Giant Cardboard Gingerbread House
Here is how I made a life-size (well more like kid-size) giant gingerbread house out of cardboard. It all started when my son’s school asked me to help out with their holiday market and they said the theme was “The Gingerbread Shop”. They asked me to help out with some decorations and I knew I needed to make a giant gingerbread house. Here is how I did it!
Supplies:
Paint - ‘Baked Cookie’ by Sherwin Williams SW9098
White Poster Board
Scissors
Hot Glue
The first thing I did was assemble the cardboard house and cut off the window flaps. I wanted the house to have a chimney so I used a cardboard box about the size of a shoe box and cut it so that it would sit flush to the top of one of the roof sides. I attached it to the top of the house using hot glue.
Next I painted the whole house using regular interior paint in the perfect gingerbread house color, fittingly called Baked Cookie by Sherwin Williams. Once the paint was dry, I used a plastic bucket to trace half circles on the roof to get a scalloped pattern. I went over my pencil lines using a white chalk paint marker.
Then I added a white border around the windows and door using white poster board and hot glue. I found this white scalloped border and added it along the roof edge as well which really helped the gingerbread house come to life.
I wanted to add “gum drops” to the roof so I used sheets of Cricut sticker paper and cut out a bunch of circles on my Cricut machine. I attached these to all the scallops on the roof and ended up going back to add a little hit glue to a few that didn’t want to fully stick to the house.
To make the candy canes, I just used some cheap white pool noodles and red duct tape that I found at the dollar store. I wrapped the red duct tape around the pool noodles going down at an angle to create the look of candy striping. Using a carpet knife and scissors, I cut out about 1 quarter of the length of the pool noodle so that I could easily push the noodle into the corner of the house and it would sit flush. I attached the candy cane pool noodles using more hot glue.
For more candy detail, I used some big candy stickers I found online and added them around the house on the walls. I also attached some wooden dowels to one of the sides and put a candy sticker above the dowels to look like big lollipops.
The final detail was adding the look of snow to the gingerbread house. I found a can of snow and to my surprise, it really did look like snow. I sprayed it around the bottom perimeter of the house, on the roof eave and on the top of the chimney.
This life size gingerbread house ended up being a huge hit at my son’s school and all the kids loved it. It would be so fun to do for a Christmas party or as a fun Christmas craft with your kids. Since the cardboard house comes blank, you could really decorate and design it for any holiday or occasion!
