What London street set is complete without a red phone booth? It just can’t be done!
This project was also for our detective VBS. It was very fun to make and the kids loved it.
Materials needed:
Refrigerator box
Enough additional cardboard for top of the phone booth (24”X24”)
Cardboard scraps
Pencil
Paint: candy apple red &black
Sharpie
Zip ties
Tools needed:
Glue gun
Utility blade
Drill (optional)
Yardstick
Small paintbrush or sponge-brush
The first thing to do is to decide how big you want your phone booth. I didn’t want it quite as big around as the refrigerator box, so I had to cut it down to make it 24 inches per side. I did a messy little sketch before starting to guide me:
I ended up cutting the refrigerator box into 2 pieces in order to cut enough off the sides to make it smaller. I have included better dimensions of what I actually did at the bottom of this page. That diagram also shows the box flaps at the top and bottom of the box as well as the extra flap I left on one side of the panels so I could overlap the two pieces of cardboard to make attaching them easier.
After the box is cut down, paint both sides red. Simple enough, right?
The next part is a little more time -consuming. The phone booth window panes have to be lined up just right. This part requires a lot of measuring. One thing I did that helped a lot was cutting out some cardboard scraps in the same dimensions that I wanted the window panes. Once I figured out where I wanted them, I was able to trace them directly onto the cardboard. I recommend using a Sharpie to make the markings on the painted cardboard. Pencil and pen don’t show up very well on paint.
Next, carefully paint the panes. A sponge brush usually works the best. Much like the last step, this is exceptionally time-consuming. Fortunately, I had a lot of help with this project and somebody else painted the panes for me. Even so, to save time, I decided to leave the back blank.
I couldn’t figure out how to make the top curved without making this a much larger project than I wanted to take on, so I cheated by painting a curve on the box instead of cutting it.
The final step involves the satisfying work of putting the phone booth together.
Stand up the two sides and overlap the one tab. I used my favorite way of attaching cardboard, which is by using zip ties (I love zip ties!). Use a drill to put some holes through both pieces of cardboard to poke the ties through.
I only secured the one whole side because I wanted to leave the front door open so the children could go inside. I ended up further stabilizing the phone booth by folding the bottom on flaps underneath and zip-tying them together at the corners and doing the same at the top (technically, I could only secure the back corners, since I cut the front flaps off). Then I cut out a 24”X24” square of cardboard, painted it black, and zip-tied it to the top of the booth.
The finishing touch was to attach the word TELEPHONE to three sides of the booth. This can be accomplished by typing the word TELEPHONE into a Word Document. I used Times New Roman font at a 250 size. It ended up printing on two pieces of paper which I taped together, trimmed up, and taped to three sides of my booth.
At the last minute, I decided to glue a little Velcro on the door so we could keep it closed when the kids weren’t playing in it, but it didn’t work that well. Also, after a few days, the front door started sagging a little bit. Overall, not my best work, but still worthwhile as it fulfilled its purpose which was to add a little more fun to children’s ministry.
I hope these instructions weren’t too confusing. It’s hard to explain some of it, and I didn’t take nearly enough pictures during the actual process. I will very likely try this again next year, so hopefully, I’ll find a better method for opening and closing the door as well as taking better step-by-step pictures to show the process.
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Don’t forget: decorating is a lot of fun, but the purpose of Sunday school and VBS decorating is to set the stage to pique the interest of our children and open them to some solid biblical teaching.
“Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it”. Proverbs 22:6 KJV