Designing the nursery or kids room is fun, but it is all too easy to find that what you have created looks good, but is flawed.

I have two boys and they have taught me more about kids than any book ever could.

1. Be Practical - Pretty, coloured, embroidered fabrics are unlikely to fair well with either stain remover or hot washes.

Will you really need to hot wash your kids bed linen? With healthy children there is no need to always wash their linen on a boil wash. The problems lie if they get a high temperature. Fever in children can cause vomiting and nose bleeds, also the deeper sleep means that bed wetting is more likely.

2. Aesthetics - It is unlikely that you will be spending much of your time during in the day admiring the calm of your child's bedroom. However, there is something special about that last check before you hit the pillow. Looking at them fast asleep, you realize why its important to have a calm picture or design on the bedding.

3. Don't Spend Too Much - Whatever the adverts for cleaning agents say, getting stains out of bed linen is not that easy. If your kid has a nose bleed in the night you don't want to be worrying about keeping it off the bedding. Equally if your child has left a felt tip pen on their bed (without a lid), it is important to be scolding them for leaving the lid of the pen and being careless rather than ruining their bedding.

You can never predict when kids will stop wetting the bed, so it is worth investing in a stock of bed mats. Unlike the old plastic sheets (which crinkled when you lay on them) Pampers have made a bed mat which is very absorbent and soft so they will never even know that it is there.

So how many kid's bedding sets do you need? It is easy to get carried away and buy more than you need. In reality you only need two sets, one to be on the bed while the other is washed. If you are buying different designs, it is worth keeping them similar so that you can mix and match if the need arises.