Kids Outdoor Playhouses

There are so many choices out there when shopping for a present for a child. I wanted to buy a children's outdoor playhouse, and I have decided to go with a durable and safe plastic one, but how to decide which one?  There are so many options in the plastic outdoor playhouse arena.

I've narrowed it down to three. This one, "Welcome Home Playhouse" would be great for either a girl or a boy. The "Little Tikes Endless Adventures Tikes Town" is roomy and diverse, and the "Ferber Activity Train" looks like so much fun.

All three are in my price range. All three have detail pictures that include the interiors and features. I wish I could buy all three, but I have to choose just one or maybe I don't have to choose. Maybe my inner child should be called upon to make the decision.

If I could fit into one these exciting looking playhouse, which would I want to do first? Would I want to crawl through the Ferber Activity Train or jump off its durable roof? Or I could answer the phone that really rings in Little Tikes Endless Adventure Tikes Town. Or I could play house and make imaginary dinner in the Welcome Home Playhouse.

Playing house doesn't sound as much fun to me as all the things I want to explore in the four-sided Little Tikes Town Playhouse. One side has a market with a window. Another side is school, which would make me more excited about going to school for real and less scared about being away from home. Across from that wall, there's the sports wall with a net I could kick or throw balls into it. They also talk about some games, but I can't figure out from the pictures what kind of games are on that wall. Another side has a gas station with another window and outside there's a faux gasoline nozzle. I could pretend to fill up my imaginary Porsche, but in ten or fifteen years when this child starts to drive, will we still have to fill up with gas and will sports car still be around?

Looking again at the Ferber Activity Train, I don’t think it would be all that much fun to play in it alone. It's a lot of running, jumping, and crawling. That's always more fun in a group. The Tikes Town and the Welcome Home could be hours of fun with a doll, or an imaginary friend, or with real friends.

I'm not sure why playing house doesn't sound like fun to me. Maybe too many of my years were spent keeping house instead of playing it. As for worrying about raising a child's expectation about fueling up a car for real, we'll probably have to put something in our transportation in the future. Plus, the child who plays with Tikes Town, will understand what their elders are talking about when we say, "I remember when I could fill up for a hundred bucks."

"Little Tikes Endless Adventures Tikes Town" is among the best of the playhouses on the market. It's durable and versatile. I could have fun for days in this special little playhouse. It fuels the imagination of my old inner child, and I almost wish I were a kid again, but I'll be happy to just sit back to watch my grandkids enjoy playing at being a grocer, an athlete, a mechanic, or play at being in school as a student or a teacher. I can't wait to see how they take to their outdoor playhouse plastic!

Source: Karen Jacobs

A mini mansion in a backyard

I have to admit that as the time nears for our first grandchild, I'm plagued with memories of all the things we wanted to buy for our kids, but couldn’t afford. One of the things was an outdoor playhouse. Looking around the Internet, I quickly felt lost. There are so many different kinds. There's the tent manufactured to look like a playhouse, there's molded plastic, and there's wooden structures that look just like miniature mansions.

I decided to break down my decision making into three categories. Number one: safety, two: longevity in fun and durability, and three: which would our grandchild go gaga over the most?

I went to consumersreport.com, but I couldn't find playhouses there. I tried searching yahoo.com and google.com, but store websites overwhelmed the search results. Then I turned to Amazon.com. Power to the people who review everything, I love you. I found almost everything I needed after simply searching "child playhouse."

I found the tent playhouses, the plastic ones, and even a cardboard one kids could color themselves, but they didn’t the mini-mansions. Unfortunately, there's a choking warning on the cardboard playhouse for children under 3 years of age. If a playhouse can't pass the safety category, than it won't be considered in the other two. Besides, cardboard is not durable and I want something that is going to last.

The fairy princess castle tent really caught my eye, but we don't know if we are going to have a girl or a boy grandchild, so I'd like to stick to something more androgynous. Plus, it also had the choking hazard warning, and a few bad reviews regarding durability. I found this to be the case with a lot of the tents. They didn't hold up to long hours of play, but they are a lot less expensive than the plastic playhouses and the mini-mansions. So, we could just buy a few tent playhouse for the tike, and then they'd have a new one when the old one wore out.

Still undecided, I perused the plastic playhouses. Where the playhouse tents ranged between $20 and $50, the plastic playhouses started around a few hundred dollars and went up and up from there. Most of the plastic playhouses didn’t have the "choking hazard warning" and they mostly had great reviews. A couple of these houses had complaints about dull, cheerless interiors, but shopping around and reading more reviews revealed that wasn't the norm.

When I went searching for the mini-mansions also called, luxury playhouses, I found that I needed to know as much as a building inspector to be sure one of these child sized houses would be safe. I would also need at least a few thousand dollars. I fell in love with one, though, but it was a whole playground set priced at over $100,000.

The tents, though cute and very affordable, don't seem like a good investment, whereas the luxury playhouses are too much of an investment. If I want to spend over a few thousand dollars, I'd rather buy him or her saving bonds for college. So, like Goldilocks, I think the plastic playhouses are just right. Now, all I have to do is figure out which one of the adorable plastic playhouses I want to buy.