Hobbycraft wooden advent calendar Review.

Its beginning to look a lot like Christmas. Haha no it isn't its still November! Although if you make your own Christmas presents chances are you've been playing Elf for about the past 6 months.

Anyway I LOVE advent calender's! But not just the regular chocolate ones! I like the EXCITING ones! And last year we treated Lil Man to a lego advent calendar because that is basically the most exciting calendar you can buy! FYI don't buy it its absolute rubbish. Seriously it was the most disappointing thing I have ever seen. It was basically pointless.

 So this year I decided to be prepared and buy a solid advent calendar that we could use every year [Actually I wasn't being prepared the original plan was to put the contents of the lego advent calendar into a solid advent calendar with some sweets and stuff........then we realised that opening doors to that would be soul destroying] 

So instead I think we are going to go hunting for some stuff to put in it! which may or may not include lego!

anyway so this is how it turned up from hobbycraft. brown MDF. If you have a rustic Christmas you would probably leave it like this?

So I painted the white parts first, I used two coats of emulsion and two coats of white acrylic paint. I had some serious trouble trying to get even coverage on this thing. 

Next I painted the insides of the doors green which two coats of acrylic. I was going to paint the insides of all the compartments but its just so fiddly I gave it. we're going to use it for 25 days a year I can live without perfectly finished insides.

Next I painted the red parts with red gloss, this part probably took the longest because oh look super fiddly again! I think I did two coats of this and it does give a nice shine!

I free handed all the numbers on the doors using sharpie and scattered them about at random. Or at least I hope they are random.

Okay so the nitty gritty! Its a pretty good kit. Its very fiddly so i wish there was a way to take the doors off or to build it form flat pack or something. 

I like the simple house design it really does leave the door open for lots of imaginative decorating opportunity! like gingerbread house, sparkles, Santa! I kept ours with our red and white colour scheme though as we like to have a very tradition Christmas! 

In fact I think it would be super cute to just give these to your kids to decorate and then they have their own personal one!

Things I'd do differently:

If it was less fiddly id have loved to decorate the inside of each compartment with pretty paper or scrap paper so when the door opens its all beautiful and bright.

I'd have sprayed the whole thing white to begin with [or if hobbbycraft could just made a white version that would be awesome!] about half was through painting I had an "it would have been so much easier to spray paint this" moment. and then maybe I could have finished the insides of those pesky compartments!

I'm still debating a bit of glitter but part of me thinks we have a lot of glitter on our mantle piece at Christmas anyway and I don't want it to be too much.

I am going to add something to the bottom red square wheres there no door though, I'm just not sure what yet, I think I'll raid the Christmas box when we decorate and see if anything jumps out at me! 

So yeah I'm pleased I just wish the whole process had been less painful!!!

Frankie

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