A sod-covered found-wood playhouse in a woody British backyard

A sod-covered found-wood playhouse in a woody British backyard

Come along with me and experience the tale of the time J0_M0 decided to build his kids a log playhouse in the English countryside, using only found wood and purchasing only a bag of nails. -Cat

This is the finished product, but it took some time to get here.

All the logs come from the surrounding trees and the sawn timber is old pallets and scrap from neighbours. The only money I spent was on a couple of bags of nails.

July 2007: I thought, 'Wouldn't it be great to have a log cabin down there? I could finish that by the end of the summer.'

August 2007: Starting to look like something. A pile of logs?

This is what happens when you pull a log from the bottom of the pile.

September 2007

The stairs are made from an old door.

October 2007: I started filling in the frame of the front wall with split logs. Horizontal on the inside and vertical on the outside.

Mid-October and the roof is nowhere near finished.

The days were getting short and I'd run out of timber. It would have been nice to have the roof on.

February 2008 brings a really heavy frost. -4 degrees Celsius.

May. I finished off the back wall leaving a gap for a door to the right. Got to build some steps round the back at some point.

Need to let some light in when the roof is on, so added two sticky-out, pointy skylights.

June. Summer arrives and I get the first bits of the roof on. This is going to take a lot of pallets to cover.

That floor panelling on the skylight looks a bit ugly, but it won't be seen when there is grass growing up there.

Starting to look like a house now.

Those planks on the roof went on pretty quick. It took me a lot longer to break them apart from the palette.

I threw that plastic sheet up there to keep the rain off while I carried on chopping and sawing inside.

This is the view from the back in August 2008.

A couple of blue tarpaulins on the roof came from Poundland, the rest are skip finds and fertilizer sacks. It will look fine once it's covered in grass. Still not worked that out yet.

Compost thrown over the plastic sheeting makes a huge difference. The odd clump of grass shoved in at random. I guess it will take until next year for grass to take hold.

Grass growing on the roof. It's only taken me a year to get to this!

Side wall just about finished.

February 2009.

April, and the grass is looking fine.

I started looking for wood to make a door. What a weird shape it will have to be.

August. I cut the grass on the roof two weeks ago and it's grown back quick.

Somehow the shape of the doorway looks even stranger from the inside.

December 2010. Winter has come early to the Shire.

50cm of snow and the roof is still holding up.

I thought I'd spend a few weeks building a log house for the kids to play in. If only I'd thought about it a bit harder — this took over two years!

Original article and pictures take i0.wp.com site