Kids Indoor Playhouse Progress! (finally)

The last update on the playhouse is here.   The next thing we did in the playhouse was finish out the window.  Well technically I started painting the first mural.. but while I do one thing Justin is usually doing the next thing so they all sort of happen at once.

So first let me show you how the back mural came together… so I will admit I had a huge crush on the movie Tangled when I started this project, and since then I am not as obsessed, but I still really like the inspiration I had for the project, although, as I finish, it might become a little more mine.

Anyway, the back mural came together like so.  First, because of the awful texture on the walls of my house, and the fact that I had just ripped out shelving, I had to do a lot of repair to do on the drywall.  I started, filling big gaps (where the caulk had ripped the drywall down to the paper) just with plaster and smoothing with my finger.  ONce it looked relatively good, I used this spray to go over the area.

What I have learned since buying this house and having a few walls to repair is that you should always go with the water based version of these sprays, not oil.  The spray bottle to repair the texture is which STINKING EXPENSIVE (around $12.00) and if you buy the oil based bottle, you pretty much only get one use… or at least that is what happened to me and so I wasted a HUGE bottle… but moving on!

You can sort of see the stripes that where plastered in the image below.

Once the drywall looked decent… and I ran out of the spray texture, I decided to just get on with it.  One of the goals of this project is just to use what we have, and since we kinda hoard building materials, paint and misc. randoms that have anything to do with building, we have so far had a TON of stuff to use.

I decided that all paint from this project would come from our mis-mixed paint supply.  I began by painting the back wall a solid color.

You can see that I only painted the top half of the room.  Because the bottom half of the room was all going to be covered with new drywall…

Okay, when it came to the mural I wanted it to look really loose, and “painterly” as my old painting teacher would say.  NO photo quality here.  I also decided to take advantage of the awful texture to add some depth and age to the mural by no filling in the whole thing totally solidly.

I am pretty happy with how it turned out… and I have made some drapes to frame the mural with… just like Tangled.  I know… but it works for me.

Now on to the window.  I wanted it to have a cute little folding shutter, which I have noticed they always have kicking around at the Habitat Restore.  So, we found a size that would work and built the window around the exact size of the shutter.  I am so happy about how it turned out (we have yet to paint and hang the shutter, but you can see how it will look below.

Here is what the hole for the window looked like, we had that 2x 4 to remove.  Now, just so you know these walls aren’t bearing walls, because of the way our roof is built there is no load resting on these walls, so we took a few careful liberties when it came to cutting out the hole for the window. If you ever consider doing this, you must know about the structure of your wall before hand.

Justin Built the window box and molding in onw fell swoop!  It made installing it really easy!  (although we still don’t have the interior molding yet!)

We recycled some great solid banisters from our stair project.  We had a few extra and you can see how Justin notched them out perfectly so they went together very cleanly and could be screwed in place from the frame, before installation.  This would also help with dare devils trying to jump out the window!

To install  it was about as easy as this…and a few simple nails… I love it when things are easy like this!

The shutters sit on the inside of the window, like shown below.  Don’t you think the girls will have so much fun opening and closing them, I know I would have!

Alright, well, that is the most recent update, we have a few more things to show you, but we are working rather slowly.  I am hoping we will have enough time to finish this by Christmas!  I kid you not we have been sick since MID OCOTBER!  I am trying to rest and get over it… I swear there is nothing you want more than your health when you have been sick for a long time.  I will try not to take my health for granted when I am better …which will hopefully be soon!

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