Customer Reviews

Housebuilding for Children: Step-by-Step Plans for Houses Children Can Build Themselves

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Truely delightful and informative book for young builders and their parents. My son first checked it out of the library so many times in a row we finally decided to just buy it! Great basic building skills and tool knowledge taught, good practice projects, and good playhouse building ideas. The illustrations and plans are very informative. We enjoy the authors enthusiasm about working with kids and their passion for building. My son just can't get enough out of it and he's only in kindergarten. I suppose I'll never pry it away from him when he can read it for himself!

Good basic carpentry instructions (if sometimes a little too basic), helpful illustrations that take me back to my 70s childhood.

The houses are very basic, and definitely not intended to last very long. However, with a little research and/or know-how they are easy to modify and make more durable - an educational project in itself, though more adult involvement may be needed with inexperienced younger kids.

I, my husband and our 7 year old just built a version of the balloon frame house in this book. The framing went very well, though the size of nail recommended by the book split the firring strips every time, so we ended up pre-drilling every hole.

The book recommends making the walls for this and other projects out of a wallboard called homasote. Probably because it's easy for kids to saw. However it's also not all that strong for siding purposes, it soaks water and falls apart pretty quickly. We replaced it with sheet siding (we also considered treated plywood), and we also cut triangular pieces for the roof peaks (left open in the original - our weather isn't good enough for that). We made the house footprint 6x4 instead of 4x4 and are glad we did - 4x4 would have been pretty tiny inside! We're putting a tar paper and shingle roof on it as well, not homasote.

Despite all those caveats, I never would have tried to build a frame playhouse without this book, my kid has had a fantastic time working on it with us, and we all feel very confident about taking on more building and carpentry projects after this. So again, I think it's a good starting place, backed up with some extra research into building techniques and materials.

I went looking for treehouse books, finding many that were more complicated than the deck and took more materials!

This one was perfect - simple, nonthreatening, and useful for teaching building skills to the kids. We decided we could use the other chapters to elaborate on their simple treehouse design.

My husband bought materials Saturday morning, and by Saturday evening our two kids were stomping on the sturdy platform. Sunday evening we had a treehouse. I know I could not say the same for any other treehouse book I had seen.

This is an absolutely charming and informative book. It is filled with delightful pictures of children, busily constructing their own little houses. This is creativity at its best, and should prove an inspiration to children and adults alike.

I bought this book on the strength of the reviews, so I'd like to add my two cents' worth.

I believe that woodworking is an important skill to teach children. It helps with hand-eye coordination, manual dexterity, conceptualizing two- and three-dimensional images and introduces them to things such as angles and fractions.

This book has some good designs, the best being the wood frame house, tree house, and post and beam house. There is a "junkyard" house which greatly concerns me. In my neighborhood, a pile of trash would never be allowed, and I'm sure many zoning regulations exist to prohibit it. I am also concerned that a child could easily get a cut from a rusty nail or encounter insects and animals "foraging" for the parts of the house. The book features old uncovered rusty box springs (which I can't imagine where one would get) that could be sharp, rough or contaminated.

None of the children pictured are wearing eye protection, either, and anyone working with sharp metal objects and hammers should be.

There aren't any adults in the photos, which implies these projects could be done unattended--too risky. I would never let children do these alone.

Still, take what you can, and supervise, supervise, supervise.