Leprechaun Houses

We had the funnest party yesterday with some of my friends I worked with years ago and all their cute kiddos. I do an annual St. Patrick’s Day party with them and thought it would be fun to change things up a bit. If you follow me on Instagram, then you know I love to decorate gingerbread houses. We did haunted houses at Halloween, the classic gingerbread houses at Christmas, and then love shacks at Valentine’s. I wanted to do leprechaun houses, but was a little sugared out. I’m so glad I decided to do wood houses for these. They turned out absolutely adorable! Now we have a place to keep our leprechauns if we get lucky enough to catch one.

The whole project started with these adorable house boxes I found while looking for stuff for a completely different party. The size and shape is perfect, and I love that the roof comes off so you can take a peek inside and even decorate it for the little guy.

Here is a list of where I purchased everything to help you find things a little easier. Everything I bought at craft stores was 40% off when I purchased it. Watch for sales, craft stores always have great ones.

Michaels – black rocks, white rocks, moss rocks, moss rocks with succulents,
Oriental Trading – paper mache house boxes, gold coins, large wood slice, wood spools
Walmart – moss ribbon, bag of moss
Hobby Lobby – small wood slices, moss ribbon, small popsicle sticks

My boys have been so anxious to make a bug garden (like a fairy garden, but for bugs) that I thought we could use these houses in the bug gardens after St. Patrick’s Day. I’m sure the paper mache houses won’t hold up very well outside, but that will just give us an excuse to do this fun activity again. If you are going to make fairy gardens, I think little wood bird house kits would make such cute houses that you could decorate. That’s what we’ll replace these with after they have endured the weather a bit. Luckily, all the cute steps, wagons, tables and chairs, etc. are all wood and will be just fine.

My oldest boys are 5 years old and couldn’t get enough of this. They’re still making houses and other accessories out of all the wood slices and moss as we speak. They woke up first thing this morning, and got to work. 12 hours and about 5 pounds of glue later, they’re still creating. I think the excitement of working on their bug gardens mixed with getting to use the hot glue guns by themselves, is what has kept them busy all day. They have done so well with them and can’t put them down.

At the party I had three cordless hot glue guns to split between the 12 kids. First of all, that wasn’t nearly enough. Second, the cordless hot glue guns didn’t heat the glue fast enough for how much they were being used. They took forever. I grabbed my cheap, mini glue guns that plug into the wall and we were able to crank out the houses much faster. If you decide to do wireless glue guns for this project, I recommend having one per person.

And you can’t have a leprechaun house without a few gold coins. We places them around the houses to help lure the leprechauns to us. I hope it works.

Send your kids outside to gather some sticks and other treasures from nature and get to work making some leprechaun houses. Or, you can just go buy everything at the store like I did. Haha! Works either way.

I hope you have felt inspired to make leprechaun houses or maybe it gave you motivation for a fairy/bug garden this summer. Whatever you choose, enjoy the process of making them. That’s the best part.