Indoor Playground
It’s been a moment. Summer slammed into us like a freight train. Balancing getting the planned content on here with our gaggle of children has been tricky. Bless those school teachers.
Speaking of children, here’s another fun project Mike did over part of a Christmas Break a few years ago. We have a decently sized room in our basement that is part dusty sewing corner (I can’t do it all, or even most of it, honestly) and part playroom. When we moved into this house the people that moved out left a bunch of very large wooden food storage shelves. We used a couple of them in the storage room but were left a few. One that we used to store toys and the others were disassembled and added to Mike’s wood pile. Well after a few years of debating what do with this room of forgotten hobbies and toys Mike got a bee in his bonnet and just started building. Well first tearing the shelf apart and then repurposing the wood from that and the other shelves. Like most impulsive projects, it went through some different iterations before settling on this current arrangement.
Now my favorite part of this project was that it cost us very little since the wood was mostly repurposed. As the resident penny-pincher this should come as no surprise. But most people don’t happen to have this amount of wood just hanging around. That being said, on to my next favorite part, this ended up fairly simple. There are a lot of really ornate indoor playgrounds on Pinterest. They look amazing. But take a lot of money, time, vision, and skill. Mike has plenty of skill and we have an abundance on vision in this house (take a look at our project list sometime) but not so much of the other two. I think how this worked out a bit more modular makes is much more attainable for the average DIYer. Plus the type of wood used was your basic 2x4s and particle board.
Lets talk about the different areas. The different platform areas make for fun individual spaces for play. Sometimes the kids like to do campouts down there and everybody has a place. Also the underneath areas give some larger playroom objects like dress-up boxes, wooden train sets, baby doll strollers, and piles of swedish tunnels.
Do you recognize that dress-up box? See more information on it here.
The monkey bars are actually made out of thick walled PVC pipe and so can hold a lot of weight. The green fleece blanket under the monkey bars was just put there on a whim to protect kids from potential falls and the “temporary” arrangement has done well for the last 3 years. It also moonlights as comfortable hammock.
There is a Creation Station (read: always messy) that uses a stainless steel shelf that Mike fell in love with in the Ikea clearance section as the table and a couple school chairs scored at the local school district surplus office. There is some lighting under there to help it not feel like a cave. Also there are neatly labeled organizers for all their creation utensils, but I’m gonna be straight with you and tell you that it never has the markers in the markers bin and I’ll be darned if they can ever find their scissors and so NEED to use mine.
Other little additions were the basketball hoop that happen to fit just right and the ever so popular swings (also from the local Swedish store). And as you see below, if you have large quantities of stickers and you send a couple kids to go clean up the area you might end up with a sticker party explosion instead. At least they made invitations.
So does this jazz up any ideas that would work in your under-utilized spaces that would make your kids and their friends think you are super cool too? At least for a couple of days.
