Our Playroom Tour

Playroom Tour

Today I'm continuing our gradual tour of the new house and our finished makeover projects. We are really lucky in that the new house has plenty of rooms and we had a spare reception room downstairs that we could turn into a playroom.

This is the room before we moved in...

It looks like it might have been used as a sort of playroom! What you can't really tell from this photo is that the carpet was disgusting - really filthy and dirty and smelly and the walls were in poor condition. We had a decorator strip the wallpaper, line and paint it all a fresh white. We kept the wooden doors to the garden but just painted them and we pulled up the carpet, sanded the floor and painted it grey. We then had our blank canvas to create a bright playroom.

I wanted the room to be gender neutral, bright and colourful with clever storage so it was easy to find toys / craft things and be a room that the children wanted to spend time in. I wanted them to be able to get to everything themselves and also have a place to display all their artwork and make a mess, with us only worrying about tidying it up once a day in the evening.

Most of the toys are stored in this very clever Kallax unit from Ikea. Each colour box contains a different type of toy. Paints are in one box, craft things in another, playdoh in another. Cars in one, trains in one, dolls in one, you get my drift! It is really easy to pull one box out when they want to play with that thing and then put it all back before getting another box out.

Smaller toys and bits and bobs that don't have a home are stored in these great plastic tubs. They are really cheap and you can find them in bigger supermarkets.

Across the other side of the room we have a smaller kallax unit which houses books and toys that are a bit bigger like the toy garage. We put an old TV in here with a cheap little DVD player and the girls love sitting in here to watch films together which frees up the main TV for us!

In one corner we have their toy kitchen. The girls loved playing with this, and it's nice to have it out all the time. We do need to pick up some toy food for it though as all of ours seems to have gone missing!

I bought this small dressing rail to house all their dressing up costumes. We had so many and in the old house they were stored in boxes under the bed which meant they were hard to get at and were always wrinkly. This rail is perfect and Little Miss J often gets herself a costume to play in as she loves dressing up. I really like that she can just go and help herself, it really helps her imaginative play too.

In the other corner we have a unit which we brought from the old house but goes really well in here. We had upcycled an old ikea chest of drawers to make this. You can read the tutorial here. It is nice and sturdy and perfect for keeping the large fish tank on. It stores pet supplies, blankets and an empty drawer for things I want to sell on eBay.

The children's artwork is proudly displayed on the wall in here. Some I have put into frames and other pieces I just washi tape to the walls which means I can change it about when I want to. It is nice to be able to display the art they work so hard on and I think they really love the fact that we celebrate their achievements by displaying them.

As you can see the playroom is also where we store our beloved Bugaboo Cameleon pushchair!

Little finishing touches make the room just perfect. This cute little fox doorstop, the cushions I use instead of a draught excluder for under the old wooden door and this gorgeous rainbow rug all help to finish the room off perfectly.

So that's everything in this room! We are really pleased with it and I hope the children appreciate how lucky they are too! I'd like to say this means that there are no toys in the rest of the house, but they do bring some out, and the whole top floor (the children's floor) is still full of toys but it does mean that our front room looks like less of a playground at least!

I have filmed a little video tour of the room too if you want to see it in full 360 degree glory!