This is a outdoor multi-purpose shed I designed last year as part of the 2009 CASA Parade of Playhouses event that benefited Dallas CASA. (you can find that post entry here). We are in the process of writing the design competition brief and it should be ready to go out within days – I hope that my architecture friends will consider submitting a design (hint hint).
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Since I was working on it I thought that it would be interesting to see the drawings that were actually used to build this playhouse. If you want to build your own outdoor house let me know and I will email you a PDF of the full sized plans for free.
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This is the third year in a row that I have designed some sort of folly structure for charity. The approach I take when designing something like this playhouse is to make it a real, functioning object rather than a disposable trinket that takes up space for awhile before being discarded. This shed was designed specifically to house a Smart fortwo Car that was raffled off with this structure. It seemed unrealistic that anyone would actually park this car here long term so I tried to develop the building so that it could be re-purposed into something else; a potting shed, studio, play house, etc.
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Last year I was also asked to design a doghouse to benefit the White Rock Lake Dog Park. I took the same approach that it actually needed to work as a doghouse. I went a little overboard and my design included insulated walls, a solar panel that would illuminate the clear plexiglass dog bone over the entry, as well as the roof being hinged for storing dog toys.
This was another raffled event where people bought tickets and put them in a box next to each dog house that they wanted to win. I am happy to say that this doghouse won 1st prize as fan favorite. The funny thing about this was I was contacted a few months later to submit this exact same design to benefit Habitat for Humanity at the Texas Irish Folk Festival. I never met the person who ended up building this doghouse but he contacted me a few months later and asked if he could put my doghouse on his website so he could sell it to other people. Sure – why not.
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