All I want for Christmas is to… build an indoor playset. When I told my husband this, his actual response was, “uhhh”. My kids have way too many toys and need to get some energy out on the daily so my solution was build an indoor playset 🙂 We have the perfect room for it so I went for it even though Danny wasn’t so sure!
I explain the modifications below and at the end, I have linked all the products we used to build it.
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I modified plans from Ana White that can be found HERE.
Ana built this in a room with 9 foot ceilings and the dimensions of her room was 15×21. Our room is 12 feet wide so I had to get rid of the monkey bars or only build one clubhouse. Emma loves monkey bars, so the decision was easy.
I worked on this after the girls were in bed for 6 days. Danny helped 3-4 of those days.
Here it is!
The clubhouse
I kept the basic structure of the clubhouse the same as Ana’s plan. Our ceilings are about 7.5 feet tall, so I cut all the vertical 2x4s 80 inches long. The bottom part of the clubhouse is 4 feet tall which is exactly like her plan, but the top is about 2.5 feet but with the ceiling it gives the girls about 3.5 feet.
I decided to make windows in both of the 4×4 plywood pieces, with flower boxes of course :). The flower boxes are made out of 1x4s.
The “railing” under the two roof lines were made with scrap 2x4s, 1x4s, and 1×3. I used my nail gun to secure them and they are sturdy. Since I added the slide, I moved the roof over the slide all the way to the ceiling to allow for head space when going down the slide.
The incline ladder was added for my two year old. I thought the vertical ladder under the monkey bars would be difficult for her and they are. Once she is a bit older, I will most likely remove this ladder and add a fireman’s pole or something similar in that space. The ladder is made out of 2x4s cut to length. The rungs in the ladder are 2x4s as well. I used my jigsaw to cut out the board so it could sit directly on the clubhouse.
Monkey Bars
This had to be modified from Ana’s plans because it isn’t between two structures. If you follow her plans, there is space for a 2×8 on the outside of the structure. I added 2x4s to go directly under the 2×8 to support the weight. I also placed huge anchor screws in studs to secure it.
On the wall side, I cut the supporting boards at the base so that I didn’t have to remove baseboard in order to have the boards flush to the wall.
On this wall we were able to secure the boards in the studs.
On this wall, a stud was not in the place we needed one, so we used wall anchors to secure the first 2×6 into the wall and added another for support. I used my jigsaw to cut out the spot for the 2×8 overhead.
For the base/ladder, I used scrap 2x4s and one of the scrap pieces of plywood that was leftover from the window cutout.
For the bars, I bought them from Amazon precut and coated. It would be much cheaper to cut conduit pipe yourself, but I simply did not have the time!
Im not quite sure how we pulled this secret off but we did! It was so much fun to build and seeing how happy the girls are on it, makes it all worth it!
I started off with buying…
- 24 2x4x8
- 2 2x8x8
- 1 2x8x10
- 1 2x8x12
- 2 2x6x8
- 3 2x3x8
- 4 1x4x8
- 8 1x6x8
- 1 1x3x8
- 2 1x2x8
- 1 4×8 sanded plywood
- 2 4×4 sanded plywood
I also used some scrap wood that I already had in the garage. ]
Here are some items I purchased on Amazon. All the other supplies were purchased at Lowes!
Follow me on instagram to see other projects I am working on @heysarahbarlowe. Thanks for reading and if you decide to build, please share it with me!
