Lifespan of a wooden kitchen and dollhouse

[bratmobile]

If you have a wooden kitchen or dollhouse how much use does it get and how old are your kids?

I have a 4 yo and 2yo (boys) and am thinking about giving away many of the toys that have been gifted to us for a wooden kitchen (dh is against this by reason of space and cost) and or a dollhouse. Of course, the most beautifully crafted ones are also incredibly expensive so I'm asking here first about how much use they will see. My two year old would LOVE IT! but how long would it last? My 4 yo also likes our wooden foods but they are all piled into a box on a shelf and so they don't get played with as much.

I saw another thread about a wooden kitchen that isn't getting much use, the same is true for our train table-maybe its just the stuff you have that is old hat.

[milehighmonkeys]

We have one. DD plays with it sometimes and doesn't others. Right now, she's obsessed with her wooden trains. These were actually DHs that his mom saved. It's going to vary from kid to kid. Like my DD doesn't seem to be interested in baby dolls, so getting her a really nice one wouldn't be a good choice for her.

[bratmobile]

yeah, i know. i know what my kids would like now its just one of those cases where you don't want to spend a LOT of money and then have it be something they outgrow in a year.

what i really want is for someone to say, is "yes, my 7 yo still loves our play kitchen!" it may just be something that I really want to play with-hehe.

[plantmama]

We got a wooden doll house 50% off after Christmas one year and my dad made my boys a wooden stove. They do use the stove when I'm cooking and ds #1 used the doll house a lot when he was about 2-2.5. Now at the age of 4.5 he hardly looks at it and it's spent some time in the basement.
You can always make doll houses out of boxes or cover a chair with a cloth for walls and put some doll furniture in it.
They are very rough and destructive with everything they touch so for us it wasn't all that worth it I guess.
For us the trains and the matchbox cars have been the real long term winners.

[hottmama]

My 5.5 yr. old got a kitchen for his 2nd bday and a dollhouse his 3rd. They are nice wooden ones. He plays with the kitchen fairly regularly, not every day but definitely every week. He hardly ever plays with his dollhouse unless a friend wants to play with it-- he played with it literally every day at 3, though. Also, we have a train table and trains and those are almost never played with anymore and were only briefly interesting.

[BellinghamCrunchie]

We spent too much on a kitchen that is beautiful, but DD doesn't use it much. Every time I move it to a new location she plays with it more, but it definitely does not get daily, or even weekly (well except as something to jump off of) use.

In retrospect, for DD, I wish I had spent the money instead on an outdoor active toy like a swingset or trampoline, or a bunch of toys with more creative power, such as Magna-tiles, tinkertoys, lincoln logs, and building blocks.

[ma_vie_en_rose]

We have a dollhouse and a kitchen with 3 girls. The dollhouse has hardly been touched. I actually recently moved it into DD1's room so that she would have it to play with during quiet time. I is getting slightly more use now. The kitchen, on the other hand, is played with non-stop. Whenever we have friends over, it is the most used toy, especially the play food. It is funny because DSD and her friends who are too cool tweens play with it constantly. LOL

[Dena]

We gave dd1 this wooden kitchen from Magic Cabin for Christmas. The advantages were that it is small, fits in a corner of our small family room, and not quite as spendy as the bigger ones. Of course, because it is small, I am not sure she will use it past five or six, but at nearly four, she still loves it and plays with it a LOT, so if we get one more year of her playing with it, plus a couple of years of her sister playing with it, it will be worth it.

And anyway, I figured by six she would want to be in the real kitchen cooking real food, since she already loves helping us there.