A pre-school child quickly amasses an ever-growing number of books, toys and clothes. Ample storage is therefore required if your child is to have a bedroom with sufficient floor space on which to play. Once your child has passed babyhood, there will be certain items of furniture that can be disposed of to create the extra storage and play space required.

For example, the comfortable feeding chair in which you dozed at night and the nappy changing unit, if you had one, will no longer be needed. Removing these items may also free up sufficient space to change your child s cot for a bed.

Floors

Flooring should be practical and hard-wearing. Carpets are warm underfoot bin make sure that you choose a color and pal tern on which spillages and small accidents will not be too visible, flooring such as laminated or natural wood and cushioned vinyl are ideal alternatives.

If you wish to create a decorative theme in the room, linoleum, which can be cut into various shapes, is a good idea. You could use it to create huge dinosaur footprints crossing the room, for example, or a path of large cobblestones on a grass-green background, leading to a wardrobe that has been disguised as a garden playhouse. This way you can cut out a piece of linoleum if it becomes damaged.

Walls

Wall coverings at this stage should be easy to clean and hard-wearing: this way, the occasional artistic outburst from your child will not be a disaster. This is especially important it the bedroom is also used as a play area. Paint and solid vinyl wallpapers are the best choices.

Furniture

A growing child needs more and bigger clothes, so you may need to purchase a wardrobe, cither new or second-hand. An old wardrobe can be transformed into anything from the outside of a circus tent to a lunar rocket, adding theatrical interest as well as storage space to your child s bedroom. A bookcase is also a practical purchase – in many homes, the books owned by the children vastly outnumber those owned by the adults.

There are various styles of bed available for young children, many of them similar to adult beds. All children moving from a cot to a bed should have a safety rail fitted to the new bed to ensure that they do not fall out. Some of the styles that may catch your eye are cabin beds (a raised bed with cupboards and drawers beneath), captain’s beds (elevated with a wardrobe and cupboards below) and bunk beds. However, all of these are only suitable for children aged six or over, due to their height.