Today is a guest post by my Indianapolis blog friend Jill. She has some awesomely creative ways of making your child’s train table a winterscape playset perfect for a Disney’s Frozen Playscape! She’s sharing how to upcycle your son’s Train Table into a Frozen Playset for your daughter. My affiliate links are used in this post.
I have a 9-year-old train lover who hasn’t outgrown trains, but did outgrow his Thomas trains a few years ago. I left his train table in my daughter’s playroom for her to use for her various girl playsets – Disney Princesses, Strawberry Shortcake and Littlest Pet Shop.
The interesting thing is that when it was still a train table, I got this great idea at Christmas to flip over the board, paint it white (for snow), and use it for our Polar Express Wooden Train Set. I felt it was one of those awesome ideas that I should share with the world, but, I didn’t have the right blog! But, it was pretty awesome and my son loved it!
It was the winter snow side of the table that spurred another great idea this spring – make the train table into a wintery Disney’s FROZEN playscape! Here is what we did:
First, flip over the top of your train table board and paint the underside of it white.
Next, go to your local Goodwill (or dig through your toybox) and find a couple of those simple fold-out castles. For Elsa’s ice castle, I spray painted one silver and sprinkled on glitter while it was still wet.
For Arendelle Castle, I used the castle below because I wanted one that had some tower rooftops to paint green so that it even if it was not the same design, the colors would make it seem authentic.
This was the part that I allowed my daughter to help with. First, I spray painted the entire castle a flat gray, and removed the doors and spray painted them gold. When I was done, I mixed some acrylic paints to get the shade of green I wanted in a small cup. Then I let my daughter paint the rooftops. She was really excited!
Next, I got out my Polar Express Train set and found some of the accessories to use. Most of what makes the scene are the snow-covered evergreen trees. You can find these at hobby stores in the toy train section. I also used some wood-block houses, and those are also found in craft stores, but also easy to make yourself.
We put Elsa’s castle up on our train mountain. That may be difficult, but I were making one from scratch, I would probably get a shoe box and scrunch up a brown paper sack on the outsides to look the the side of a mountain, and spray paint it. Then I would just set Elsa’s Castle on top!
My daughter already had the Polly-pocket-sized Disney Frozen set that came with Elsa, Anna, Kristoff, Hans, Olaf & Sven. You can pick some up at Amazon HERE.
When all the paint was dry, we set it up and she was in heaven!
Are your kids obsessed with Frozen like mine? Have you created a Disney’s Frozen Playscape?
Jill Levenhagen is a busy mom who truly believes in balance, and loves to talk about her mom successes on her friend’s blogs. On her website Blog Chicka Blog, she teaches bloggers about bettering their photography and wants to convince the blog-world to use her favorite editing program, Lightroom! Blog Chicka Blog also sells Jill’s original photography as stock photos for just one dollar! Be sure to follow her on Facebook | Google+ | Pinterest.
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Ken says
That was really wonderful. I love your idea of transforming the train board into white and using it as a r Polar Express Wooden Train Set. Keep posting such interesting blogs 🙂
Priscilla says
Thank you for sharing! The castles for frozen are all horribly made or sold out! My daughter loves frozen but needs a castle! Many Thanks!!!
Kelly says
What kind of paint did you use for the surface of the table? Thank you!