Create An Awesome Playroom For Under $20, Plus Easy DIYs!

I was super sick of tripping over toys, and large play items were taking over my house after Christmas. So, I decided to turn a dark basement storage room into a toy wonderland! Okay, that’s a stretch. But I was able to use that space, about $20, and a weekend to create an awesome playroom on a budget for my kids!

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I’m so mad at myself for not having a before picture of what the space looked like. Basically, it was a spare room in our basement with ugly, dark brown concrete walls. At one point we had it staged as a guest bedroom. But after some pretty major flood damage, we had to rip up the carpet, lay new waterproof click-lock plank flooring, and replace the baseboards with waterproof vinyl base trim. I didn’t include that in the playroom cost because it happened about a year prior to the transformation. But if you’re building or refinishing a basement, I’d highly recommend you look into the products I linked in bold above from the get-go. If your basement ever floods, you won’t have to replace a thing!

Anyway, back to the playroom. Following the flood damage, we never restaged the room and it basically became a “junk room” that we just shut the door on. We never really needed the space… that is, until Heidi’s October birthday and then Santa’s visit in December. In less than 3 months, we accumulated a ball-pit, a pretend-kitchen, a 7-foot tall monkey, a Barbie dreamhouse, a train set (and that’s not even half of it). Yes, my kids are spoiled rotten. Chances are, yours are too! Finding somewhere to put all of the kid stuff became a pressing issue pretty quickly. Suddenly, I’d never been happier to have that ugly little junk room attached to my house, and I got right to work.

Gather Supplies You Already Have

You know me. Mama on a budget. Before I jumped into transforming the space, I looked around the house to see what all I had to work with. I came up with a partial can of yellow-beige paint and a partial can of white. I found a large framed picture of a barn scene, my children’s “first-year” banners, a Lilly Pulitzer planner from the year before, a rolled up rug, and lots of toys.

The furniture pictured is some that we already had in there from when the room was staged as a guest bedroom. Basically, I just wanted to clean it up and freshen the paint so that it would be a happy place for my kids to play. The largest and cutest toys are the ones I knew I would leave out to display all the time. And the rest, I just stash away in drawers and miscellaneous storage bins, like I explain in this post.

*Create An Awesome Playroom For Under $20, Plus Easy DIYs!*

Painting The Room

Kicking myself for not knowing the paint colors, but I don’t think it matters anyway. I mixed the partial can of the yellow-beige color with the white paint I had on hand to make it brighter, and also to make sure I had enough paint to stretch two coats over the entire room. It ended up making the perfect amount, and the color was neutral and pleasant. I was fine with it for a basement playroom!

Run With A Fun Theme

The Lilly Pulitzer planner I found was the complete inspiration for the colors and decor. I’m not sure if you’ve ever seen one of these planners, but they have gorgeous Lilly Pulitzer prints on 30+ pages that I thought would make really cute framed artwork for the playroom. The colors were vivid, the scenes were jungle-ish and happy, and it all seemed to match the bright hues of my kids’ toys. Plus I already had them, so why not?!

I found the adorable Lilly Pulitzer seahorse pillow at my local TJ Maxx to hammer in the theme just a little more. I wasn’t able to find the exact link, but here are some similar ones from Amazon that are super cute! Literally everything else was either mine from college or from my daughter’s bedroom. Putting it all together was so easy once I started looking for things in my home that matched the Lilly prints.

Framing The Prints

This was really fun, and I’m sure this could be done with just about anything! Greeting cards, stationary, posters, and pages from children’s book pages would all work nicely and be super cute. All I did was flip through the planner and pick out my favorite images, then I cut them out and set them aside. I arranged them in a way I thought would look pretty on the wall, then I ran to grab a bunch of $1 frames from the Dollar Tree. Inexpensive frames like these would work just as well and they’ll ship directly to your house!

Upcycling An Ugly Picture

Whoever gave us this picture once upon a time, I AM SO SORRY! I know we ended up with it because someone else was getting rid of it, but it actually worked nicely for this little project. I took the backing off the picture and turned the barn/farm scene around backwards. Then I grabbed the Lilly Pulitzer planner and started cutting out images to use for a large collage. It turned out pretty decent, and it only took about 5 minutes of cutting and pasting with a glue stick. My 2-year-old could have done it! I realize it’s nothing special, but it totally works for playroom art. The fairy wings are a special touch from her 2nd birthday party – see post here.

Hanging Artwork On Concrete Walls

This is where the playroom project started to get a little more difficult. We live in an older home, and the walls in our basement are made of concrete. Being that the basement walls serve as the foundation for our house, we didn’t want to start hammering a bunch of nails into it and then regret that decision later on. On the two bigger walls, I used the Mud Pie Month Banners for each kid to fill the large space since they could easily be held with tiny command strips. That part was easy.

Over the bed I hung the frames with command strips the first time, but the next morning most of them had fallen off the wall. I bought heavier duty command strips and tried again. By one week later they had all fallen. I tried mounting squares, sticky tack, putty, and hot glue and nothing worked for very long. Finally, I bought Gorilla Glue brand hot glue sticks, and that’s held them in place for nearly a year now. Skip all the hassle I went through and just buy this Gorilla Hot Glue to start with! Use this link if you need a glue gun too!

Now You Try!

Clearly the purpose of this post was not to show you a stunning, unattainable playroom out of a Pottery Barn magazine. The point is that it’s NOT that hard to create a cute area for your kids to play, and that you probably already have everything you need! I can’t imagine going back to the days of having all these toys crowding my living room. And the aesthetic of this fun room is a thousand times better than the little junk corner we had before. Best $20 I’ve spent in a while!

Toy Links

Everything in this toy room gets played with nonstop! I have linked our favorite toys below, just in case you have a special kid who needs something amazing to add to their playroom.

Barbie Dollhouse – click here
Pretend Kitchen – click here
Ball Pit – click here
Extra Balls – click here
Slide – click here
Dog Bounce and Spin – click here
Peppa Tea Set – click here
Basketball Hoop – click here