Here’s How to Transform a Plastic Playhouse with Spray Paint

  ​We purchased this Little Tikes Playhouse a couple of years ago second hand for an amazing deal! Since then, it’s always been in the back of my mind that I wanted to give it an update. Thanks to the experts over at Home Hardware, we discovered we only needed a couple of products to get the job done. Had I known how easy it was I definitely would have completed it sooner!

Let’s take a look at the playhouse “Before”.

And "After".​

I mean, wow! What a difference spray paint and some accessories can make. Our daughter loves it so much and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t kind of want to move into it myself.

Let’s get started with how we painted our plastic playhouse! Supplies used:

• 6 cans of Black Beauti-Tone Enamel Flat Spray Paint; 2 cans for the shutters, 4 cans for the roof

• 6 cans of White Beauti-Tone Enamel Flat Spray Paint; for the exterior walls

• Natura Safe Prep

• Plastic Drop Sheet

I chose a flat finish because I was going for a matte look for this project and the most important thing to note is this spray paint can be used on plastic.

To get started I laid down some left-over plastic sheets and disassembled the playhouse. I also gathered some old 2 x 4 wood cut offs to set each piece of the playhouse on. For example, one wall was supported by a piece of wood on the top and bottom to keep the wall elevated off the ground in order to ensure the fresh paint was not touching the plastic sheets.

I mixed the Natura Safe Prep with some warm water and wiped down each piece of the playhouse. Natura Safe Prep is a naturally derived phosphate-free degreaser that preps the surface and helps with paint adhesion. It can also be used to clean the surface after it’s painted!

Once dry, we got to work spray painting the roof and shutters black. Then the exterior walls of the house white. These colours are the style we were going for, but Beauti-Tone offers a great selection of other colours as well to suit your aesthetic needs.

The spray paint went on great, and one thing I really liked is how if we needed to touch up an area it blended right back into the surrounding paint. No overlapping streaks or paint drips. I also love the matte finish. I think it looks so much fresher and it feels like a new playhouse!

Finally, we assembled it back together and added some cute accessories mostly from materials from around our house. I did a quick flower DIY for the windows while the paint was drying. For this I simply cut a strip of cardboard the length of the window, and hot glued artificial flowers to it. Then I used a couple pieces of masking tape (my favourite tape for everything it seems!) to adhere it to the playhouse. We’ve had some crazy windstorms and that tape is magic I swear because the flowers haven’t blown off yet!

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If you wanted to take the accessories up an extra level you could add some permanent fixtures to the house like a metal house number or little light fixture!

And there you have it! This project took one afternoon and was probably the easiest but most dramatic makeover we’ve done in a while. The paint has been holding up well and our daughter is loving it. It’s so much more aesthetically pleasing in our yard now too.

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