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Hillbilly model set up with some extra touches at Kayla and Grants home.
"We make a living by what we get, we make a life by what we give."
Winston Churchill
This playhouse was a custom order from Bobby and Lori at South Mountain Peaks in Bostic NC. It made two little girls very happy on a hot August evening in 2007! It features electric lights wired in, fully lined inside with wall switch, dry erase board on back wall shutters, heart shaped cut outs, and plexiglass windows. Heirloom quality to be handed down or resold for more than was paid for it.
The "Hillbilly" model
Kids love the dry erase board which covers the whole back wall inside
Window pane dividers can be added if desired
Siding can be painted or stained to suit or you can save a few bucks and finish yourself
Made to look like a rustic cabin
Save a few bucks by painting the house yourself
Porch rails are an option that makes the playhouse look cute
Playhouse from above after it was custom painted for Kristie
Playhouse after it was set up at Kristies
Let's talk and come up with exactly the custom heirloom playhouse to suit your needs and budget.
This playhouse was built for the Buncombe County Beekeepers Chapter to raffle off for a fund raiser. It has a dry erase board on the back wall and paneling on the walls inside.
For only a dollar, you could win this cute playhouse and benefit a great cause to boot.
(winners outside Buncombe county must either pick up playhouse or pay for delivery. )
This playhouse is being used as a fund raiser to help the Buncombe County Beekeepers Chapter raise funds to pay for their free bee school. You can purchase a raffle ticket from them for $1.00 and the drawing will be prior to Christmas on December 21st.
This is the first playhouse I built for sale. It made two little boys in Bedford NY very happy on Christmas morning 2004. They are neighbors to Martha Stewart and this one has quite a story behind it.
The "Home Sweet Home" model
This playhouse made a little girl in Sylva NC very happy on Christmas morning 2004 also. It was the second playhouse I built. It has a loft and the window in the loft is a hand painted Care Bear that Bethany added.
Eric from Cherokee NC custom ordered this playhouse to match his real house. It made his daughter, Emily, very happy on Christmas morning. My sister, Ernestine, let me build it in her basement due to the cold weather the week prior to Christmas and the fact I had to build it after dark.
Cathy in the Reynolds Mountain area of Woodfin NC ordered this playhouse in December 2006 for daughter Olivia. Cathy plans on trimming and finishing it herself.
This playhouse made two little girls in Charlotte NC very happy on Christmas morning 2005. It has a unique twist in that it is an example of traditional mountain siding types and looks like a rustic cabin. Each side has different examples of siding used on cabins here in the mountains.
This playhouse is loaded and ready for the Scarecrow Festival where it was displayed in October of 2006. Kristie and her mom purchased it and had porch rails added as well as a custom paint job to match Kristies home in Starnes Cove area of Asheville NC
I remember staring at the pile of treasure and was in disbelief that I had permission to plunder it. I was 11 years old and with the help of my 8 year old brother, I sorted out the different sizes of scrap pine boards that were such a treasure to us. We were still debating on what to do with this assortment of treasures when we finished sorting them out. Our dad was a carpenter, and we often benefited from the left overs he had from various projects he was working on. This one was special, because many of these scraps were over four feet long. A child's imagination can do a lot with such material at his disposal.
At first, we were going to build a bridge across the creek, but realized the lengths were not what we needed for such an expanse to be structurally sound. As I look back, I am amazed at the thought process that brought two children to such a conclusion. We had been around construction all of our lives and had an underlying foundation of understanding for construction principles already, even if we did not understand all the terms and the reasons. We had experimented with construction before and we had some knowledge gained from failures. We had also recently seen the creek flood and saw the awesome power of nature in that little creek. Our conclusion was a good and sound one, even if it was made by children.
I remember looking up into the pasture at the lone white oak at the top of the hill. It was huge and it sort of reminded me of a giant arm sticking up out of the ground with a palm bent slightly and the giant branches were like long fingers stretching to the sky. I said to my brother, "Look! We could build a tree house in that tree!" He looked at it a moment and said "lets do it!" We loaded our wagon with boards, but saw that we would have to make several trips. I thought of building some make shift side boards and we could load more boards on the wagon. Some scraps of plywood were quickly located and placed on the wagon. The boards were all loaded quickly and we started pulling the wagon load of wooden treasure to the pasture. We only stopped once, to go and retrieve some hammers and nails.
All went well until we started up the hill. At that point, the overloaded wagon was too much for us to pull. At the same time, we remembered our 5 horsepower Mini-Goat mini bike. My brother pulled it down to the wagon while I ran to the barn and located some rope. I tied the handle of the wagon to the Mini-Goat and my brother eased up on the throttle. I had to help a little as the load tended to make the mini bike want to rear up. We managed to get to the top of the hill before long and only lost less than half of the load. We could not stop on the way up the hill, or we would have lost our momentum. We unloaded the wagon at the tree and went back to round up the rest of the load.
I remember being very tired at this moment and if I had been doing chores, I would have been begging for a rest. This was no chore, this was an adventure and we were too far into it to just stop without a very good reason. We decided to nail boards to the tree and make our ladder as we made our way up towards the tree's "palm". We made it to the tree's palm just in time to stop for supper. After working so hard, two boys were ready for mom's spaghetti and "sissy bread". Mom made great home baked biscuits, but when she made spaghetti, she would make one huge thin biscuit. Each of us would break off a piece of this biscuit and somehow it just tasted better with spaghetti than regular biscuits. It was calling our name with the aroma that was drifting up the hill from mom's kitchen. Before we left, we did make some plans on our next step and quickly realized we needed some support timber to hold up all the weight of our tree house materials plus us.
As we were eating mom's special spaghetti and sissy bread, we talked to dad about what we had been doing. I think he was impressed with our staying on task as much as he was what we had accomplished. I think he realized this was a good exercise for two sons that suffered ADHD and was an educational activity we should continue, if a bit non-conventional. Dad offered some old rough sawn 3x8 timber to use as floor joists and some 20 penny spikes to nail them with. He also cautioned us to bring all his tools back to the house before dark. The tree house was calling us, but we managed to hold it off until we finished a piece of mom's delicious rhubarb pie.
Those timbers seemed a great gift until we had to lug them up that hill. Then, I recall using my first curse word as I tried to nail into a piece of dried aged white oak. We nailed slowly and deliberately until we managed to secure the timbers to the tree. We managed to use the various sizes of boards to make a floor and only had to use the hand saw a few times. We labored relentlessly until it was almost dark. We loaded the wagon with tools and headed home.
Our next few weeks managed to be filled with hard labor to the point we had callouses and blisters. I remembered proudly showing off our semi-finished product to dad and saw the pride in his eyes at our first real accomplishment in construction. The house never really was finished, because we were always expanding and remodeling, but in the end it had a trap door with a rope ladder for quick escape, and a false side with a big sling shot behind it which we used to pelt the neighbor kids with small apples when they came to play. We had carpet, various rooms with speakers we rigged to a battery transistor radio, and a wood stove made from a metal drum. We did not need the stove until after school started back, but it really did work and we did not burn the place down.
We used the playhouse until we were in high school and gradually other interests caused us to forget about it. The tree house remained for years, inviting some child to come back and play, but finally the last pieces came down about 25 years after we built it. I will never forget those wonderful days and the lessons we learned that were as valuable as any learned in a classroom. I now build children's playhouses in part because of the joy I got from that tree house and wanting to share that with others.
I would be honored to build a unique house just for your children to create their own memories in
