Outbuildings: From Work House to Play House

Despite some rainy weather, Andy and I managed to get a little outdoor work accomplished on this three day weekend.  One of the things on our to-do/wish list since we moved in was making one of the outbuildings into a playhouse.  The "small" outbuilding is situated near our vegetable garden and the best area of lawn on the acreage.

Two summers ago, we built a sandbox and outdoor play area next to the outbuilding but never got around to cleaning out the inside of the building and repairing the roof.  With my sister and brother-in-law visiting this weekend, we decided to finally dive into this project.

Putting my city sister to work

The intermittent rain kept us from doing any roof work, but we were able to jump into the interior cleaning portion of the project- aka spider and mouse removal.

Walls piled with years of dust, dirty, bugs and animal poop

Rat's nest in loft

I don't have any pictures of the inside of the building when we first moved in because I refused to even peer inside but this is where we started on Saturday.

Andy had already done an initial clean out of a generation worth of rubble and randomness inside over the last three years.  We found a few "gems" to keep such as this box as well as some old stools and buckets.

The main task of this weekend's clean out was to purge, organize and make the inside safe for the kids.

Our little helper is super confident up and down the ladder to the loft

We took everything out and hammered down or pulled out all nails sticking out of the walls.  Like millions of rusty nails.  We also removed two tables that someone had probably used as planting tables at one point.

Andy tearing out one of the tables

Cleared out, the space is actually pretty large and would make a fantastic guest house if we were so inclined to run plumbing out to it.  Bed in loft, kitchenette and bathroom under with a little sitting area.  A project for another decade I think.  For now, we are using the loft space for seasonal storage and the floor space for a stage and theater area for the kiddos.  After lots of sweeping and vacuuming, the space is "clean" and safe.

Table which will later be a crafting area

Platform for stage area and pod swing.  Loft above holding winter tools and lawn chairs.

Andy used one of the old tables to create a little stage and as soon as we repair the roof, I will be putting up some curtains and maybe some paint to make a really fun theater for the kids to put on their shows (much to Andy's terror as live theater is his biggest fear).

Their first production- "Box Trolls" (F is in the box on the floor)

Another project that we tackled this weekend was organizing all the gardening and outdoor tools.  Previously, we have just stacked up shovels, racks, etc on one of the walls in the 3-way but this was not good enough for LEAN expert Andy.  Screwing a piece of wood into one of the framing pieces of the outbuilding, Andy cut notches and holes fitting each tool.

Taking it even further, he labeled the notch so we know where each tool goes.

Guess this is what you can expect when you keep an engineer around the house.