Homemade wooden play kitchen

Well, you know the kind of thing I'm sure, something like this or this one below, both of which are along the lines of £140?

Myriad's Play Kitchen

Here's my version, which cost a LOT less!

And yes, the dials do turn!

About a year ago I found this old unit on Freecycle. Thanks to darling hubs' skills, the rather dull 'telephone unit' was transformed by taking off the two original sliding doors below the shelves and turning them into opening doors, one for a cupboard and the other for the oven. 

This is with the sliding doors off and already sanded (it was originally going to be bare wood): I decided against those hob tops in the end

The girls played with it like this for almost a year quite happily

Jude cut a hole in the base to accommodate a spare dog bowl to use as a sink and added a set of old Bakelite knobs scavenged from a rusting cooker. 

Aw - this was October 2011!

A year (and a new baby!) later, it's finally finished!

The cute little shelves to the right is a spice rack found at the local carboot painted the same colour

  My only extravagance for this project was to buy a tin of Annie Sloane's Chalk Paint, which is probably the nicest paint you can buy, both in terms of toxins and odour as well as being environmentally kind. Jude put in a copper pipe to hang a set of hooks from, and I used a marker pen to draw hob rings on top. Total expenditure £17 (for the paint!) - but I only used a third of a tin and plain emulsion would have done the job just as well.

All the goodies on the shelves were bought in charity shops/carboots or gifted: nothing (our poor deprived girls!) is new. Granny very kindly bought a set of lovely fabric foodstuffs from the wonderful (but pricey) Myriad for a birthday, plus all the kitchenalia - pans &c - she bought from Ikea. A few weeks ago I found a boxful of toy grocery supplies in a charity shop for about £2, and everything else has similarly accumulated over the years.

(repeat after me) Re-use, re-purpose, recycle!

One very happy Milly May!

Unit: Freecycle

Paint: £17 for 1L tin in Old White

Knobs & copper pipe: Scavenged!

Sink: Pet food bowl, hole cut to fit.

Hinge and magnets for the doors: £5

Hooks: already had

Marker pen:"

Total cost £22!


I'm joining Fiona for Green Day today!

NB Sorry for the slightly crappy photos - my camera's been playing silly buggers lately... 

Callington Murals

At some point someone in this town near where I live decided to invest a lot of time and money decorating various walls around the town with wonderful murals. They're everywhere! The curious one of the Bakery is my favourite, and maybe one of the best bits of street art I've seen (and I'm quite passionate about the subject).

There's also a fantastic flying fox in the playground which the girls LOVE!

As an added bonus, there was a sale on in one of the two charity shops: all clothing £1! Jude found an ace jacket & I picked up some bits n bobs to use for patchwork. The other big expense was £2 for these five books... that should keep me going for a week or so :-)

Happy bargain-hunting all!

(the pics are all a bit jumbled themselves, sorry!)