A cardboard playhouse offers children an easily assembled miniature house that they can decorate themselves. Since children turn refrigerator packaging into houses and cars anyway, purchasing a kit to build a fancy cardboard structure makes sense. The house assembles with a few folds and tabs, leaving a white canvas for children to fill with accessories like a mailbox or window curtains.
You can buy a cardboard playhouse folded up flat. With easy to follow instructions, you just tuck in a few tabs, break open perforated doors and windows, and attach the pitched roof. Their size varies to accommodate children from 3-8 years old. Although ideal for temporary assembly indoors, they could also stay outside on a dry pavement away from rain.
The best feature of a cardboard playhouse is the potential for your child to customize his or her own house. Rather than being made of brown cardboard, these special kit houses have plain white exteriors. Some come pre-decorated with simple black outlines of windowpanes, a doorknob, mailbox, and roof tiles.
Just like a coloring book, this allows your children to express their creativity by coloring in the blanks with crayons, markers, or paint. Maybe they will want to match their own house or let their imagination run wild. Encourage them to fill in curtains, flowers, a chimney, or draw in pets or birds.
Even after they've painted the exterior of the cardboard playhouse, they have hours of amusement. Children use miniature houses to pretend to be grown-ups. They'll delight in checking the mail, mowing the lawn, cooking a barbecue, or simply coming home from work. Set up the playhouse for a birthday party or special weekend. For space-efficient storage, it will fold up flat for next time.
A good cardboard playhouse should minimize sharp corners by hiding the folds and grooves. It should also provide good ventilation. Test its resistance to tipping over so that during rough-housing, no one gets hurt. As with any large, interactive toy, check on kids frequently to make sure the playhouse hasn't torn, dislodged, collapsed, or caught anyone's clothing.