Jenny’s play oven ( at one of my favorite fun sites, ikeahacker) was made from a small laminated cabinet from the as-is department. If you are lucky enough to have an Ikea near you, the As-is department is a great source of material for projects (they give away broken glass you might use for a mosaic, plus you can buy cheaply broken furniture pieces or tabletops which can be used as wood) and also for almost complete items that just need a little love (like the toddler bed). If you don’t have a local Ikea (you poor thing), you could do something similar with any small laminate furniture you might find.

Go to the post to read the whole thing, but I love some of the clever repurpose they did with items from the hardware store:
– 4 pinewood wheels designed for making a toy cart, painted them with black enamel paint to make them shiny, superglued to top panel, to create hotplates.
…- 6 pinewood doorknobs, again enamel painted black, then once dry added numbers and dial-style icons, using a tippex pen – for the oven and hob controls, superglued to front
– red electrical insulation tape (self-stick), to smooth out the plywood rough edge of the top panel (chance, it was exact width)…

They glued their knobs on, but you could use the techniques from the one we did to make your knobs actually turn.

Also from Ikeahacker – a really simple cardboard stovetop requiring no carpentry at all!

Ariacielo writes on the Mondopiccolo Blog on how to use the actual box that this little kids cookware set came in to create a mini stovetop to make the cookware even more fun. They do it with the Ikea kids cookware set box, but I suspect you could modify their techniques to work with any right sized box. I think this is a great idea for when you have a small space (or let’s face it, a boy*) and one of the full kitchen sets isn’t in the priorities, but the little one still needs a place to cook when he feels the urge!

The $2 Play Stove
And finally, a super-cheap option from Dollar Store Crafts. It even has storage! I love the re-use involved here. Go get the instructions!

Related Posts:
– Toddler Bed – Hack a toddler bed to use a smaller crib mattress
– Kids Play Stove from an old side table
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*OK, OK, before you send the hoards after me for gender stereotyping, let me state for the record, my little boy loves to cook. In fact, he has a chef’s hat and his own little kitchen gloves. But the typical pink and purple storebought stoves just didn’t fit with his decor. He doesn’t play chef all the time, and a homemade little stove does just fine for his needs. So go make your little boy a playstove! :)

Cutting Sushi; Playstoves are also for jumping, apparently; Making a cake with Daddy.
Click through to see the cuteness of The Boy in all it’s cooking glory :)

I was browsing through the As Is section at Ikea and came across the parts to a Kritter child’s bed. I wasn’t really planning on getting the 3 yr old a toddler bed (his crib converted to one by taking off the front rail), but I couldn’t resist–it’s too cute! When I got it home I realized that (duh) it takes a longer mattress than a crib mattress. Well, The Boy doesn’t need a longer mattress yet, he still fits fine on the crib sized one–and I really didn’t want to go buy all new sheets and such anyway. So the fabulous husband modified the bed to make it fit the crib mattress, leaving a nifty little compartment perfect for stuffed animals at the end!

All he basically did was add a flat wood bottom to the end section where the mattress wouldn’t reach, and use the guard rail (which we weren’t needing anyway) as a divider between the box and the mattress. Easy Peasy!

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Related:
– Other things from Ikea…

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On to cooler stuff… A Finger Puppet Bus!

We got the boy a set of finger puppets from Ikea, which are cute, but of course small, so they would inevitably be lost. Plus, little hands sometimes have a problem with getting the puppets on their fingers to play with them. So we came up with the idea of a ‘schoolbus’ with wood dowels where the puppets could live! And hey, all made of wood, no icky chinese lead in this toy!

The Boy loves it. He can drag them around and take them to ‘school’. And Mom and Dad love it because they all get put back on their pegs when they get put away!
This was another case of I had the vision and Daddy implemented it – He actually made it where the wheels turn and all, but if you wanted to go even easier, but stationary, you could just glue/nail disks on the side for wheels.

Also, The headlights are painted in Glow-in-the-dark paint!

Update: HOW TO is here!