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How to Turn Any Room into a Starship

Space, the final frontier. Accompany us as we guide you on a journey to transform your room into a starship! If you're a fan of Star Trek, or Star Wars, or have an aspiring astronaut at home, you'll definitely want to try this out! It's a five-step mission to explore the creation of a starship bridge to boldly go where no DIYer has gone before. Let's begin.

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Materials

In this blog, we're going to be talking about how you can customize your room to appear as if you're in a starship in a budget-friendly way. You can use whatever you have lying around your home. Or if you aren't too concerned about budget check out "materials" section to get an idea of what you should use.

  • Captain's Chair - An office chair or gaming chair should suffice to simulate the rising and lowering mechanism of a starship captain's chat.
  • Crew Chairs - Your crew will need seats to monitor their respective stations
  • Glass Table - Simulate the advance holographs that show up on the displays by utilizing a glass table.
  • Monitors and TVs - You can't have a Starship without visual aids for your transmissions and security cameras identifying approaching enemy ships!
  • Vinyl - This will help your starship to life. From silvers, blacks and space themes, use a variety of vinyls to get immersed.  
  • Dustpans - For control panels.
  • Carboard/Magazine Holders - For the monitors if you want to save money.
  • Tape and Spray Paint - To help blend in your colors and hold stuff down.
  • Craft Jewels/Bottle Caps - To create buttons for the control panels.
  • Bulletin Board Paper (Gray) - To create dark flooring.
  • Calculator - Accessory for Captain's chair.

The first thing you'll want to do is take your chosen captain's chair and place it in the center of the room and surrounded it with glass tables, each holding two crew members. Once you get this layout established, it is time to decide how to actually dress up the room. Choose an aesthetic consisting of silvers, blacks, and glass for your overall color scheme and design. This particular color scheme will give you cohesion to your layout so that when visitors look at it, they're not necessarily seeing that things are different styles, but they're just seeing everything matches color-wise, and so they accept it as reality.

It's also important to remember that in the low budget, you're boiling your room down to its very essence, the absolute minimum that you can get away with to convey an idea of something. Every single crew member should have a workstation that is made up of one screen and one control panel if you want to convey having a crew. If you want to save money, and not buy multiple monitors, you can also create some, made with one of those fold-out collapsible magazine holders. You fold it in, put it together, and it looks like this. When you flip them outside, however, and take off the metal panel, put two of them together, and you suddenly have a very interesting control monitor screen.

Next, wrap the entire thing in tape and then spray painted it silver. Now, if you're tech-savvy, you can blackout lines of electrical tape and put a green neon piece of poster board in it so that you can put a special effect of something going on on the monitor via your computer if you want to make a film.

The control panels are made up of dustpans, and each one is sprayed pan silver with a black trimmer on the bottom and electrical tape. And then all the buttons on top are either craft jewels or they are made of bottle caps painted in various colors.

Flooring

Depending on which starship you're trying to emulate from your favorite sci-fi series, we'll use Star Trek as an example. If you're trying to emulate the original Star Trek series, one of our biggest challenges to emulate is probably the floor. If you have a hardwood floor in your room, that's obviously not going to work for a starship, but unless you want to uproot your floors and make things match, there's a cheaper, temporary option. Bulletin board paper will suffice. Bulletin board paper around 10ft long or so should suffice but get as much as you need for your floor. Get several rolls of it and roll it out, make four or five pieces of it, and that will make an entire gray floor. Next, tape it to the floor, and it will serve perfectly. Just be cautious as you walk on it.

Captain's Chair and Lighting

One of the most important aspects of a starship is the captain's chair. An office chair will suffice, but if you want something on top of it to make it more control panel-like and official looking for the armrests, then we've got you covered.

So, once again, take out your magazine holders. Slip them onto the existing armrests. Now, take some dollar store calculators, set them up on top of it, and bam, you will be able to easily just sit there and punch numbers into it. Sometimes the aspects that people notice most are things that you just happen to randomly find. If you have multiple crew members, you will want to ensure that your science officer's section has some kind of binocular scope to look into or any kind of a microscope-looking thing. Find anything cheap to fill that part, it works. Even things from your local thrift store. So, once you find your gadget, once again, use your magazine holders, and set it on top of it. It will make a little panel to go at the bottom to hide that it was a magazine holder, and it will look great. Just keep a lookout for just anything you think might be usable. It's also important to remember that sometimes people get a concept if you provide them with something that might not be true to the canon, but they think should be there.

Star Trek pilots never use a joystick, but if you find something that appears futuristic looking, it will really make the bridge look a little bit more important when the pilot was actually doing something with her hand. So lastly, on the bridge, you can decide to include several Led light systems which would just accent different places in your room. You can also use birthday cake lights, they're very cheap and small. Put them on the edges of desks or at the top of your right screens, just to give it a little bit more light, a little bit of an accent, and try to make it a little bit more spacey and modern and Sci-Fi like.

Backgrounds

Lastly, you'll need backgrounds and interiors. We have an assortment of metal films to recreate your starship's hull. And galaxy-themed backgrounds for you to frame and utilize to recreate traveling through space. And with that, you're ready to get traveling! So get planning, and check out our vinyl! Get yours today!

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