{Porch Make-over} Why I’ll never be a contestant on The Block… (and our finished play space!)

Before you see my totally awesome, designer front porch play area, I just thought I’d let you know that I am opening up a few more ad spaces over there ====>> on the sidebar. If you’d like to be a sponsor of Daisy, Roo and Two don’t hesitate to email me for further details.

I’d like to welcome The Karma Soap Company in my Sidebar Sponsor Spotlight over there too – giveaway coming very soon!

–

On Friday morning I challenged myself to set up a play area for the kids on my front porch.

With $100 or less.

I thought it was going to be some kind of awesome mini-block mini-makeover.

I thought I was going to turn this:

Into an outside version of this:

{Image}

With a side of this:

{Image}

So, it turns out that if I were a contestant on The Block I would never win a room/week. Ever.

Partly because I am cranky and impatient and mostly annoyed by reality TV shows. I would spend my time on The Block living it up because I would not have my children with me.

Although with my luck, I’d probably sign up for The Block the one year they did The Block: Families.

My Room winning capabilities would also be severely limited by my lack of design imagination.

I’ve got none.

Whatsoever.

Paul is the design brains in this house.

My areas of strength are budget and practicality.

Which is why despite my front porch play area not looking like this:

{Image}

I’m OK with that.

Mostly because before I could take any photos of my awesome new play area, my kids found their new play area and got so excited they quickly proceeded to mess it up royally.

But they messed it up royally for over an hour.

AN HOUR!!

Seeing as the goal today was to create a safe (as safe as you can get with 2 year old twin boys), fun space for my kids to stay occupied in.

In other words, my goal was to avoid Death By Climbing Toddler.

Or possibly just avoid as many days like this as possible.

And in that sense, today was a huge success.

I was going to take some fancy pants pictures of the beautiful and simple play space I set up for the kids.

But then I couldn’t be bothered.

But let’s just say that because this is all about Life in the Real Lane, I meant for the only pictures of my weekend’s work to be these:

Cost Breakdown

Reject Shop – $11:

Chalk – $2

Chalk holders – $2 each ($4)

Orange buckets – $2.50 each ($5)

Big W – $61.26

Sand & Water table (to be used for coloured rice play) – $28

Pack of 20 Cars – $17

Yellow Duct tape – $4.26

Black Duct tape – $12

Total Cost: $72.26

Everything else is stuff that was hanging around annoying me inside.

The Duct Tape Road looks awesome, and was ridiculously easy. So easy I’m not even posting a tutorial. Just remember to cut the yellow duct tape with the coloured side facing you, rather than the sticky side.

By doing this I estimate you could save yourself about two hours of pulling tiny skinny pieces of duct tape apart to stick down as road markers.

Not that I did anything like that at all…

 I can see the kids lifting the tape up off our fancy-pants astro turf at some stage. But for now they are just happy to hang out and build cities.

Roo has also been using it for pretending to be a tightrope walker, and Oscar enjoys stamping on random parts of the road.

I’m not sure if he’s stamping down dodgy looking parts, or just stomping in approval.

Let’s go with approval.

We still have to remove all the junk off the top of the cupboards and paint the cupboard doors in chalkboard paint.

I also want to get a magnetic white board for magnet fun, and some coloured laminated posters with the alphabet and numbers.

I think I’ll probably end up spending another $75, so all up it will be about $150.

Seriously, you can’t put a price on sanity.

Tell me, what’s your must-have item/activity for a play space for kids?  I highly recommend a duct tape road. Also, wanna come over for a play date?