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Children's Playhouse Tutorial

Note from the Autocad Granddad to whom it may concern:  For those who cannot wait or who cannot reckon it, a child's playhouse is a vanity playhouse when it bears a likeness to the main house on the property.

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So you want a playhouse for your kid?  Or your grandkid?  Need playhouse building design?  Need playhouse building plans?  Mrs. AG did, for the kid in her and the grandchild in her care most of every weekday.  What got her rolling was to have just seen a picture ad in the Journal for selling a well-known, historic, residential property named Langsyne, out on Cape Cod.  Langsyne had a playhouse – still does, right there in the picture – and she remembers that children's retreat very fondly from her year's now long gone by but not forgotten.

So, the AG asked of Mrs. AG, "Pray tell, my sweet!  For what style of little house would you wish? "

And she said, "Ours."

So be it said, so be it done.

Vanity playhouse building plans!  Bring 'em on.

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The discourse and drawings to follow really do emanate from planning this very children's playhouse.  The original, to-scale drawings themselves are reduced and wiped clean of notes and details to keep this webpage from vying for the great American novel.  On this website, design is of the essence, practical design; the playhouse design thinking remains on this page above all else.  Here, you'll get what to do in building a children's playhouse and why to do it.  Ask Norm Abrams how to build it.

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Design standards for building a children's playhouse range widely.

1. For our vanity playhouse, the structure should resemble its roots.  This generally means using the same materials as in the existing, simply cutting them down to size.  There is no need to be slavish or mechanistic about the resemblance; this is fantasy time.  Artful resemblance is your friend, it's the daily bread of your kid's conscious (yours, too, when the truth is told of minds and metaphors).  Lastly, the physical fates will make a fool of you if you don't have bendable rules, particularly with doors.

2. Child safety is crucial in designing a children's playhouse.   And safety surfaces in several, different aspects.  Stable foundation.  Stable structure.  Sturdy structure.  Tight to weather.  Vented.  Easily accessible physically by an adult.  Easily accessible visually by an adult.  Joined and fastened securely and cleanly.  Light and airy. 

3. Take the time to use materials efficiently.  It's easy to get lost in the numbers when you're reducing almost everything.  The pitfall is to leave yourself with drafted measurements of things such as something and 13/64s, never getting that ripped dimension cut just right, or lots of joist cross-cuts at 8'-2 1/2", leaving a pile 21 1/2" leftovers.  Few of us would get the grins paying for a half-dozen custom-made windows for that obsessively authentic look.

These design standards will surface over and over as we form up a playhouse.  Keep them in mind for your own playhouse building project.

A fun sidelight for the geez is in wondering what others go through a resolve this paraphrase:  To reduce or not to reduce.   He figures more than one weekend warrior will get the old shorts in a wad building a playhouse that in some places is shrunken in materials' dimensions and other times not.  Hint:  If it's really structure — think don't shrink.

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The Autocad Granddad and Mrs. Granddad live in a two-story, sort of neo-Disney colonial (typical of newer houses in Georgia these days) with steep rooflines, and wings for a master suite over the garage, a family room, and a sunroom.  (If you've got a one-story structure to loosely replicate, you'll have to get a little more fanciful with the front door's relative dimensions.)  Mrs. AG and I agreed to lop off the wings, and stick to the main house for a vanity structure.  It alone measures about 32' wide and 26'-6" deep.  Here's an isometric and an elevation of most of our middle part in wireframe (with details left out, e.g., window detail and the columns out front — got tired).

This ended the boring part.  The AG already knew more or less what the place looked like.  The challenge was to make it look about the same, but lots smaller.  That took more design and building sense than reckoned.

Practically, this kid's hideaway had to be —

So the geezer got real (it's not as though he hasn't been all along).  No point in numbly converting dimensions by the mechanics of mathematical ratios and proportions.  Mathematical division is no substitute for architectural design.

For width and depth, it didn't take a long time to figure that about a 3-to-1 size reduction worked out usefully.  Take the 32' width.  At about a third, we're working with standard plywood floor sizes of, say, 12', or three sheets' width or one-and-half lengths.  Going deep, 8' works about right for one-third of 26'-6" with few leftovers.  12'x8' it shall be: room for kids; generally conforming to available materials.

Playhouse height brings on unique cruelty for the reductionist.  It's the front door.  The standard size is, of course 6'-8" height.  Get tough about 1:3 and and your kid's entry door is a thoroughly unsuitable 2'-2" tall.

Here comes some design magic.

All this hubba-hubba got the AG about 4'-3" of door opening with nearly 8' of total wall height.  The mathematical lie:  You can figure that most two-story houses are round-about 19' of wood from mudsill to uppermost top plates.  Say, 20' for good luck.  8' or thereabouts is not too close at all to one-third of either 19' or 20'; nevertheless, by the time the AG ooched here and wiggle-roomed there, just under 8' was as good as it got.  This was not a scientific moment.  This was design at its rawest.  The AG spent gobs of time morphing the front facade.  In the end, available window heights obliged total playhouse wall height, more than any other single factor.  And you know what?  What he got was good.  You'll see, subsequently.

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First, we've got to get down to earth.  Literally.  On what shall we build this playhouse?

Well.  You do not want to set this structure hard to footings and piers, let alone a footing and stem wall, if you can help it.  Though codes and ordinances vary, your opportunity for an obligatory building permit and inspection routine and a higher tax assessment often go up substantially when you lay down a permanent foundation.  Not a road eagerly traveled for most outbuilding projects.

The foundation must accomplish two feats:  provide a stable base for the playhouse; shed water from the playhouse structure, notably get water [read:  moisture] out from underneath.  These are words by which to build a playhouse foundation:  excavate not less than 6" to level, firm soil at a distance not less than one foot from any point on the structure's base perimeter, and lay down not less than 2" of stone dust tamped over not less than 4" of road gravel tamped over silt cloth over a smooth perforated drainpipe (holes down)  crossing length or width of the excavation and pitched to light not less than 1" in 10' on the horizontal.  Crown slightly over grade.  Level and firmly set prefabricated concrete pads centered at each corner of the structure at its perimeter.

The AG's playhouse playhouse will be built atop this 14'x10'x6" foundation. 

Mastery shows in siting the concrete pads as the AG has, that is, at outside corners only.  Outside corner siting . . .

The AG's –playhouse footprint and the playhouse foundation plan look like this.

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How about playhouse floor framing?

Well, how about it?

This floor frame must be sturdy. 

1. Sturdy enough to take a pack of leaping children, and not keep on giving and giving. 

2. Sturdy enough to exceed tough span table specs.

The way gray beard has gone about it, this playhouse floor frame is a standalone deck structure by another name.  Only the very most recent span tables broadly disseminated take a framer to 60#s live load plus 10#s dead load.  And the AG likes those numbers.  Then, he moved it up a notch.  He's using doubled 2"x10"s for end joists and head joists, single 2"x8"s for common joists.  Beefy.  He had to apply a wee bit of structural creativity to handle the front-face jogs, noting that the first story jogs twice and the second only once.  See how sturdy interior structure comes into play necessarily in order to hang this frame together perched only at its outside corners.  (It's like answering your own question, pouring your own second cup, poetic justice.)

Let's lay on the plywood floor.  It's tongue and groove at 3/4".  Initial dimensioning of the footprint leaves little left over of three sheets.  The landing gets 5/4"x4" pressure-treated wood.  Eventually, that planking will go on the treads and risers of the front steps.

This floor plan makes up from something old and something new.  Old are the footprint and foundation lines.  New are the floor ply and planking, plus an introduction to what windows and doors go where.  Note especially the unobtrusive inclusion of an adult-sized backdoor.

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Design me up, Scotty!

The Autocad Granddad is now going to cut out the pedantry of playhouse framing plans wall segment by wall segment.  What a guy.  Suffice it to know that the AG drafted wall framing per common building building standards from 2"x4", 16"OC partitions to house wrap over 1/2" CDX sheathing.

Instead, we'll move to the crux of this wall aspect to the playhouse project by offering a few words about windows.

The AG digresses.  Windows are what nobody does best.  Nobody.  One company makes superb windows delivered with the presence of Hannibal Lechter.  Guess who.  The others – all the others that the AG's come across – fall down hard when the time comes to deliver technical advice or wide-ranging product line or sales backup or follow-up or delivery or something else key to the building process.  If it's the cold, silent treatment that turns you off from some of the big boys, be careful about that for which you wish.  Actually succeeding in your reach out for window expertise to their brethren can make you wish you hadn't.  Thus endeth the digression.

Really small, stock windows are hard to find, say, at around 1' or less in width.  Try it yourself.  The front of the existing house has big windows pretty near 3' wide, 4' and 5' tall.  The smallest the old boy could grab hold were casements, width be the deciding factor.  Praise be, the casements come with muntins . . . not patterned as the existing, but muntins just the same.  To flesh out,  the AG added pediments, shutters, and flower boxes consistent with existing only lots smaller.

He finished things off with a roof that doggedly tracked the gable and hip relationships on the existing, right down to the exact pitch and scaled overhangs.  If you want to screw up this vanity job, dramatically change roof pitch and configuration.

Here's a version of the roofing plan.

This brings us to an elevation and isometric.  It's going to get spooky.  Without dimensions to aright your mind's eye to perceive what's going on, this would look like somebody's house front face.

Told you it'd look good. Told you.

Now you have seen for yourself.

This overscaled door's disproportion gets sucked up mostly in the details all around it.  While the windows are set farther apart proportionately than the existing, the gigantum front door and porch roof structure compensate, as do the window boxes especially.  The stock upper windows are slightly overscaled, the result being too little horizontal free space to run the belly band that straps the existing at the story joint.

The AG simply continued the window and window appointment motif from the front to the sides.  Though you've got a clue about the appointments as they're profiled in the elevation above, here's an isometric showing off not only a side (the other is treated similarly), but also some of the roofline complexity and some of the front face changes in depth.

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Before we get out of here, let's finish up with finishing.  Holding to stock materials as closely as possible means not only fewer bucks, but also less chasing around, and it's a lot easier to work through that look-alike design standard.  To conform with existing, matching stock materials are the first place to look.  (In the list to follow, stock means not only easily acquired but also consistent with existing.)

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If you're interested in your own kid's playhouse, vanity playhouse or not, tell the AG.

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