I finished the playhouse just in time for my son's 3rd birthday party. They were rescue heroes saving kitties from trees and all sorts of other emergencies. The project certainly ended up being a much larger production that I first set out to accomplish. However, I am confident that this fire station playhouse will provide years of fun for our kid(s)? as well as neighborhood friends.

I've created a "final" picture gallery of the fire station playhouse if you are interested in seeing what it ended up looking like.

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OK I admit, I really didn't plan on getting this carried away with the playhouse. But once I realized it was starting to turn out kinda cool, I decided I would drywall the inside. Prior to this project, my drywalling experience was limited to creating a six foot long soffit in the house earlier in the year. Plus some indispensable Spackling experience filling nail holes from picture hangers in the house

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Tags: playhouse

I had started framing the playhouse before I had any idea what the roof was going to look like--let alone how I was going to build it. The one thing I did know is that I wanted to design a roof that would allow for me to be able to stand-up inside the playhouse when it was all done. And not that we get too much rain around here, but I also needed to accommodate for it nonetheless.

What I ended up doing was a pretty simple design. With each of the walls already up, I had a nice 4 inch "cap" around the top of the playhouse. What I decided to do was create the roof as a separate component, then (somehow) attach it to the walls. Think of the roof as a hat.

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The first weekend was a great start. With the walls up, you could really get a sense of what the fire station was going to look like. For the second week, I focused on figuring out how I was going to make the door in the back open and close; some kind of "climbing thing" - to quote the future user of the playhouse - inside the playhouse; and finally give some thought to the roof. If I could get two of these three items completed, that would be a good two days. So off I went...

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The first weekend was a great start. All supplies were purchased (at least I thought) and the base and walls were framed and stood up.

Link: Slideshow of the first week's construction

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Construction started in September. The goal was to try and get it done over the course of a few weekends. (Note to self: next project, multiply number of weekends by five). The book I bought gave me a pretty good idea on how to get started. I figured I'd use the base and wall dimensions for the playhouse on the cover of the book. The rest, well I'd just wing it.

The plans in the book that I was loosely following called for a 6x6 foot base for the floor area. This base was created from 2x6 inch studs with 3/4 inch plywood over the top. I didn't want the floor directly on the dirt, so I placed 4x4 inch "legs" in each corner of the floor. Each leg was 8 inches tall. The legs rested on cement patio deck blocks (you can buy these for about $5.00 each). These cement blocks are designed to have a 4x4 rest squarely on them. Each of the cement blocks was buried all but the top 2 inches into the ground.

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About this time last year, it became clear that Nick was going to need more than just a plastic slide in the backyard to satisfy his need to burn steam. The backyard isn't big enough for a swing set, so that was out. But maybe a playhouse. Nick thought that would be a good idea.

So when we asked him what kind he would like, he told us a fire station. Big surprise. And with that, we set out to figure out how to build a playhouse. Oops sorry, I fire station.

The first thing we did was fire up Google and see what we could find. I figured we'd at least find some plans out there. But that wasn't the case. With the exception of a company that makes "playhouses" that would cost about the same as our real house, we struck out. Instead, I got this book for my birthday.

The book was helpful. It has a bunch of different designs--all with the appropriate shopping list of materials needed. But in the end, I used about 10% of one of the designs. I used the design on the cover of the book as the basis for the fire station.



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