Building a children’s playhouse out of wood – construction instructions

There are many children’s playhouses to buy, and you can spend a lot of money on a finished children’s playhouse, for a children’s playhouse the size of the assembly instructions presented here, probably by four-digit numbers, and if you want some accessories, climbing wall, swings, or wall bars z. B., it can be a lot more expensive.

With these ready-to-buy assemblies, you also pay money for your convenience, not only for the construction itself (you usually have to assemble purchased playhouses as well), but also for the accessories, not infrequently even a disproportionate amount of money compared to buying all the individual parts separately. The bigger your children’s playhouse is to be (and the more imaginative you want to decorate and equip it afterwards), the more it is worth building a children’s playhouse yourself, assuming you are of course skilled in the art.

A children’s playhouse is also better placed on a foundation

You will certainly not build a children’s playhouse that the children will no longer want to use for the next year because they have become too old for it. In addition, you can continue to use your children’s playhouse if at some point the children have become too old for it – a children’s playhouse with the size of just under 4 square meters and a height of 2 meters suggested here also makes a very good garden shed or tool shed, if You can retrofit it accordingly on the inside.

That is why it is worth pouring a frost-proof foundation under the playhouse. If you want to place the playhouse proposed here on this foundation, you should pour the foundation exactly the size of the area of ​​the house and it should protrude a few inches from the surface of the earth. With these simple measures you have then implemented “constructive wood protection” for your wooden structure:

The lower frame wood of the children’s playhouse is made of wood of durability class 1, particularly waterproof wood, (or treated with non-toxic wood protection, which must then be reapplied every year), the bottom row of the wall paneling is provided with a drip nose, the raindrops from the construction away, the protruding concrete strip will later be sealed against water – all of this is enough to give your house a long durability in the area of ​​the transition from the structure to the floor.

Children’s playhouse – well-considered construction makes work easier

You will likely have read through some building instructions for children’s playhouses before you encountered this article. Not infrequently, the material list will have spoiled your mood, there is talk of a lot of different squared timber and laths in a lot of different widths and lengths. First of all you have to convince an employee in the hardware store to dedicate himself to such a material list with care, then you have to look through it yourself and measure everything exactly …

It is much easier: You build your entire children’s playhouse only from square timber of 100 x 100 mm, if you use “a few centimeters more” wood in this way, it doesn’t change much in terms of price, a square timber 100 x 100 mm costs 10 , – € the meter, a square timber 80 x 100 mm a few euros less. But your purchase will be made much easier, and if a square timber should be cut incorrectly, you can simply cut a new one of the correct length from a spare one yourself. When building the children’s playhouse, you will no longer lose your perspective, because you no longer know exactly how around a certain slat should be attached.

In other words: Nobody forces you to find the best and most complicated and perhaps even 1, – € material-saving building instructions and to lose a lot of time and perhaps the desire to try to understand them. Especially as a beginner, you run the risk of assembling something wrong somewhere, and then you can often listen to clever sayings from the area that convey that it would be better to have such a house without years of DIY knowledge ready to buy.

No! Build square, practical, good, and build using a construction that you understand without problems, that you can even recalculate yourself if in doubt if your children’s playhouse is to be bigger:

A very simple construction for a children’s playhouse

Your children’s playhouse consists of four wooden frame walls, each made up of two beams of 2 m length and two beams of 1.80 m length each.

The wall as a top view – it is mounted like this, lying on the lawn:

| —– Kantholz 1,80 m —- |
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Kantholz 2 m Kantholz 2 m
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| —– Kantholz 1,80 m —- |

These four walls are each 2 m wide, they will now be set up and connected to one another. Again as a simple, geometric solution with four corner beams. The corner beam is screwed to the right side of one wall and to the left side of the second wall, which is at right angles to the first … seen from above, you get a square of 2.20 mx 2.20 m.

The building instructions for the children’s playhouse

How to proceed:

• First of all, assemble all four walls of the children’s playhouse, lying on the lawn, with angles and wood screws.
• These walls must now be erected and screwed to their common corner beams.
• Two walls will be attached to each corner beam at a 90-degree angle.
• If you want to put a sloping flat roof, two corner beams are higher than the others.
• Then of course you have to make sure that you insert these corner beams where the roof is supposed to be higher.
• You will need help with setting up and joining the walls, especially with the first two walls.
• It is best to attach the first corner beam to the first wall and mount the second horizontally.
• This means that the wall with the corner beams is set up vertically, with the corner beam on the floor.
• The more level the floor is here, the better it is, if in doubt you can work with wooden blocks.
• Next to the vertical wall you now place the second wall on the floor, against the corner beam.
• Of course, you also need two angles, and ideally several helpers on both sides.
• The helpers make sure that you screw these walls exactly at a 90-degree angle.
• When the first two walls are connected it will be easier.
• You can now use these walls e.g. B. set up, with a crossbar as a fixation, you are almost alone.
• Perhaps the lower frames should be screwed to the foundation anyway, then do that now.
• Now the remaining two walls are attached, now you have a cube frame, possibly with two higher roof girders on one side.

These walls now have to be stiffened with inserted square timbers. It makes sense to first insert the door frame and the window frame. Here, too, you can make the construction fairly simple: You assemble the frames you need for the door and window, again from 100 x 100 mm square timber, precisely fitting. You can already use the doors and windows ready-made, for a children’s playhouse you will surely have chosen a glass for the windows that will not break if the finished window frame with the window falls down. Now insert the appropriate intermediate beams into the walls in which the door frames and window frames are to be inserted.

The walls, in which no doors or windows are inserted, are stabilized with inserted beams, since the individual wooden frames are not exposed to any real static loads, you are quite free here as to how many stabilization beams you insert. Above all, you would have to make sure that you bring in enough supports for the subsequent cladding.

Your next job is then to clad the frame of your children’s playhouse to create a house with walls. Usually this cladding is done with tongue and groove boards. If you pay attention to a corner cladding that does not let water through to the corner beams, this is again a wood protection measure, and the cladding boards are of course also given a wood protection coating.

Finally, the roof is covered, in the variant proposed here with a lath construction, which is then covered with roofing felt to form the pitched roof. You start this lath construction with two cross beams that connect the two higher corner beams and the two lower corner beams, then these beams are connected with two more square timbers to form the frame, which is then provided with a lattice grid on which you can attach the roofing felt.

Alternative proposal to the roof and insulation

A simple solution was described here, a flat roof with a slight slope that can be built without any special explanation. But you can also really build a “cube” with corner beams of the same height and place a real pitched roof construction on this upper frame, for the construction of which you can also find instructions on the Internet.

If the children’s playhouse should be usable not only in the warm season, but as early as possible in spring and as long as possible in autumn, you can install insulation. You have a wooden frame construction that contains fields that are open on the inside and are 10 cm deep. For these fields, you could cut Styrodur to size and insert it as insulation and clad the walls, which are now equally thick on the inside, with fiberboard. Please don’t expect miracles, it won’t do much, but if the sun has shone on the house for a long time in spring or autumn, you can stand it for a while.

Play equipment for the children’s playhouse

The stronger your wooden frame construction including reinforcement has become, the more play equipment you can attach to the outside of the house. For example a climbing net or a climbing wall, or you can let one of the roof cross members extend far beyond the roof on one side, support it with a thick pillar embedded in the ground (or a small play tower) and attach a swing to it.

Decorate children’s playhouse

You have to treat your cladding with wood protection anyway, with a non-toxic wood protection paint of course. Some of these coatings are available as colored glazes, so you can add a beautiful picture to every wall in your children’s playhouse.

In terms of design, this is by no means as terrible as you might now assume – wood stains are only ever available in muted, harmonious natural tones that result in images that “automatically” fit into a garden. On the other hand, the pictures on the house wall are a pretty clever move of yours when it comes to renewing the wood protection coating: You will be able to persuade your children to work very easily if the point is not to “paint” a house, but rather to do one House wall to repaint pictures.

The laws you have to obey

First of all, before planning the children’s playhouse, you should find out whether you need a building permit. Before planning, because the size of the structures for which a building permit is required varies from place to place. Perhaps you can get around the building permit if you simply make your children’s playhouse half a square meter smaller, which is then certainly worthwhile, building permits cost money.

In addition, you should keep the limit distance from the neighbors prescribed by neighbor law, and possibly even a little further away from the neighbor, who you know will already react to children’s laughter with headaches. Of course, you don’t have to, but your nerves might thank you …

Does a children’s playhouse fit in your garden? – Advantages and disadvantages

A children’s playhouse has several advantages, which is why not only children are attracted to the plan to build a children’s playhouse in the garden:

• Your children will spend their time in this children’s playhouse – they are more in the garden, it is healthy, and you yourself have more peace and quiet for concentrated work.
• If you let your children take part in the construction of the children’s playhouse, they will get to know a lot of manual work.
• In addition, the children’s playhouse really becomes the “children’s house” that they like to look after themselves, including cleaning and care.
• the children learn “a bit of responsibility” and that without tiring arguments.
• If you place the children’s playhouse strategically, you will also have more peace in the garden.
• Warning: fire! Teach your children that fires, including candles and the like, have no place in the house. The risk of fire is great!

The disadvantages of these advantages are a little loss of space in the garden and costs. However, the cost of the children’s playhouse will quite likely save you other costs for other desires that the children forget about the children’s playhouse for a while. And the loss of space is perhaps not so tragic when you consider that with the children’s playhouse you are creating a place in the garden that is probably more used than the rest of the garden …

Conclusion
A children’s playhouse is a real luxury for the children and for you too, at least if you buy a children’s playhouse. However, if you have the most basic manual skills, it should not be difficult for you to build your own wooden children’s playhouse in the garden according to the building instructions described above.