That's SOME Castle

Well, after I ran across this cool idea for making a castle out of boxes last November, I decided that I needed to find someone with kids the right age to help me make something similar. Today, I went to my friends' house and we got down to work on some serious construction. Their Dad is a contractor, so they're into building things. He'd called up a local appliance place and they hit the Mother Load for boxes. "Just what was available today," I was told.

There was a refrigerator box; tall enough for me to stand up in, and large enough that there was some disassembly required to get it in the house. Once we got it to the basement, it became our "great hall" and "gatehouse," all rolled into one, complete with a drawbridge (still connected, yet sturdy, because the box was just that cool) and three arrow loops to let in a little light, without exposing the boys to enemy fire. Being a family that knows their way around construction work, they found rivets - Mr McGroovy's Cardboard Rivets - for us to use, rather than fooling around with tape much at all. So we riveted a couple of big washer boxes to our great hall and cut some doors. Since we went with arched doorways, they made great shields. We just riveted some arm loops onto the back. While I fed and changed the baby, the boys and their Mom added a couple more boxes for various towers - including one that we crenelated.

As the boys are too young to handle knives yet, they had to wait some while their Mom and I assembled their new castle. Amid many many reminders "get out of the box while I'm cutting" and a great deal of enthusiasm, they made several flags to adorn the castle's walls and exterior, as well as personalizing their shields. They glanced (briefly) at my copy of Anatomy of a Castle. They plan to look at it some more while they're over for next week's piano lesson.

While we were taking pictures, the boys insisted that the baby needed a shield too, and even found one just the right size for him, so I stood him up and their Mom took the picture. The "fierce" warrior look works for him, I think!

Unfortunately, we ran out of time before our creative juices - or our boxes and rivets - ran out. So we agreed that we're going to have to get together and work on it some more sometime.

Some interesting links:

The IDEA
Mr McGroovy's Cardboard Rivets

Castle Glossary
Castles of the World
Castles on the Web
Build a Model Castle

PS. Amazon had a used copy of Anatomy of a Castle for about $5.