Because of course 🙂

It’s not on our to do list or anything, but of course we have to build a playhouse. OF COURSE. We just need to add all sorts of projects to our list.

It all started on Pinterest. That’s where most of my problems start. I get caught in a rabbit hole of problematic creative inspiration and soon I feel like all our future kitchen cabinets should be emerald green (I have a couple years to convince Chris to get on my train). You see what Pinterest does? This post is supposed to be about building a playhouse and somehow I got to talking about our kitchen (holy jesus I still want to re do it so bad).

So I was on Pinterest looking at something about backyards (I don’t even remember) and then I started looking at pictures of playhouses. I had the pipe dream that we would build a playhouse, but wasn’t really sure if it would ever happen. I started paying closer attention to what I was liking about the ones I was pinning: simplicity

This one

This one

And this one

They were not overly designed, overly built, unnecessarily show-y. I liked ones that were very straight forward. I thought, “we could build that pretty easily…” So one night while I was at work at the A’s I drew up a really quick plan

I brought it home to Chris and his response was, “why don’t we buy one?” Because I have a terrible time paying for something we can fairly easily make ourselves and because a nice wooden one is actually kind of a lot of money. So I decided it would be my job to convince Chris that it wouldn’t be too much trouble to build one ourselves. Obviously that means I brought my graph paper and ruler to work again at the A’s. I think I came up with a pretty good plan

I only drew a front elevation because I wanted to just give Chris a quick summary as to why our playhouse would be awesome up build 🙂 We didn’t settle 100% on the building plan, but I was able to convince Chris that we could build it fairly easily, hooray! How did I do it?

1) it would be built fairly close to the ground, so no steps

2) the trim for windows and the door would be 2 x 6’s with a 2 x 4 stacked right against it so that the siding can be easily nailed to the 2 x 4 and the 2 x 6 extends slightly past

3) a simple corrugated metal roof

4) a rectangular, single floor design

I was excited to get it built, but didn’ know how soon we would do it. I came up with my plans about 2 weeks ago and this past weekend we had a work party at our house where my dad, step dad and his girlfriend all came to help out on projects while my step mom, grandma and Chris’s mom came and played with the girls. I thought we’d work on projects mostly for the garage (the disorganization is really getting frustrating), but Chris had it on his to do list to dig the post holes for the playhouse, yay! So we all went out to the back to plan out exactly where it would be. We had a general idea based on the backyard master plan we did last week, but we obviously needed to nail down exactly were it was going to go for the post holes to get dug. It took us a good 15 minutes of hilarious arguing – there were 5 of us trying to plan it – but we finally figured it out. CBH and Celia spent about an hour digging for the 4 post holes. It was hot and it was hard: they were basically digging in clay soil.

The final plan?

The first back left post is 10′ away from the tree. A header will extend from the playhouse to the tree and a tire swing will hang down. The back and front walls of the playhouse will be 8′. The side walls will be 5′. There will be a front door about 30″ wide and about 5′ tall. All windows will be about 18″ x 18″. The top will be pitched towards the back (7′ tall in the front, 6′ tall in the back). A portion of this will be open to add more light. All openings will not be truly open – they will have chicken wire or something similar allowing things to appear open but make sure no animals can get inside. We will have a “front door,” but it will be more like the gate of a fence with just a simple wood frame and chicken wire opening that will most likely latch on the door trim. And we’ll paint it all to match the house.

Of course there are MANY more important details to sort out (the piers, posts, siding, etc), but it’s good to have our rough idea sorted out. We’ll build it here and there and hopefully not have too much trouble along the way – I feel like the projects you think are going to go fairly simply always prove to cause the most headache. Let’s hope that doesn’t happen!