Building a DIY children’s play kitchen in 30 easy steps. Maybe. Part V

Gripes! This kitchen is taking forever. It’s been over a year (!) since I first started this project. Yes, a year. Don’t blame me. Blame work, chronic pain, socializing and, most importantly, the birth of our second daughter. She’s OK with the delay as she understands that she will reap the benefits of this kitchen in a couple of years. Tons of progress has been made since I published Part IV and the end is oh so near.

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Building a DIY children’s play kitchen in 30 easy steps. Maybe. Part IV

Things are finally moving along a bit faster. And it’s almost time to hand over the reigns to the beautiful and talented Ziva, my wonderful wife with fantastic design skills. She’ll be handling the decorating and accessorizing of the kitchen once I complete the construction. We last left off putting together the faucet and taps and attaching them to the kitchen. We are really trying to keep to our objective of using recycled materials as much as possible. For not only environmental reasons, but financial as well. Good non-plastic play kitchens are very expensive and by using materials that we have had sitting around the house or found on the street, we are easily able to keep the price low. Whenever I see a bunch of junk on the curb I scour without shame which has helped us managed to keep this project within a very low budget. Really low.

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Building a DIY children’s play kitchen in 30 easy steps. Maybe. Part III

Now that the base of the play kitchen is complete it’s time to do some work on the “special features.” You might recall that the first step in building this play kitchen was shortening the legs of the Ikea night tables using my much treasured jigsaw. I held on to the excess wood thinking that the pieces would come in handy at some point of this project. And come in handy they did. I played around with them a bit and figured out a sequence that would look pretty good for the sink faucet and taps.

Step 7: I measured and marked the center of the piece of wood and using several different sizes of spade bits, drilled, starting small and worked my way up until the hole was big enough to fit the faucet nice and snug.

I purchased very basic (and very cheap) faucet and taps at a local hardware store. Here’s my little munchkin modeling it for you. I told her to put it on her head.

Step 8: I then took another scrap piece of the night table leg and using the spade bit drilled holes for the taps. Both the faucet and the taps fit quite well.

Step 9: Using a strong adhesive I attached the wood holding the faucet to the piece with the taps and added another spare piece to use as the base.

Step 10: And finally, I attached the completed faucet and taps to the kitchen using the adhesive.

And there you have it. A completed sink.

8 plastic wheels: $6:00
MDF Board: $15.00
Metal Bowl for sink: $5.00
Shelving brackets: $5.00
Faucet and taps: $10.00

Total: $41.00

Recycled materials used:
Night tables: Purchased nine years ago
Wood planks found on the street

Building a DIY children’s play kitchen in 30 easy steps. Part I

Building a DIY children’s play kitchen in 30 easy steps. Part 2

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Building a DIY children’s play kitchen in 30 easy steps. Maybe. Part II

Several weeks have gone by and we’ve been itching to make some progress on the play kitchen. Our social life has taken precedence and the past few weekends have been filled with copious amounts of visits, trips to the zoo and lunch guests. This hasn’t left a lot of time to move forward with the play kitchen. We finally had a respite from the more social aspects of ours lives (I’m generally an introvert) and took huge advantage of a quiet Saturday and we made an incredible amount of progress. It’s starting to take shape and another couple of weeks it will be ready to be handed over to my collaborator, the lovely Ziva for further design and decoration.

Step 4: We found some nice thick treated wood planks that once belonged to a closet or something lying on the curb outside our apartment. The first piece I cut to size (using a lot of patience and my trusty jigsaw) and attached it with four brackets to the two night tables for both support and to work as a bottom shelf.

Step 5: It was now time to get the sink on. So that is exactly what I did. I got the sink on. Aw yeah. I thought this was going to be the most challenging action to get right but it proved to be much easier than I anticipated. I purchased a piece of MDF from a local store (this was one of my only purchases for the unit up until now), cut it to the proper length so it would fit nice and snug between the two night tables and had my trusty collaborator Ziva guesstimate the circumference of the sink and then drilled a hole smack in the middle of the circle. Several holes actually. I then meticulously cut out a circle in the mdf board. I purposefully cut less than I needed to for several reasons. First, I’m very inexperienced with the jigsaw and second – I only had one shot to get this right. Luckily, Ziva’s measuring skills were spot on (at least in this case) and I am apparently naturally talented when it comes to the jigsaw. After some trial and error and a lot of tweaking, I managed to get the bowl to fit in the hole nicely. The lips rest perfectly on the counter – which is now a sink.

Step 6: I firmly attached the sink (!) to the unit with brackets which brought even more stability.

I then stood back, smiled and called it a day.

Costs so far:

8 plastic wheels: $6:00
MDF Board: $15.00
Metal Bowl for sink: $5.00
Shelving brackets: $5.00

Total: $31.00

Recycled materials used:
Night tables: Purchased nine years ago
Wood planks found on the street

Next step: Figuring out how to properly attach the sink to the wood so Tzofi can’t just lift it out.

Building a DIY children’s play kitchen in 30 easy steps. Part I

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