Amazing Playhouse
It is winter! And cold here. So we aren’t in the gardening mood at the moment. But I would love to share a project with you that we did a few years ago. Our daughter and grandchildren live far enough away that they usually stay overnight when they come. Although we have two guest rooms, it just didn’t work to have both kids in the same bedroom as their mom. And didn’t work, either, to have one of them upstairs away from both Mom and sibling. So my hubby and I put our heads together and, with the aid of a plan we found online, built a darling play house. It serves as both a playhouse, and bedrooms for them at night. The first photo shows the (almost) completed playhouse. The second and third photos show some of the process. And, believe me, there was a LOT of “process”.
We did start with an online plan but had to diverge from it, as it didn’t quite meet our needs. You can see, in the first picture, that there are two levels to this playhouse. The top level has stairs going up, that I will show later; there is a twin size mattress up there. Our grandson claims this bed and loves it. The bottom level serves as playhouse during the day and, at night, there is a blow up mattress for our granddaughter. Since it was for both of them, we used pink and blue, along with a little yellow, some purple and some green paint for the exterior.
I found strings of flower lights at Pier 1 and used them to fill the little window boxes. On the inside we used pop on lights, and then added the rope lighting, so there is plenty of light. All the lights, except the pop on lights, are operated by a light switch. The half door has a magnetic closure which works pretty well.
The photo with the pink rug shows our granddaughter’s side of the playhouse. (Our grandson has a green rug on his side.) We put a little pink mirror at her eye level. Each side has a table. The tables have legs that fold up, then the tops drop down so they are out of the way at bedtime. Each side also has a little fold up step stool for a chair. The back walls have three coats of magnetic paint and they work very well with magformer magnets. (If you have younger children, and don’t have magformers, I highly recommend them.) We put one coat of white paint over the black magnetic paint, then I painted the rainbow mural for color (and a little magic). The little fairy (from a coloring page) stands on tiptoe on the rainbow on our granddaughter’s side, and the rainbow on our grandson’s side turns into a road that ends on the tabletop. At the time I painted the truck, he was very into trucks.
Building the initial playhouse took a couple of months (my hubby was working 10 hour days and six hours on Saturdays on his job) but we planned to have it done for Christmas. When I had to have emergency surgery, we really had to hustle to get things done before the kids came. In fact, we put the finishing touches on it a few hours they got here. Talk about hurry! Then each time they came, we tried to have more done on it. The little tables and stools came later, as did the rainbow mural. In future blogs I will show you more features of this amazing playhouse.
Final thoughts:
We as parents know how fast our children grow up and a lot of us simply didn’t have either the time or the resources to do something like this when our children were small. But it gave us a great deal of pleasure to make something so special, that we hope they remember for the rest of their lives, for our grandchildren. If you are contemplating making something so special for your children or grandchildren, I promise the wonder and joy on their sweet little faces will make all your time and trouble worth while.