Repainted Play House

A while back, friends of ours gave us their daughter’s old playhouse. We painted it aqua and teal with spraypaint and it’s been great. Here it is almost 2.5 years ago, freshly redone:

Oliver has loved it the past two summers and this year Matthew’s enthusiasm for playing in it has renewed Ollie’s interest as well. The only thing was that the spray paint started to flake off. A little here, a little there. A little more. After a particularly bad rain I noticed Matthew came out covered in little bits of paint chips and I knew we absolutely had to repaint it immediately.

I powerwashed the heck out of it, scrubbed it with soap and a bristle brush, then washed it again. It knocked off a lot of  paint. Anything that was going to come off anytime soon had to go.

The teal only had one coat of spray paint on it (vs. the aqua which was aqua on old pink) so that stuck around a lot better. This section really needed touchups and a fresh coat on the table where water pooled from rain.

I decided I wanted to keep the teal parts as they were because it matches our teal chairs. But I let Oliver pick the colors for the rest and he chose bright green for the house and light gray for the inside chairs, door and plant pots. We're once again leaving the roof unpainted because it's already blue and in good shape.

Repainting went really fast. I wasn’t too fussy about keeping the driveway clean since we have to reseal it anyways - I just threw down a few contractor bags and got to work. I also learned from the first time that the easiest way to spray it is to do it with the walls standing up. I think it took longer to scrub the green paint off my bare feet than it did to paint the house. The last step was to put a coat of outdoor clear spray paint sealant on it while Mike took the kids for a bike ride to keep them away from the toxic cloud. (That stuff is nasty and floats around!)

Here’s the playhouse put back together:

(also ignore how dirty our driveway is! We've had a ton of rain that's washed a lot of mud/mulch/grass down the slope away from the house and then I took these pictures before I cleaned the driveway of the paint flecks!)

The kids are thrilled. They've been playing in it together every day now for a couple of weeks. And I’m just glad no one is coming out of it with little bits of paint stuck to them anymore...!