Up-Cyling Little Tikes Swingset and Slide

I've been meaning to get this post up for a while now…like a month, but life gets busy, and little things of slightly lesser importance get piled up in a corner for later…if ever. But luckily, the pile is being ransacked, later is now!

I saw an up-cycle of a Little Tikes picnic table on Pinterest a while back, and really wanted to get on board of that trend…but didn't really want the old school table that didn't fold up. (And refurbishing things, just for fun, is a habit my husband would like me to lose.) Then, upon further study, I learned you can spray paint plastic…WHA???! I know! So I started researching it, and sure enough, many little kid cottages and houses had been brought back to life with a few cans spray paint.

So, I took to our local Craigslist (which has now become a problem in itself)…I scoured and trolled for about a week. I struck out several times…'sorry, it's sold' was becoming my Craigslist anthem. But after work one day, I got on, scrolled through all the newly added kid stuff, found nothing, refreshed, and BOOM! A Little Tikes Swing Set and Climber for $75, posted 16 minutes ago. I jumped on that faster than burnt bacon (what? I like burnt bacon)! It was dirty and disgusting and had water sloshing inside of it, but I knew with a little love, it could be transformed. 

In order to move it, we had to fully dissemble it (pain in the ass, by the way). We gave it a good scrub down with soapy water and sprayed it all off. We picked up some cans of Rust-oleum 2X spray paint in green and red at Home Depot. Last minute, I decided I wanted one more color, so I ran to Walmart and bought some Krylon Fusion spray paint. Both claim to work on plastic. After laying down a tarp, I got busy. The Rust-oleum worked incredibly, with smooth, even coverage. Not so much can be said for Krylon, which dripped and splattered and made zero effort to disperse evenly, if at all. Rust-oleum good, Krylon bad. I ended up returning to Home Depot and buying my third color in Rust-oleum instead, and repainting over the Krylon mess.

One slide painted, the other slide still faded!

The green (Hunter or Forrest, I forget) covered very well,

Just by looking at the cans, you can tell which had better control and dispensing.

If you look closely, you can see the splatter and drops from the Krylon…terrible.

In all, it took about a day and a half of painting and my arm hurt like a mother!! After reassembly (which was hard considering we had no real instructions) a few of the pieces had slight scratches afterward, but touched up easily. It's been in active use now for a little less than a month, and is holding up fantastically…with a few minor scratches on the slide (because the bubble-blowing lawn mower has taken a turn or two down it).

I loved the outcome so much that I actually tackled two Little Tikes cube slides for friends, one with left over paint and one with pastels. 

Before.

After.

Hard at work.

Quick note: after so many painting jobs, the paint on the tarp from jobs past,
will peel off and stick to your current job…even more so if it's hot out.