Kids' castles: Playhouses give children their own creative spaces
FARGO – Give a kid a dishwasher box, and he’ll be entertained for days.
That simple cardboard carton will become a house, a store, a spaceship – or whatever else he can imagine.
Children have always wanted a place to call their own – a place where they can “be in charge” and make up their own games and rules.
The playhouse is the perfect place to do that. It gets kids away from TVs and videogames and encourages them to run around, imagine and think in their own little corners of the world.
Here are three stories of local people who have provided that “corner of the world” for their kids.
A ‘man cave’ for Max
What’s that old saying? “The cobbler’s children have no shoes.”
But in the case of the Scott and Shannon Dahms family, the contractor’s son has a pretty sweet playhouse.
As owner of ArchD, a design-build company, Scott drew every line and hammered every nail for son Maxwell’s backyard bungalow.
Ever since the family moved into a work-in-progress, 1899-vintage Victorian in central Fargo, they’d wondered what to do with the home’s bald and weedy backyard.
Dahms checked out the playhouse kits at big-box stores but was frustrated by the sometimes-flimsy construction and the tract-housing sameness. “I didn’t like the character of them,” says Dahms, who holds bachelor’s degrees in architecture and environmental science from North Dakota State University. “Everyone’s got them.”
He decided to build a structure that would fit in both with their home’s architecture and with the deck he was adding in the backyard.
He ultimately settled on an 80-square-foot playhouse made of cedar and treated green lumber. It boasts a climbing wall, swings, slide and first-floor sandbox.
Max’s “man cave” is also souped up with a tire swing built from a real Hoosier racing tire.
Dahms plans to add lights, shelves, a Dutch door and a chalkboard-painted wall to the interior of the little house.
Backyard Pirate Ship - News
It's also become a neighbourhood attraction, stopping hundreds of strangers in their tracks as they look up with awe at the ship jutting out from the backyard of Renner's home in Kerr Street. Now, photos of the massive ship are generating a buzz at
But Dahms is confident he will someday appreciate a space that imagination can transform into a fort, a spacecraft or pirate ship. “My dad built us a couple of tree houses when we were kids, and I still have those memories,” Dahms says.
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