Among scarfing down sugary candy and watching Saturday morning cartoons, getting in some quality playtime ranks high on most kids' weekly to-do lists. Beyond being a great place to blow off steam after a hard day of kindergarten, designing a fun and comfortable playroom for your little ones can stimulate social development, creative thinking and self discovery – important parts of children's growth.

Whether you want to section off a corner of their bedroom or devote a spare room to this project, you and your spouse will appreciate keeping toys and games off the floors in the rest of your home. Here are some home design tips to get your children's playroom started.

Toy chest
While you'll be sure to enjoy not tripping over stuffed animals and checkers sets in your living room, centralizing this chaos in one space can quickly turn the playroom floor into an even-more-dangerous minefield of toys. Because of this, you'll want a fun toy chest to store these items while providing a classic children's decoration in the area. You may also want to consider a separate painted wooden cabinet to house board games, arts and crafts and picture books to keep the room organized.

Soft landing
Playtime can be fraught with accidental injuries that strike at a moment's notice, so it pays to anticipate kid-sized disasters like scrapes and boo-boos in your playroom design. In addition to making sure your furnishings have rounded corners, placing a soft floor mat in the center of the space will provide cushioning for indoor roughhousing (even though you've told them not to a million times!).

Colors and patterns
Of course, you'll want to make sure the decorative layout of the room is fun and engaging for your little ones. While it might be going overboard to create a playroom-wide theme, you can keep things simple with a few bright color choices and patterns on the walls that match the fabrics and area rugs in the room.