With an incredible burst of inspiration I decided to build Lia a Fairy Tale Princess Castle.

It’s basically 8 pieces of plywood with hinges connecting the pieces. As plywood is typically sold as 4’x8’ pieces, these are not full sheets – each wall is 2’x5 1/2’ as per the plans.

It was kind of a fun project and a way to play with a “testbed” and to practice working with tools to build confidence to do things around the home, DIY style, as the main TV show we watch always makes us want to get up off the couch and do something. It probably took 2 weeks of nights and weekends and I had to take over the garage and make more trips than expected to pick up parts and tools.

Hassles in this project

Biggest hassle is trying to get service at Home Depot. Basically noone works there, and if you by chance find someone and ask them a question, other customers will be amazed that you found someone and will try to steal the helper away from you. The one thing they had to do for me was cut the plywood, as it’s too heavy to carry the whole sheet home, so you have to find someone who can operate their saw, and the do offer the service..and I went once, spent around a 1/2 hour waiting for the guy I found to return…left…went to Lowes…their saw was broken, waited a week, decided not to give up …, found noone working in the wood section as usual…but found a guy 10 or so aisles away who agreed to cut my wood, and voilla, I was on the way.

Lessons learned

If you streamline cleanup then it’s easier to maintain the momentum to get a project done. I used, evil, environmentally unfriendly disposable latex gloves when painting and disposable paintbrushes too.

Stenciling looks hard but if you get the proper brush and practice a bit on some spare wood then you can do a 1/2 way decent job – or at least I suprised myself by the improvement as I painted the “lyrics” on one wall.

While the exterior looks nice and fun, the interior is bare so we have to decorate and put things in their for Lia to do. Plan to get some unpainted tiny “chairs” from Michaels as a start, and may put some small planter or windows boxes around it with some tiny pots for Lia to play with and water and so on.