If, after buying household appliances or furniture, cardboard packaging remains in the house, do not rush to throw it away. A house made of cardboard, made and decorated with your own hands, can serve as a play space for preschool and primary school children for a long time.
Probably, there are no such children who would not build toy houses for themselves from improvised materials: chairs, cushions, tree branches, blankets and tablecloths. To help them with this activity and to channel children's energy into creativity, parents can use unnecessary large boxes. Building a house made of cardboard will allow you to usefully get rid of packaging, will give your child the first knowledge in the field of architecture and skills in interior decoration.
How to make a folding cardboard house
For small apartments, the ideal solution would be to make a folding house, the design of which allows you to remove the structure after the end of children's games. To make such a house with your own hands, you will need a large packing box and a rectangular sheet of cardboard for making a roof.
The bent parts of the box are folded back to lengthen the walls of the future house, the joints and the bottom are carefully glued with tape. After that, the box is turned over onto one of the walls and the upper part is carefully cut off. A rectangular sheet of cardboard is bent in half in the form of a gable roof and is glued to the side walls of the house with adhesive tape.
The inner surface of the walls is pasted over with old wallpaper or bright pictures cut from children's magazines. To disguise the entrance to the house, you can attach a piece of beautiful fabric or tulle curtains. After the end of the games, the cardboard house can be easily folded along the bottom line and removed to an inconspicuous place.
How to make a log cabin
A more time-consuming process, designed for joint creativity with children, is the manufacture of a spectacular cardboard house decorated with tree branches. For work, you will need a large box of household appliances, even rods of the same length and thickness, and a glue gun.
On the box, the details of the future house are marked with a pencil - windows, doors, decorative elements. A triangular ledge is cut out on the upper short walls to form the ridge of the roof. The long top walls of the box are trimmed slightly, making them just below the ridge.
With a clerical knife, the marked parts of the cardboard house are cut out, small squares of transparent plastic imitating glass are glued on the inside of the box in the window area. Prepared tree branches with the help of hot glue decorate the walls of the house, gluing the twigs in neat parallel rows.
The roof is made from a rectangular sheet of cardboard, the length and width of which should be 3-6 cm larger than the bottom of the box. The sheet is folded in half, forming a gabled roof, and fixed on the house with double-sided tape or hot glue. After the glue dries, the roof is pasted over with branches or painted with gouache, imitating tiles. The finished cardboard house is decorated with decorative elements.
