Yup, it’s that playhouse we got back in May 2009. I thought I’d let the world know how it’s getting on and whether it has survived two winters. As you can see, it has and is still standing. The wood has greyed somewhat which is to be expected, but there’s no sign of mould or rot. Poppy and Joseph can use it with no difficulty, apart from once Joseph goes inside the house he sits on a chair and decides that he is too scared to move. To anyone thinking of buying this playhouse I would suggest you also get the slide extension. It’s a moulded bit of plastic that fits at the end of the slide to prevent your child from travelling 3 foot across your garden on landing…. could be cheaper than replacing / washing clothes in the aftermath. You can get the extension from John Lewis. A second modification I needed to make was to prevent the static shocks to the children as they went down the slide. In warm weather, static would build up presumably because the playhouse is on the decking and not a lawn. This was easily solved by taping over the metal fittings with duck tape.

Of course there has to be a gadget angle to this post, so I fitted a solar panel to the roof of the playhouse. This in turn feeds an LED light inside which I used at our old house in the garage. It isn’t very good for lighting a garage, or anything at all to be honest, so I thought I’d give it to the children to play with instead. Thanks to Granny and Grancher they also have a couple of little chairs inside to sit on while they have their picnics.

The only criticism I have is with the material door. It started out a nice bright green matching the plastic fittings, but over the last year or so it has faded considerably. If it starts to get too tatty then I’ll probably remove it, but as far as I can tell you can’t get a replacement. Anyway, you get the playhouse from quite a number of places including Amazon (above), John Lewis and Tesco Direct. It doesn’t come with the solar panel.