- Total Time4-6 hours
Best out of waste projects -like this best out of waste castle- are a favourite in our house as they are fun and creative to make… and it doesn’t hurt that they are inexpensive too of course. 😉 Our Tamatoa crab or Barbie doll thrones were some of our other similar best out of waste projects.
The kids and I have spent a few hours every Sunday this past month making this beautiful castle for the Playmobil people complete with bridge, water, garage for the car, bench in the garden and a “little hideout” for the Playmobil kids in the back. It was so much fun to make and it surely will be fun to play with too. It’s a win-win. And the cost? About 200rs including the glue, foam paper and flowers.
Be creative when you build your best of waste castle. It doesn’t have to look like ours. 🙂
Start collecting delivery boxes, toilet paper rolls, egg cartons and tetra packs a few weeks in advance so you have lots of different sizes and shapes to be creative with. My kids LOVED the building part of it and they all had lots of great ideas. Remember that you need a bigger box pressed flat to build it all on too.
We tried to use as much recycled stuff as possible -even the paint was sample pieces from the last time we repainted the kids’ bedrooms- but a few bought things are needed too to make it pretty. We used glitter foam paper instead of glue and glitter -why stress over potential glitter disasters with young kids if there is an easier way, right? We also cheated a bit and used paper flowers from Itzy bitzy instead of making them ourselves.
The time frame for doing a best out of waste castle is very flexible. It all depends on how big you make it and how many small little additions you want to add to it… like water, sand, shells, flags, bridge and so on. No matter the size, I recommend doing a little whenever you have the extra time and not trying to finish it all in one day.
Hope you have lots of fun with this project. Remember there is no right or wrong, it’s all about having fun while making it, so if the youngest member of the family makes a gigantic butterfly to sit on a tower, then it goes there. Apparently 😉
Ingredients
Directions
Start by collecting lots of different sized boxes, tetra packs, egg trays and toilet paper and kitchen towel rolls. Remember one big box to build it all on.
Set it up as you wish. We have used the inside of a tetra pack for the stairs and the egg trays for the big roofs and the small roofs on the towers. Glue it all together.
Paint it in the colours of your choice. My kids chose yellow, so we needed to give it two coats to cover the brown cardboard fully. The kids also decided to add a small river in front of the castle out of the soft paper from a chocolate box. My 4-year old daughter painted it blue with yellow dots. It's the sun reflected in the water.
Add windows and doors. We covered the holes in the egg trays with cut out glitter paper too so it looked like "attic windows".
Use fevicol glue and sand to make the "gravel path" to the bridge
Make a "wooden" bridge by pulling two strings through the towers and adding brown paper strips or painted ice cream sticks to the strings.
Add finishing touches like a little bench or flowery creepers growing on the castle
To make the flags, iron the foam paper and bend it while it's still hot. Here is also a picture of our little den in the back. The kids love to make their Playmobil people hide out there
We made sure one of the cardboard boxes could open so there was a garage for the egg tray car to park in
We added a golden gate and seashells to complete the look
And we were done. Fun to make and fun to play with afterwards.
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