I’ve been wanting an outdoor mirror for a long time, so when one of the other classes was getting rid of furniture, I gladly took the wood kitchen that had a big mirror on it.
I have had many ‘old’ tables outside and since these things are all made for indoors, they don’t do well outside. They all end up warping or getting mildew as the water seeps under the light shellac that is on the wood.
Soon I’ll apply a few more layers of polyurethane in hopes that it helps slow down that process, but I figured I’d wait to see if the kids even use it before I went through all that trouble.
I put a large heavy tree round next to the back to stabilize the counter, but one morning I came to school to find it tipped over. The winds must have done it at night and I knew I had to secure it further. So I removed the stump and put a stake in the ground. Home improvement stores seemed to only carry tree stakes that were full of splinters, so I ended up just using a 2×4. Since it was sand, I made it into a kind of sand anchor by attaching a couple cross boards to the stake so it would stay down better. So far so good!
There was originally a door on the cupboard, but I just took it off because I didn’t want kids to hide inside. I also removed the coat hooks in case I wanted to use them elsewhere. I thought the kids might use all the shelves as ovens for their sand cupcakes, which is what I see all the time. I’ve noticed that the kids also will sit in the larger cupboard on occasion, so my hunch about the door was right too. I could have added another little shelf but I didn’t want them to use it as a foothold and climb. When the stump was there I saw kids standing on it and using the top as a counter, but I didn’t want the kids to fall as there isn’t enough of a fall zone nearby.