How old are you children?

Swings would be great but take up a lot of space since they have to be out in the center of the room and having clearance front/back. We built a playhouse in our last backyard for our three children that had a sleeping loft, ladder/up down.

Any girls - How about a corner with a built-in playhouse area? Doorway with window (no glass). Space inside to cook, have a tea party or play dolls.

thanks allison. the kids are 4 & 5, a boy and a girl.

Since they are young, you might want to make the ladder removable until they are older, for safety.

An art area or wall would be fun.

You could post this in the decorating forum too.

I guess it depends on what your kids are into. I don't have kids, but my hunch would be that it would be best to keep the permanent infrastructure of the room pretty simple so you can change it up over the years to suit their interests. You should probably make sure it's wired so they can have whatever technology they want our there in later years when all they do is play video games. (If they're like my husband, that means well into their 30s : )

I do have one cool idea, though, which sounds a little out there but bear with me: A stage/theater area where they could do performance-type stuff. You could have a raised "stage" area at one end of the room and/or one wall partially mirrored, maybe some cool lights, and there could be a big trunk or a clothes rack where they could have costumes and dress-up stuff. Later when they are older, they could do karaoke or those dance video games and stuff like that with their friends, or if they study dance or music or drama in later years they could practice there.

I also think a playhouse area sounds neat. When I was in kindergarten, our classroom had different play areas that we rotated to every day. There was a playhouse area that all the girls fought over because it was so much fun. It had a kitchen area and pretend food, baby dolls, play clothes and an iron, etc. There was also a "construction" area that the boys loved. It had big blocks you could use to build walls and toy equipment, etc. I guess it would be crazy to have a sandbox in there since it's indoors?

We are just finishing up a playroom over our garage for our kids. I used a 'unique' floor, it is made out of soft wood, pine starter board, usually used for walls or ceilings I think, and painted it white, caulked it and then put a poly finish over it. I wanted a floor that wasn't too expensive so that my kids could destroy it without worry.

I painted the walls a pale yellow and kind of want a porch-like feel to the room, since where we live we don't have porches or sunrooms. We are going to put up elfa shelving, I love using the clear shoeboxes from container store to control all the toys and have a hanging section for dress up clothes. I have thought about making a felt board for them to use, my drs office had one and my daughter loved playing with it. We are putting a small table and chairs and a set of drawers with all their arts and crafts - stickers, markers, papers, crayons, play-doh, etc.

I think they just have so many toys of all kinds that they don't need a fancy structure around it, just a good way to keep things organized and enough room to take them out and play with them. We are also going to have a sofa, our tv and our excersize machine in the same room, so I think it will end up being a big gathering place for our family, I hope.

I have three kids, 6, 3 1/2 and 11 months.

Good luck!

devorah

In our current home, our playroom consists of centers too. Art area consists of the chalkboard, painting, playdoh, etc. Building area with legos, knex. Reading corner with bean bags, fold out chair/sofa--kids size/style and tons of books. Built in under our stairs is the tv center, with storage for dvd's and playstation. Also have a train table/cars/rescue heroes w/ storage under the train table, which we also use as a game table. They also have a desk w/ a typewriter,(they love to play office), a play store and a tool shelf. Yes, we have tons of junk, but honestly, there isn't a day that goes by that they aren't down there playing something. What helps is that we have a storage room right behind it and I rotate their toys a lot. I painted the ceiling like the sky with clouds,(so easy)and part of the wall. I used the wallpaper with trees to the ceiling. We put green burber carpeting. We knew that there would also be a lot of "wrestling" going on, so hard floors would not work for them. It was the most fun I had decorating a room. I am a former teacher, so I use a lot of my school and holiday decorations, too. I love to surprise the boys each holiday/season and decorate it for them. Now if I can only get them to keep it clean--but no matter, I just shut the door LOL!

We don't have kids yet, but in building our home, we built a room that we could use as a playroom in the future should we be blessed with children. In that room, we are building in a window seat that opens and can be used as a toy chest and we wired the room so that we could hang a small plasma on the wall up there for movies and wired with CAT cables for the use of a computer center in that room when the kids grow up and need to have a homework center there. As for specific "stations" or other creative ideas, we're just not there yet, so I can't offer you ideas.

I think a climber would be more fun than a swing. If you have a swing, you need to keep the path of the swing clear and would be hard to do. We had a climber down the basement of our old house. It was made by a european toy manufacturer (can't remember the name) but it was a classic jungle gym that had removable platforms and you could configure the jungle gym many different ways so that it not only was climber but it could be a pretend firehouse (with a firepole to slide own), put a blanket over it and you had a play house, etc. If you had high ceilings, you could make it high, and if you had low ceilings you could make it low. It was awesome and the kids (boys) loved it. And you could move it around easily so the kids could shove it out of the way when they were doing something that required a lot of floor space.