Kid Play Rooms – Inside Or Outside A Children’s Bedroom?

Where is the best place to create kid play rooms, in the children’s bedroom or in another room in the house?

For safety sake, a play room should always be located in a spot where adults are nearby. When planning kid play rooms it’s best to select a location that can be easily viewed and is within earshot (say in a dining room just off the kitchen).

Creating a play room or play area as part of your children’s bedroom is a good idea when your kids are a little older but for real young ones a separate area is usually better. It’s always good to be close by kid play rooms in the event there’s an emergency or disagreement that requires some parental intervention.

Further, you’d be surprised by what you can learn about your child just by watching and listening to how they use their play room. Child play rooms give kids a chance to be imaginative and to explore and it gives parents an opportunity to learn more about our child’s personality and how our child communicates through play.

Over time kid play rooms can be moved from one room to another. As your children grow you can take back their play room space and use it for it’s original purpose - a family room, a dining room etc.

School age children usually enjoy having their activity and sleep space all rolled into one. If a children’s bedroom is a reasonable size and you create an organizational system that works with your child’s personality, your children’s bedroom can also become a fun play room.

The key to creating temporary kid play rooms that are age appropriate is to limit yourself to the basics. For instance, you can do want we did when our kids were small. We turned our dining room into an awesome play room by putting our table and china in storage and filled the room up with our children’s toys instead. The dining room was centrally located and just off the kitchen. You could adapt all or part of a family room in the same way. Cater to the play needs of your youngsters and then when your children grow, you can create a play room in the basement or within the walls of a children’s bedroom.

When my youngest was in kindergarten we created a fun play room in the basement. Today our kids have outgrown their basement play room and now any play is carried out in the children’s bedroom.

Where to locate kid play rooms is limited only to your available space and your imagination. Even small rooms when organized well can be turned into a great play room.

Child play rooms wherever they are located within your home are best divided into compartments. For instance, you may want to divide the room into a craft side and a play side. The craft side could be home to arts and craft supplies like paints, markers, clay etc. (In other words, anything that could make a mess) and the play side could be home to puzzles, board games, action figures, dolls etc.

When creating kid play rooms that may be later moved to different rooms in your home as your child grows, it’s important to focus more on play value instead of decorating techniques.

In the case of our dining room play room we keep the walls bare and strung a clothesline type rope to hang favorite pieces of artwork. Since we knew we were going to turn the room back into a functioning dining room in a few years we didn’t want to go to the time and expense of putting up child-friendly wallpaper or repainting.

What we did do was use toys and freestanding shelving units as part of the play room décor. It is easy to decorate a play room when you stick to one or two colors and coordinate accessories like a throw on the loveseat or a matching cushion on the rocking chair. You may also consider painting any child sized furniture to match.

For more decorating play room ideas see: Fun Ideas For Kid Play Rooms