Little Tikes Playhouse Makeover

When my husband's grandparents passed along their old Little Tikes Play House to our little guy, I immediately knew I wanted to give it a makeover. Don't get me wrong, it was in great shape considering they got it for the granddaughter's that are in their mid teens now. However, long before we had children, I stumbled across a few plastic play house makeovers and thought, "I want to do that one day!"

And that day has finally arrived.

Early in the summer, I picked up this tool set for our little guy (because we are a DIY family and he LOVES to help with any and every project we do) and decided to hold on to it until Christmas... yeah, I'm that mom.

Now that we have a whole play house, I decided to turn ours into a work shed for our little handy man - which is going to be a part of his Christmas present, too. 

Every single tutorial I have found for the playhouse makeover says to dismantle the play set, then spray paint... Ya'll, I swear I tried with all my little heart to take this thing apart (we're talking a mallet, hammer, screwdrivers, etc.), but I was only successful in removing was the roof and breaking one of the shutters. The rest of it just would budge.

So, I figured out a way to paint our play house without taking it apart.

Ready for my magic secret?

It's kraft paper!

I'm pretty sure newspaper would work, too, but we didn't have any and I already had this on had for covering the table while our son does his art projects.

I used so much of Rustoleum's spray paint, you would think they sponsored this post. Honestly, it's my #1 go to, especially for outdoor projects.

I'm sharing my mistakes so you won't make the same ones.

If you're able to remove anything without breaking it, spray paint it, then piece the house back together. In my case, that was the roof.

The goal was to leave the walls of the house the original color, but when I figured out I could not take our Little Tikes Play House apart, I decided to try to spray paint only the shutters and door.

I used the kraft paper as a shield behind them, but there was still a whole heap of fall out that ended up on the walls.

That's when I learned that Easy Off (the real stuff, not the generic kind) can remove paint from plastic... Kind of. It removed a great deal of it, but not enough.

Since the play house was already jacked up, I began experimenting with colors on the walls, which made it look even worse.

So, I covered the windows with the kraft paper and picked up 2 cans of Rustoleum's 2x Ultra Cover in Smokey Beige to cover my mistakes. That's the great part about spray paint, if you mess up, you can easily fix it.

Once I had the house painted, I had a few touch-up's to do on the shutters and the door. That's when I realized I could have wedged a piece kraft paper through the space between the door and the wall, then spray painted either side without disturbing the other... Talk about a "DUH" moment.

A bit of the paint got onto the trim of the door, so I used a matching acrylic paint and a paint brush to cover it up. 

This post completes the exterior makeover on our Little Tikes play house. I will do an update on the interior soon, so stay tuned! In the meantime, check out more kid approved DIY's.