For many years, I have wanted to create a mud kitchen area for my kids. There are tons of tutorials and plans for mud kitchens using inexpensive pallets or constructing your own out of wood. The problem is, first of all, that neither my husband nor I have a lot of extra time to be tracking down pallets and deconstructing them and then reconstructing them into a mud kitchen. Secondly, the cost of wood is so high right now that constructing our own from scratch would be very expensive. So, I got creative and ordered two garden potting benches for $100 each on Walmart.
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The benches are adult-height, so while assembling them, I moved the bottom shelf up higher and then we dug holes for the excess length of each leg to both stabilize them better and bring them to child-height.
We added a little old wooden table that was at our house when we moved in that our kids added stumps to and pretend is a stove and and an oven. We also added an old laundry detergent dispenser full of water so they can fill up bowls with water whenever their heart desires.
This year, I took some inexpensive Dollar Tree bins and drilled holes in the bottom so they don't collect water when it rains, and I zip tied some to the trellis backing and then some just sit on the tabletop to house utensils, pine cones, wood pieces, and small bowls.
We used crates to house pots, pans, cake pans, cutting boards, and sifters that we picked up both at Dollar Tree and thrift stores. The kids often like to fill up a 5-gallon bucket with water and then add flowers and leaves to create pretend soup, tea, perfume, and drinks.
We put a pop-up canopy over the entire mud kitchen area because the kids play there for hours each day and it's almost always in direct sun, so it is much cooler under there and they stay out of the sun while playing.
In the middle, we have a sand table full of play sand they can use to "cook" with or just play with and then a little folding kid picnic table for when they play restaurant. We also put our playhouse next to the mud kitchen so they can play house or pretend the window is a drive through window.
Overall, this has been the best play item we have ever added to our outdoor play area. The neighbor kids all come and play for hours in our mud kitchen and the kids absolutely love it! I would highly recommend it! It's not the prettiest, but it's definitely the most fun!