Homemade Gingerbread House Lawn Decoration

The entire idea came from the shape of the back of my sons baby glider chair. What a perfect shape for a hobbit door. There was no "plan" or measurements or anything to tell me how to do this or what to use. I just went off my gut and own creativity. I even searched Pinterest and never found anything as awesome as I wanted. So I made it up myself.

My Mission:
1) Use anything I can find in the garage, and repurpose it to build this Ginger Bread House of Awesomeness.
2) Make it completely collapsable for storage and moving purposes.
3) Spend as little as possible, out of pocket, so my husband doesn't think I've lost my mind.

Here is the final product. Well as close to final as it got for pictures.

                                               

Some things I used along the way...

 Remember the OLD christmas ornaments that were styrofoam covered in string? When you take the string off you have a perfect little ball. Cut in half, paint with crafters paint and spray with clear coat and you have: Jawbreakers! My kids did the multi colored ones.

These aren't on the actual house, but where used in the walkway up to the door. Those little dog food containers that I had saved a TON of because I just knew I would find something to do with them other then organize my screws, nails and craft supplies. Decoupage, glitter and clear coat. Adjusted the lights to be in the order of color I wanted them and altered the lids to have room for the string lights wire and TADA! Gummy candy lights. I think I made about 99 of these. I start to loose count and actually realized at about 40 that you don't even need the glitter. They look just as cool at night without it. 

These are those little floor tiles with the letters on them that kids play areas have. I sure had a TON of those from when my son was younger. We had hard floor in our house when he was a baby and I basically covered EVERYWHERE in these.

Covered in dollar store fabric lined table cloths. 

Looks like taffy to me! It need MORE. This was NOT enough, I didn't want it to appear like a little house, I wanted in to be OBVIOUS it was supposed to look like candy. So I brainstormed.















Here are some pictures of me building it along the way. Each step was figured out as I got to it.

I definitely didn't get this far in a day. This took quite some time to complete. Notice the arch for the door? That's the back of my glider chair. You can see the from and back are the baby crib and the cross supports are the PVC as well as the roof trusses. 

"Mommy, mommy, mommy…can I help?"

"Mommy, you build this house for ME!!!" 

It may look like a box of junk to you, but to me, it could be ANYTHING!

 WORK in progress. The roof took quite a while as I was figuring out the best things to use. I ended up using screening material I had, duck tape and some RV roof sealer (clear) that I had left over to keep the taffy attached and we able to fold it for storage. You will see that more a few pictures down.

I used my old gazebo cover, cut it to size, spray painted with some brown I had for the walls and staple gunned it to the stutter. I had to make sure I did it in a way that it would be able to fold up and come apart. 

Getting FANCY! The Gum drops above the front door are baby food starts painted and glittered. I adhered their lids to the structure with the white caulk I used as the royal icing.

I scored some dollar store holiday ornaments on clearance. I know, my jaw dropped too. I had NO IDEA Dollar Tree did clearance. Anyway, some were only $.12 a piece, I used them as empelishments.

LOVE the roof and the "icing" detail.