we finished all the remodeling steps above. When it came time to assemble it, Scott and I were able to manage by ourselves.

For the nightstands, I had a specific style in mind that I discovered is called French Provincial. It’s characterized by curved details and elegant silhouettes, which I knew would fit well with the style of our bedframe. I found a pair of white nightstands on Facebook Marketplace for $150, which I then sanded, painted black, and finished with a satin finish.

Honestly, Facebook Marketplace is one of my favorite places to find elegant or antique furniture. You can usually get a pretty good deal – especially if you’re okay with refinishing your own furniture. Eventually I’ll make some DIY tutorials for refinishing furniture.

8. Choose your decor products. 

We’ve created a quick-reference Vampire Bedroom collection on our Amazon Storefront where you can find all the Amazon products we used in the creation of our room. Click the link!

One of the first decor pieces we added to our room were these gorgeous black-on-black damask drapes with a valance. They add a nice touch of luxury to the room – and they glow red when the sun shines through them…? So weird, but so cool.

PRO TIP: Mount your drapes closer to the ceiling to give the illusion of taller ceilings. Make sure the drapes come down to within an inch of the floor.

We also purchased curtain rods from Amazon, as well as burgundy table runners to adorn the drapes flanking our bed. This helped tie in a darker red, felt more elaborate, and added dimension.

For the lampshades, I found these gorgeous ones from @deadlydarlingnightshades that use cathedral fabric from @videnoircouture. I wanted lampshades that would feel a bit Victorian and elegant, but still have those sharp cathedral edges and patterns.

For the lamp itself, I found a twisted lampstand on Amazon and bought color-changing bulbs (though we usually keep them red). We installed two LED strips around the bedframe – one underneath the bed and one behind the headboard. It really makes the bed pop and almost seem like it’s floating. This is a cheap and easy way to really bring your room to the next level! We also put a super soft black shag rug under the bed, and set up some flameless LED candles on the nightstands.

I looked long and hard for a bedspread that had the right color/pattern for what I was envisioning. While I didn’t quite find what I was looking for, this comforter set from Amazon came pretty close. It’s a nice balance of patterned fabric and plain satin fabric that complements the rest of the room.

One element that often gets overlooked is the outlets. Since ours were white, we bought black outlets and outlet covers and changed them ourselves.

Note: Make sure you do this safely! Always turn off the power and test the outlet to make sure it’s not receiving power BEFORE you try to change it. There’s plenty of videos on YouTube about how to do this whole process. Please make sure not to work outside your capabilities, and ask for professional help when you need it.

Conclusion

For all the work we’ve done so far, we’re still nowhere near done. We still plan to put up some wall decor (art, mirrors, etc), add a chair rail and wall molding, build an ornate frame to go around our TV, and buy or build some furniture for the TV corner of the room. We also recently finished designing an elegant coffin shelf that fits in perfectly with our vampire theme. Check out our DIY Coffin Shelf tutorial blog post to learn how to make it yourself!

Now, I did promise to tell you the cost. Ready?

I’d guess we’ve spent about $10-15k so far on our bedroom remodel. This includes flooring, furniture, paint, molding, decor, etc. We’ll probably spend another $2.5-$5k to complete it.

Choosing cheaper (but still good quality) products and doing a lot of the install work ourselves cut our costs at least in half. It probably would have cost us an additional $10-15k if we’d hired someone or gotten more expensive flooring/ceiling tiles. This is why we recommend shopping around for deals and learning how to do things yourself!

I hope it was helpful to see our process and how we made our decisions. I’ll be posting a ton of DIY tutorials, interior design advice, decor ideas, and more as I continue to build this site.

Please comment below or contact us if you have any questions or want to see a specific tutorial or post. Follow us on Instagram, TikTok, or Facebook to connect with us and stay updated on the status of our home.

Thanks for your interest in The Johnson Lair <3

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