Home from the Ground Up: Choo Choo Train...Table (and Legos too!)

Thursday, December 27, 2012

Choo Choo Train...Table (and Legos too!)

I will be the first to admit that I sometimes over-do things. When I saw the train table that John and Sherry Petersik made on their blog Young House Love I immediately thought, "the boys would LOVE that."

Immediately thereafter I thought, "can I make it even better for them?" (Picture plotting, complete with the finger thing that evil plotting guys do). My five year old is currently into Legos so hey, why not add that to the train table? At the same time I was working on a chalkboard project so I had some extra chalkboard paint laying around and boys need roads to drive their cars on, right? So chalkboard roads and Lego lands were added to the design.

Here it is in all its glory. Yes, it is a little much, but the boys love it and there is a little something for everyone.

You may be asking, "how did she do that?" (Maybe you're not asking, but I will tell you anyway. You're welcome!) First I figured out how to get the tracks to fit on a random board that I found in my basement. Once I figured that out, I traced the plan on the board.

Then I came up with a plan for where I wanted water, grass, beach, etc... At one point I thought a nice lake would work perfectly, but I was trying hard not to overdo it. (Obviously my self-restraint didn't hold out.)

It took three coats to cover the board. Here is coat one:

And coat three...I purposely made it textured to look like treetops and waves in the water.

At this point I also put the tracks back on, just to check. Guess what? They didn't line up. I know, shocking! I had to do some paint touch up to line up again with the tracks. I then figured out where the Lego land should go and glued it down with Crazy Glue and Gorilla Glue. (Why the combo you may ask. I ran out of Crazy Glue and found Gorilla Glue in my basement.)

I then figured out where I wanted the roads and painted them on with chalkboard paint.

The final step, creating all the Lego buildings, took the longest. My husband and I were "constructing" the sad little buildings for over three hours. This is what we ended up with. We used all the Legos that we already had which is probably why it took so long. If we had just bought kits it would have gone MUCH faster, but it also would have been WAY more expensive!