Cardboard Houses

This post is long overdue, but my foray into the wonderful world of cardboard has been pretty adventurous and remarkable. It all began with Sophie's first cardboard house, which was, I'll admit, a pretty quick hash job. Then came that mysterious-other-cardboard-things I'd been working on, which I mentioned here, and you all know about Bear's Castle.

Now I'm finally getting my act together and letting you know what exactly that mysterious interlude in the middle was. Cardboard houses! Ground breaking, I know, but did you realise that there were so many cardboard houses that it could be called a Village? I thought not. (Though, Steve informs me that I'd need a lot more houses to equate an actual village, but I think in child standards, there were enough for a village. That's my story, and I'm sticking to it.)

So the story behind these houses is that we were having an event or two that would include several small children, and older children, and I thought that a really cool thing for them all to play in, with rather minimal input from parents, would be a village of cardboard houses. I was not too wrong, though they were less used than I had originally anticipated. Not sure why. In any case, they were still used and are still being used, so I feel like the original mission is a success.

These shots are from when the houses were taking shape under the house. I was ducking off down there during nap time for about a week to get them ready. I did have grand plans to wall paper them and paint them to make them extra cool, but the window saga overtook those plans somewhat. 

There was something about making these though, that really bought out the teacher in me. "This one can have circular windows, and that one can have square!" I spent a considerable amount of time trying to make sure I had included several different shapes and different door styles to promote lots of learning. "Let it go, Paula," I also told myself on several occasions. "Not everything is learning, some things are just fun." 

Moving on. 

This was one side of the roofing for the house on the very far right in the top picture. It took forever to get together, because those cardboard bits (that came in the speaker boxes dad gave me) were really thick. And heavy. I ended up drilling holes in them and sewing them together with a very strange needle I had picked up from who knows where. And then it was too heavy for the actual house and needed supports made. And then, when the kids were playing with it, it got knocked over and fell off anyway. Sigh. Dad assures me that with a bit more tweaking, we could get it sitting right, but oh well. 

Image © Melissa Ordoñez

I don't actually have a photo of the all the houses together in their useful glory from earlier this month, but here are a few shots of kids playing in them. 

Image © Melissa Ordoñez

I look at these photos and wonder, did Sophie actually go into the houses? Or did she just observe others in them? 

Image © Melissa Ordoñez

In any case, the houses were back under the house until last week, when, given that it was raining, I thought it would be a great idea to take some to my local playgroup for the kids there to use. The mum's there were suitably impressed, and raved for the first twenty minutes about how great they were. Then, after an altercation between some boys, I'm sure they were all thinking how annoying they were and wishing I hadn't bought them after all.

Sophie and I were checking some things out after the big bad storm of Thursday and she found the final two there, so I bought one up into the house for her to play with.

I'm not sure what's happened to that roof, but she seems comfortable and we have since spent lots of time decorating her new house. Win.