Giant sized gingerbread house

One of the things we wanted to do this year that is a bit different was to create a giant gingerbread house for our yard display. At first I looked at building one, but with lumber prices still being high, that started to get a bit absurd. So then we started looking at outdoor kid playhouses. That was a bit of a shock. Even though I have 2 boys, I had no idea how expense those little plastic buildings could be. Wow. So we started thinking let's hit garage sales and see, but the idea of getting up at 5 in the morning to drive all over town and hope we got lucky was not an appealing one.

What was the answer? Facebook Marketplace (One of the few things useful about FB, IMHO) We found some options, but settled on this wooden playhouse that we ended up buying for $50. As you can see, it needs a little love, which is not surprising really. The Sun is unforgiving here and couple that with the other crazy weather we get and it is easy to see how easy it is for the weather to batter a wood structure to ruin here in Texas...

So here is what we have done with it so far. These pictures will show a little bit of evolution and we still have a couple of things coming from Amazon to finish it off:

The first thing we did was paint the roof white and sprinkled a LOT of white glitter on it. Yes. Glitter. then we added lights around the roofline and hung a lit wreath over the door.

To make it look more like a gingerbread house, we added a tinsel snowman, tinsel gingerbread man and tinsel giant candy canes...

To do something with the window on the side facing the street, I asked the wife to pick up a tinsel tree that matched the other figures to stand in the window. She came home with a 4 foot tree from 5 Below instead, with ornaments. So I pulled out a 50 count light string and put the tree in the middle of the house, and I have to say I really like the look...

To wrap this portion up, we took the blue door off and painted it cherry red. And yes, glitter got sprinkled all over it too...

To finish it, we have some 6-8 inch plastic candy rounds coming for the roof and some cupcake containers that are shaped like gum drops we will paint different colors and then attach to the house using white caulk to make it look like they are stuck on with icing. Once we get past Christmas, long term, we are going to paint it a lighter shade of brown to get it closer to what real ginger bread looks like...