A Playhouse and Other Projects

Over Memorial Day weekend we were busy--and by "we", I mean "not me", with building a playhouse we bought for Charlotte's 4th birthday (see this post for more about that). Overall, Chad spent about 8-ish hours on it but was able to get it completed by Sunday evening--squeezing it in before any rain visited.

He started Saturday afternoon and spent the better part of three hours just going through the instructions and laying out every single piece and part in an assembly line before building the roof and two walls. Charlotte was home during this process was extremely excited, asking "is the playhouse done now?" no less that 457 times before the sun set. She even brought her play food out in preparation and insisted on eating dinner out there.

This little house turned out so great--it's just the cutest. Charlotte was gone overnight Sunday into Monday and when she came home she was SO excited to see her finished house. She spent the rest of the day in there--eating lunch and dinner inside.

And my favorite photo--I love how this looks like she's walking into a cute little cabin in the woods:

The cabin was the only project we (Chad) did ourselves (himself), but we had a bunch of other things done this past week, too. We outsourced a lot this year, starting with having the deck cleaned and restained:

I knew it was looking bad but I didn't realize just how bad until it was redone.

And the porch. The porch needed repainting, which is a project Chad and I undertook ourselves four years ago. After painstakingly painting all 300 (it seems) spindles, we swore never again to paint that porch ourselves. We made good on our promise and had it repainted by some poor, unsuspecting college students who decided to spend their summer painting houses. They may rethink that decision after spending two solid days in almost 90 degree heat painting this porch.

The one project that I took on was to repaint Charlotte's picnic table. Several years of use and year round weather left it in need of scraping, sanding and repainting. Before:

And after:

Now all the big projects are done and no more weekends will need to be dedicated to working on anything. Starting with this weekend, when Chad and Charlotte go on another camping trip and I...don't. :)

Happy Weekend.

~Stacy