Lots of Cardboard, and a ridiculous amount of Duct Tape

Let me let you in on my newly-defined side career. I'm a castle designer.

It's true. On Saturday, Travis and I were looking online for a good craft idea, and stumbled upon this cardboard castle gem.

Please don't follow the above link to the Disney Family Fun website, and then come back to this blog and expect to see anything remotely resembling the pictures you saw there. I mean, we had fun, the boys love the castle, and I had a good time putting it together, but come on. I'm a left-brained insurance geek for pete's sake. I can muster up some creativity and artfulness every once in a while, but I keep my expectations pretty low here. (Now, if this had been a spreadsheet project, I'd have knocked it out of the park.)

Anyway, the castle is made up almost entirely of cardboard and duct tape. Well, the original instructions called for masking tape, but I didn't have much of that. I had duct tape.

So not only did we make this super-cool castle, but the boys learned a very important life lesson, which I made them repeat at least three times during our project: if it can't be fixed using duct tape....it's probably not worth fixing anyway.

Here's a picture of the boys with the finished product. The paint job leaves something to be desired, we only got one can of spray paint which didn't really cover the whole thing. But, it's better than the "oatmeal" and "cereal" and "tissue paper" labels which had heretofore marked up our castle.

By the way, I painted it while Travis was out at tae kwon do class, and got this picture when he got home. That's why he looks like he's wearing a bathrobe.

We duct-taped the finished castle to a large foam rectangle, and painted the front blue for a moat. Oh, and the red and yellow tower tops are leftover party hats from the dollar store. Pretty resourceful, eh?

Here's the inside of the castle. The stairs are a little crooked. I told you it wasn't perfect. But, there are two secret passageways, a hidden compartment, two slides plus the two towers, that little hidden room on the first floor, a couple egg-carton balconies on the front, and a look-out tower (water bottle) on the top. Pure heaven for a three- and six-year-old.

Here is Travis pointing to his favorite part, the slide leading from the roof to the second floor.

Here's Noah pointing to his favorite part, incidentally the same as Travis's. You can't see his other hand which is pointing to one of the secret exits, his other favorite.

The boys' new favorite thing to do is play with this castle with any number of their little Mario Brothers characters, many of which filled their stockings this past Christmas. Travis has designated the towers as warp zones, and he made me write "Bowser's Castle" on the front above the drawbridge. They are on a big Mario kick these days.

Oh, and what was Sophie doing while I was putting the finishing touches on the castle tonight?

Why, drawing on her face with orange marker, of course.