Natural Rock Play Space and Outdoor Kitchen

 This post is part of a series on Playspace Design.   Other posts in the series include:
Our Playroom

Our Reading Room

Our Art Room

DIY Outdoor Sound Wall
Dinosaur Garden

This is my favorite, favorite part of our yard.  It makes me happy just being here.  There's the dappled sunlight through the overhanging trees, the gentle rustling of the native grasses - and somehow it all combines to just be perfection.  It's so hard to do a place like this justice through photos...which is why there are SO many in this post.  I really felt like it was the only way to possibly get a feel for it.

When we first looked at our house a year and a half ago, I could see so much potential inside - but the backyard was a big bummer for me.  It was sloped and had three tiers where each flat level was overgrown grass and each slope between was full of vinca or ivy.  If you were a bird looking down on the property the flat areas would make a giant overgrown grass E, if that makes sense.  Anyway, it just didn't feel very fun.  You couldn't move between the levels and the yard was just not that inviting for young children.  My mom had the vision, though.  She assured me that we could make some amazing playspaces in the yard and create ways to move between the areas of the yard more easily.  This area you see here is located at the far bottom right of the "E".  There were two beautiful boulders at the top of the lowest stretch of overgrown grass and I remember telling my mom maybe we could add some rocks here, building off those two boulders, so that the kids could climb between the flat levels?  Well --- this is what my mom created.  A magical playspace modeled after a natural dry stream bed.

S is obsessed with collecting sticks.  Every time we go on a nature walk she's carrying and collecting an assortment the whole way.  So my mom designed four of these stick holders as a sculptural element to the playspace.  S likes to bring the sticks home from all over and place/arrange them in these black PVC pipes that we've buried in the ground.

There is also a water works element to the playspace.  We have this giant metal bucket that we fill with fresh water each time we come out to play and S can use it in either of her sand pits to "cook" the food she's always busy making here, or she can pour it down her hidden pipe.  

In between two rocks there's a slotted opening that leads to a flexible underground pipe we buried when we were making the dry stream bed.  It runs from one side diagonally to the opposite side of the dry stream bed.  If you're quiet, you can hear the water as it travels under the play area.

The pipe is laid at a gradual slope, so S can walk down the path and catch the water coming out of the flexible pipe at the other end.  We have a purple Tubtrug there to catch the water as it comes out.  If S is wanting to cook at the lower sand pit, she'll often send a large quantity of water through the pipes to fill this lower bucket for easier access.

Here's another view of the main water bucket.  S is prepping some muffin tins for the sand batter.  :)  We found all the cooking supplies at our local Goodwill.

Here you can see S's lower sand pit.  We dug a very deep (around 3 feet deep) pit in the dirt and encircled it with stone pavers.  We added several 50 pound bags of play sand to fill it and we keep a garbage can lid over it when not in use to keep wild animals from using it (ew!).  You can see S's array of cooking utensils here near the lower sand pit.  On either side of S are the two orignal beautiful boulders that inspired this whole amazing space.

Here's a finished cake that S has made for the dinosaurs from our Dinosaur Garden.  Doesn't it look delicious?  :)

A view up the dry stream bed.  Once we cleared the area of all the grass and vinca, we laid/buried the pipe, rough cut out the stairs, and dug and filled the sand pits.  We then laid the largest boulders that made the steps and framed the planters.  Next we brought in large river rock and placed them sporadically, finally we filled in the remaining spaces with smaller rocks and pea gravel.  We chose native grasses of varying heights for each of five planters - the largest grasses exist on the perimeters and will grow to about 5 feet in height at maturity, eventually creating an even more private area.

A closer look at the upper sand pit from behind the upper grasses.

My mom also found this long rectangular flagstone and earmarked it for a bench/oven.  S can sit on it to eat her fantastic baked goods, or she can place the muffin tin and some of the smaller pots and pans underneath to cook them in the "oven".

Going back up the path to fetch another bowl.

The sand pits are so much fun.  We'd considered mud, but ultimately decided that sand would be easier for S to work with as mud can sometimes get a bit difficult to dig through when it's dry.

My little chef hard at work in her little sanctuary.

Well, I hope I've managed to capture a little bit of the perfection and peace that exists in our amazing dry stream bed play space.  We are so thankful to my mom who had this incredible vision and brought it to life!  I still can't believe this used to be a snarl of grass and vinca...

Sometime next week I will try to post the remaining elements of our backyard so you can see how everything works together!

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Please always supervise your infant/child at play.  Please stay within arms reach and never leave infants/children unattended.

Not a Fairy Garden - a Dinosaur Garden!

 This post is part of a series on Playspace Design.   Other posts in the series include:
Our Playroom

Our Reading Room

Our Art Room

DIY Outdoor Sound Wall
Natural Rock Play Space and Outdoor Kitchen

This is the second of four posts on our Backyard's Design.  One of the elements I wanted to have in our yard was a place for imaginary play.  When I was perusing Pinterest, I saw so many fabulous Fairy Gardens - but fairies are just not S's thing.  However, dinosaurs are.  So I settled on creating a Dinosaur Garden instead.   :)

First we needed to decide where in the yard to create this world/garden.  My mother was super instrumental in our entire backyard design.  She's got a background in landscape architecture, so she was full of helpful tips.  She suggested playing off a feature that was already present in our backyard.  We had these two huge tree stumps from trees that were damaged in an ice storm and had to be cut down - so we built from there.

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On either side of the tree trunks, we created large, wide mounds of dirt.  I really wanted a water feature for our Dinosaur Garden, but I didn't want to deal with standing water.  I'd seen aquarium rocks used to make trails in fairy gardens, so I settled on making a giant lake out of blue aquarium rocks(I bought them at a local pet store).  To make the lake I flattened one of the mounds and made sort of a crater that I filled in with the aquarium rocks.

Next we needed greenery.  I just love sedum in general, and it was the perfect addition here.  It looks so prehistoric, it has so many varied textures, and it's drought tolerant (who doesn't love a plant that rolls with you forgetting to water it, right?).  I bought three flats of sedum (at our local home improvement store they sell these large flats of sedum that look almost like a giant plant carpet) and we broke them up into several large clumps and laid them on top of our dirt.  We did all this a year ago - so by now the sedum has mostly filled in the gaps.  It is a type of groundcover, so if you aren't picky about some gaps the first year, you can save money by just planting spaced handfuls and they will fill in over time.

Finally, we needed some dinosaurs!  Safari Ltd makes some great dinosaur models,but we were a bit more frugal and I raided the local Goodwill.  I actually love the crazy faded plastic dinosaurs I found there!  They're pretty awesome.  S has decided that they are a family - there's the Dada in the background below, the Mama is the Triceratops in the foreground, and they have a baby (smaller) triceratops as well.  In addition to the large scale dinosaur family, I also bought a bag of tiny dinosaurs- half of which lived out here and the other half of which live inside our house and play in some of our small worlds.  I like the tiny guys because usually S sends her friends home with one or two (which is great - because you get so many in a set she's happy to share) and the tiny guys hide really well in the sedum.  :)

Here's another view of Dinosaur Lake.

There's S playing with a tiny dinosaur guy.

S LOVES her Dinosaur Garden.  She spends hours quietly chattering telling all sorts of stories, making them meals of grass and gravel, and generally having a great time.  It's such a fun addition to our backyard!  PS - Her cuteness in this picture melts my heart!!!!

Got a dinosaur lover?  For even more dinosaur fun, be sure to check out:

No Sew Dinosaur World Playmat

Dinosaurs and Sticky Mud Small World

Make Your Own Dinosaur Fossils

Frozen Gelatin Excavation

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Please always supervise your infant/child at play.  Please stay within arms reach and never leave infants/children unattended.

Backyard Design: DIY Outdoor Sound Wall/Music Station

 This post is part of a series on Playspace Design.   Other posts in the series include:
Our Playroom

Our Reading Room

Our Art Room
Dinosaur Garden

Natural Rock Play Space and Outdoor Kitchen

I'll talk more about the whole layout behind our backyard design in the final post that gives the overview, but one of the things on my list of must-haves was an outdoor sound wall.  There's a beautiful hydrangea behind it and when it's in bloom with giant blue-purple blooms this view is rather breathtaking.  (The two other tan beams you see in the background of the photo are the supports for our deck above.)

To make our sound wall, I first went shopping at our Seattle Goodwill.  I searched for anything that I felt would make interesting sounds (for the wall itself) and for any interesting and unusual items we could use as "drum sticks".  I ended up purchasing two types of colander, a cream (tea) dispenser, a fish and a clover gelatin mold, part of a broiler, a drying rack, a bell, and a pot lid.  The awesome rusted crow was actually left behind by our home's previous owners and he is the perfect addition there in the upper right hand corner.

I also picked up a few strange shaped whisks, some interesting large spoons, and a potato masher for, well, banging.  :)  I keep those loose parts in a clear plastic shower caddy (the caddy keeps them organized, but the holes in the shower caddy don't allow for the collection of water).

Once I'd purchased all the items, I laid them out to determine the size of the wall I wanted to make.  We decided on a 2 x 12 single piece of wood and had it cut at Home Depot to the length we wanted/our space was able to accomodate.  We bolted that piece of wood to two 4 x 4 pillars that we also had cut to size on site.  The pillars are buried 1/3 in the ground (you can just dig a big hole, and once you get the wall where you want using a level, and then add pea gravel to "set" the pillars before adding dirt) and we chose the height based on S's height at the time (we built this over a year ago, and chose a height that she could reach at the time, but that would also grow with her).

I mounted most of the items with the same hooks I used to mount X's texture circles for his Sensory Board, though a few items necessitated screws.  I tried to hang them in ways that would create the widest variety of sounds - for instance, you can see that the broiler plate S is "playing" is partially on and partially off the board so she can investigate how that affects the sound it makes.  I love that we were able to make a wall long enough that several children can make "music" at once (as they do when S has lots of friends over).

And if you're not yet standing on your own, you can always watch and make music with the spoons and whisks in the shower caddy.   :)

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Please always supervise your infant/child at play.  Please stay within arms reach and never leave infants/children unattended.

Designing Playspaces: Our Art Room

This is the third post in my designing playspaces series:

You can read about our Playroom design here.

You can read about our Reading Room design here.

You can read about our Backyard design sometime in June.  :)

Before we even start, can I just say - this room is SO HARD TO PHOTOGRAPH!  There is barely any natural light and there are track lights that kept throwing my cameras (I had to use a point and shoot to capture some of the angles) off and giving everything a weird color.  If I were a more accomplished photographer and/or knew how to use Photoshop to correct, everything would have looked much nicer.  So please forgive my floundering photos here!!!

Now that I have that off my chest - we can get back to the post.  :)  

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S is a very accomplished artist.  She was drawing faces and stick people by the time she was 2.  She comes by it honestly - my mom is a professional artist.  By the time she was about 14 months old, S would spend hours every day creating art - so an Art Room was another must!  When we bought the house, the Art Room was a home gym.  The paint was a beige-gray, and it felt very dark (the person who took this picture most assuredly brought professional lighting along!).  Both because I thought I could do something fun with the cement wall that ran the length of the back of the room and because I hated the carpet (so we don't worry about paint spills, hahaha!) - I decided this was my future Art Room.  Though we left the old carpet, we did repaint the walls a bright white to bring whatever light we could to the super dark room.

I know that we do basically all of our sensory play in a clear bin upstairs for the blog (because the lighting is really just SO BAD downstairs) and because X can't stand and play yet - but the ultimate location of most of our sensory play is in the Art Room.  Here S is playing with her very favorite material - Moon Sand.  You can start to get a sense for my storage scheme to the left there.  The sensory materials are stored in plastic shoe storage containers (some from the Dollar Store and some from Target - the Target ones are much better) and the white shelving is also from Target (but it's terrible - buy the Ikea version if you can - we just didn't have the time/energy to make another Ikea trip once we realized we wanted an accesible storage system for our sensory materials).

Here's another view of the storage system.  The way I have it set up is such that any of the "tools" on top of the shelving are fair game for any sensory material.  If S wants to mix two materials from the bins below, she needs to check first.  Some things mix easily (like the Moon Sand and glass gems she's playing with above), whereas other combos would ruin one or both materials - which we obviously want to avoid.

For more details about the sensory supplies pictured, please visit this post.

I loved the idea of the kids getting to draw on the walls in the Art Room.  I was originally planning to do chalkboard and whiteboard paint, but the cost was pretty prohibitive and it would be harder to "undo" once we someday (though not anytime soon!) move.  So I went with whiteboard adhesive decals here.  I bought these circles precut because I do not trust my ability to draw/cut a nice looking circle.  However, sheets of whiteboard adhesive are pretty cheap, so if you are more skilled (and more patient, hahaha) than I am, that's a great way to do it.  I LOVE the whiteboard adhesive.  It is seriously great - very high quality and nice and thick.  It honestly feels just like you're writing on a real whiteboard!  These circles (in white, green, and blue) run along the whole cement wall.  They're a great way to "draw on the walls".

Pictured:

Dry Erase Decal Dots

On the left side of the room, we used chalkboard adhesive to make a chalkboard for more opportunities to "draw on the walls".  The chalkboard adhesive was much flimsier, difficult to mount, and overall is lower quality when compared to the whiteboard adhesive.  It is significantly cheaper than doing your own chalkboard paint (in particular because I've heard you need several layers before it's really nice), but it isn't as great.  Honestly, though, S doesn't really know any better and she has a great time with it, so I wouldn't say it's not worth doing - just know that it will not feel/look the same as an actual chalkboard.  (Sorry for the terrible photo)  Above the chalkboard are tissue poms that I made by hand while really pregnant.  They were incredibly tedious to fluff - so be forewarned if you are thinking of making some.  I'd originally wanted a really cool swath of them in various sizes and color on the ceiling, but for whatever reason, it was impossible to get anything to hang without using something very serious - like a huge nail - so we changed our plans and hung them on the wall.  They still give the room some added color, and I do like that this way they look like flowers, but still I'm a little sad about my missing ceiling decor.  :)

Pictured:

Handmade Tissue Poms

Chalkboard Adhesive

I really wanted the Art Room to be accessible to S, so we made sure to install shelving that is low to the ground.  As is our general parenting motto, we trust S to make good decisions (there are logical consequences when she does not - but we feel that mistakes can be great ways to learn) and so she has free access to all but the very top shelf of materials (those are mostly kits or materials that I am saving for a different time).  That means that she has free access to scissors and glitter and paint and has since she was a toddler.  :)  This system works really well for us - so that's the story behind the placement of the shelving and supplies.

Pictured:

All shelving from in-stock Home Depot shelving supplies

Blue and green stamp buckets from the Dollar Store

Jars with various supplies from Ikea

Woven plastic basket in upper right

 Here she is gathering supplies for the project she's working on.

And a different angle of her grabbing supplies.

All of her pens/pencils/crayons/chalk/etc are stored in hanging buckets.  I felt that these materials would easily be (accidentally) knocked over if they were on shelves.  The buckets are sorted by type (though we do have two crayon buckets) and S takes whatever buckets she needs for the project at hand.  The rule in the Art Room is that you may grab as many things as you need, but you are responsible for putting everything back in its place when you are done (when she was 2-3 years old, I would help her do this - but now at 3.5 years old she's pretty self-sufficient).  I made the star decorations with a star punch from Michaels and leftover paint sample cards.

Pictured:

Hanging buckets from Michaels

 The art table itself is actually two tables that we've placed next to each other.  I've covered them with our favorite mess containing material - white oilcloth - and secured the oilcloth to the tables.  The oilcloth is thick enough that there isn't really a seam between the tables and it does a pretty good job of keeping the tables together.  We also recently got a butcher paper dispenser (for Christmas from her grandparents) and we LOVE it.  I really recommend getting one if you have the table space because it's immensely useful.

Pictured:

Butcher paper roll/dispenser from Ikea

Art Room Tables 

Colored Art Room Chairs

White Oilcloth Table Cover

Just like in the playroom, I used different colored chairs to bring more color to the room.

Here's a zoomed out shot of our shelving.  We did end up using some ground space because I like to have everything spread out and easily accessible.  You can also see that we use the wall opposite the cement wall to display her artwork.  I wanted a nice (but economical) way to display some of our favorite artwork, so I settled on using thick black masking tape.  I use it to make a "frame" around the art (or in the case of her smaller spin arts - I make a sort of quilt frame around a group).  It's very fast, cheap, and I think it looks great!

Pictured:

Miscellaneous art supplies

Black Masking Tape for artwork frames

Here's S in front of the continuation of her artwork display on the other side of the door (opposite the shelving).

 Above the cement wall, there is a small amount of "normal" drywall and the cement actually makes a ledge, so I used the space to hang the word "CREATE" and to display some of her handpainted figures/fossils/etc.  I bought the letters at Michaels and bought a small sample of green paint that matched the green chair in the room from Home Depot to paint the letters.

The final thing in our Art Room was not intentional, but when you live with cats who love to destroy inflatables, you do what you have to do.  When she was smaller, S had an inflatable baby pool with about 100 balls and we set up a Little Tikes slide that landed in it.  It was one of the most coveted things in our playroom when she was 2, but our cats ultimately popped the pool so the balls had a hard time staying in, etc, etc.  Not to mention she got so tall that the baby slide was simply too short!  So her big Christmas present from us was a new ball pit.  To keep this one safe from the cats, we needed to put it in the Art Room (because the Art Room is off limits for the cats anyway since they are always knocking things over, getting into the sensory materials, etc).  Now that it's been there for awhile, I have adjusted to it a bit more.  I do like that it adds color and it's nice to be able to take a break to play in between art projects or while you're waiting for something to dry.  I don't know that I would have intentionally included a ball pit in my original design, though.

Pictured:

Phthalate-free balls

Step2 Big Folding Slide

Inflatable Pool

Hopefully I've given those of you looking to set up an art space some ideas!

You can read about our favorite art supplies here.

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Please always supervise your infant/child at play.  Please stay within arms reach and never leave infants/children unattended.