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AIBU?

Share your dilemmas and get honest opinions from other Mumsnetters.

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Original poster

To think a playroom is just more room for mess?

40 replies

Dingdongdog · 13/12/2023 14:48

We have 3 children. One older so he's not fussed as in his room a lot.

We have a downstairs playroom. I just find that the mess it creates outweighs the use it brings. Hubby doesn't agree!
We have toys all over the lounge anyway so....

If you had the luxury of a room downstairs would you have a;
Playroom
Separate dining room
Spare room for guests (maybe visiting overnight once every couple months)

Thank you!

OP posts:

ILookLikeAPinkBlancmange · 13/12/2023 15:21

What's so terrible about mess? A playroom offers better extra educational opportunities such as big toys eg playhouse, kitchen, tent, etc. and it has space for child-height table and chairs for crafts, nature table, pet cage/tank, big display boards on the walls for their artwork... if the toys are all over the house, that's possibly because you're not going in there to do activities with them, so they bring the toys out to play near you?

Caspianberg · 13/12/2023 15:32

Do you have storage in there?
we have cupboards with doors, so when we want it tidy or guests stay we just put everything away and it’s toy free

headcheffer · 13/12/2023 15:41

We have a small playroom. I love it. We have a small sofa in there and TV, and the kids aren't really allowed in our living room as a default - only when we are in there as a family. Whereas we sit with them in the playroom all the time. I'm also quite strict and it gets tidied every night, and only have a limited amount of storage so if stuff isn't fitting in the Trofast unit then it's time for a clear out!!

DRS1970 · 13/12/2023 15:58

Our children have all left home, so no playroom dilemma, but thought I would share our ideas.

We had a small bedroom we didn't use. So we stripped it out and repurposed it as a home office, and find it a great well used space.

We had a spare room separate from the main house on the ground floor. I am just in the planning stage to convert it to a large utility/ cloakroom. It should declutter our hall, and provide some useful space.

Pinocolada · 13/12/2023 16:33

I love our playroom, it leads straight off the living room so the kids can play in there while adults are relaxing. The mess stays in the playroom and the kids have to make sure it is tidy before they are allowed on screens.

Christmassss · 13/12/2023 16:39

When my DC were younger I had a playroom with really good storage units, I loved that room. Now I have a separate smaller second reception room that has a massive TV to watch sport on, a sofa and Wii.
My DH and I spend two evenings watching our own shows and he used that room.

ChiefWiggumsBoy · 13/12/2023 16:49

Mine are too old for a playroom now, but we have two living rooms - one for them and one for us. If we'd lived in that room we would have had theirs as the play room.

I think the idea is that the mess can then be contained in that one room, so nothing in the bedrooms bar a stuffed toy and all the normal bedroom stuff. I like that idea if I'm honest.

fingerguns · 13/12/2023 16:49

Our Christmas tree goes up where all my DD3 and DD2's toys are. This year, rather than living in even more cramped conditions (we only have a small living room) I decided to put all of their toys in boxes and shove them in the loft (okay fine, I have kept a minuscule amount in a single basket). The living room has never been clearer, and the girls have been totally unbothered by the lack of toys to play with. Instead, they have been using their imagination a lot more and using other objects to play with. It makes me wonder why I bought any of the toys in the first place.

TL;DR Playrooms are just havens for extreme mess. Repurpose the room. The kids won't mind!

CasperGutman · 13/12/2023 16:59

We have two 'living room' type rooms. The larger is a family room which has all the toys, the biggest telly, games console and comfy sofas. The other has more of a grown-up sitting room feel. There is a telly but it's smaller and more discretely positioned. There's an original fireplace (which we use very occasionally), and a piano. The second room includes a sofa bed (a very comfy one from Willow and Hall, which looks great when folded away), and doubles as an occasional guest room.

Newphony · 13/12/2023 17:04

Children make a mess in every room, with or without toys, so it doesn't really matter!

MilkChocolateCookie · 13/12/2023 17:07

We had a playroom when ours were little, as others have said it was good for keeping the mess contained and you could shut the door on it.

Now my kids are teens it has beanbags and a TV and the Xbox.

ReadyForPumpkins · 13/12/2023 17:09

Playroom with extra TV, game console and sofa. But my children are older and often both of them play on the console.

Lastminutebride · 13/12/2023 17:12

Playroom most definitely. We have a playroom, it’s got a sofa and tv too. Yes she makes a mess but it’s easy to tidy as everything has a home.
she loves sitting in there playing or doing crafts, watching tv.
she brings the occasional toys out but then they get put back in the playroom.

BogRollBOGOF · 13/12/2023 17:16

Our playroom was more of a storage room, but did allow for more sprawling toys like the train set to come out and not be in the way, and a place for rogue toys to be returned to which benefited the rest of the house.

Now the DCs are around secondary age we've had a big clear out and redecorated. One reason why the DCs didn't play in there was because the room was cold, so those issues have been sorted. It's now a study/ gaming room and they're making much more use out of it.

When the room is in order, it really helps the rest of the house out. If it's a mess, it's easy to ignore until it's time to deal with it.

BertieBotts · 13/12/2023 17:19

I think if you constantly have toy mess then you probably need to consolidate and/or reduce toys.

Whether you do that by actually culling or toy rotations is up to you. Some people have really huge success with rotating. I can't keep up with it so I would rather just cull.

Go through everything and put it all into categories, then store by category. Think about how things can be used together. For example we don't have a huge amount of dinosaurs, farm animals or zoo animals - so I put them all together in a tub with the toy fences. The DC will get the tub out and make a very exotic sort of farm. We also currently have chunky cars and small cars which don't work on the same scale, so I store them apart (I am thinking about retiring the chunky cars; my youngest is now two). If you have for example seventeen wooden jigsaws, all the pieces are just going to be mixed up and nobody will ever play with them. If you have three, they will be easily sorted out and so get played with. You could keep four sets of three and rotate them out, or get rid of 14. I keep little plastic trees in a tub of their own as they can be used with the "farm" or with the train track. In reality they rarely get them out for either, so I might just get rid of those too.

When you do this consolidation you'll find an astonishing amount of crap that is obviously never going to get played with because everything else in that category makes sense and then there's this weird/broken/reject/annoying one at the end. Just throw those away (or donate them). They just end up cluttering up the place as the DC dig through all the rest of the crap to find the good ones.

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