A mini mansion in a backyard

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.

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