Disney Cruise Stateroom Door Decorations

We've taken two Disney Cruise vacations now, and one of the things that my family loved to do was decorate our stateroom door.  It made it easy for the kids to find our room when we went down the hallway and it was really fun to see how others had their doors decorated.

The major rules that you have to follow is that you can't use any type of adhesive stickers on the doors or anything that goes over the top of the door (like over the door closet hooks, etc).  The doors are metal and everything must be hung using magnets.  You need a pretty heavy duty magnet and I've tried two different kinds.  On our first cruise I bought a roll of adhesive backed magnets that were labeled as heavy duty.  They were a little pricey, but I could cut them in the sizes I wanted and stick them on my projects (like these Fish Extender gifts I made here).  They didn't end up being quite strong enough to really hang well on the stateroom doors.  Sometimes we'd come back to our room and we would find a few decorations had slid down the door or were on the floor.  I found some adhesive backed magnetic buttons in the craft section at Walmart (only sold in stores) and used those for our next last cruise.  They worked perfectly and they were cheap at 18 for $1.97.  I added a little E6000 glue along with the adhesive sticker because I wanted them to really stick.  

These are what I used...

 

You can really do anything you want for your door decorations.  I wanted to keep with a Mickey Ears theme, so I found a template (I liked this one) and added my own designs to the inside of the ears in Microsoft Word.  I did one for each member of our family with their name and their favorite Disney character.  I also did a bunch of our favorite sports teams (and a CO flag) to show our Colorado pride.  I made one specific to our cruise for the second trip because I had someone from our cruise group (more on joining a group here) make one for us on our first trip that I loved having.  I had also seen a lot of cute character decorations to put around the round part on your door that has your stateroom number on it.  I found some really great templates on Pinterest and used this one to print a Pirate Mickey.  Really, you can do whatever you want.  I saw people with battery operated lights that they hung on their door, decorations for birthdays, anniversaries, etc.  Get creative!

To design my decorations, I used Microsoft Word.  I inserted the picture template, inserted another picture for the design I wanted, added a text box, and then played around with sizes.  I saved one and then kept that size and used it for the rest that I made.  I printed them, cut the design out, and then laminated them.  Make sure you cut the paper to the shape you want it prior to laminating, then laminate, then cut the plastic down to the correct size.  If you cut the paper after you laminate, there won't be anything to hold the seal and it will separate.  I have this Scotch Laminator and absolutely love it.  I got it as a gift and then bought extra 5x7" and 8.9x11.4" sheets from Amazon (much cheaper!)  After laminating, I glued a few magnets on the back and then stuck them all in a ziplock bag to pack in my suitcase.  You can read about my packing tips here. 

I somehow forgot to take a picture of our stateroom door on the first cruise, but managed to remember to do it on the last night of our second trip.  Side note, I let my seven year old daughter arrange the door and had to stop myself from moving things around every time I looked at it.  I thought about moving things around for the picture, but this is how she wanted it so I left it be.  We were also gifted some fun magnets from our Fish Extender group (more info on Fish Extenders here) that we loved adding to our door.

Decorating your door just adds a little more magic to an already magical Disney Cruise vacation.  It can be as simple or as complicated as you want to make it, but it adds a fun touch that my family really enjoyed.  If you aren't creative, I'm sure there are Etsy shops that sell pre-made decorations, or you could do simple stuff with Disney scrapbooking paper.  Make whatever you want and have fun with it!