Homemade Playsets

We didn't have much money growing up and Mom and Dad never had the money to buy playsets for our action figures so we had to get imaginative on coming up with playsets of our own.

 A dirt mound was always a special place for our action heroes to play. It would be a mountain our a cliff that could send our villain (or Hero) tumbling toward their potential doom!

Every time I see a little dirt mound like this one, I still think about my action figures to this day.

 We always had a loose pile of bricks in our backyard which we used to the fullest extent when building forts or castles for our action figures. I remember even adding an iron gate to my fortress which was really an old rusty grill to a drainage ditch or something.

 Mom's hedges were always a good source of adventure when it came to playing with action figures. Climbing huge trees or secret villain hideouts were usually the theme.

We ruined Mom's rose bushes once by trying to cut a tunnel thru it with scissors!

 Space ships were made from upside down wagons like this one. Underneath are a whole bunch of pockets in the molding which fit our characters nicely as seats to navigate, pilot or gun the ship.

Cardboard boxes of all shapes and sizes were a prizes possession in our home. We used them for bases and ships all the time! There wasn't a cardboard box out there that we couldn't repurpose as an accessory for our action figures. Mom knew it too because every time she went to Sams she'd grab a few cardboard boxes they had for guest against a wall and bring them back for us to play with.

It may sound pathetic but it was like having a mini Christmas whenever she did it!

 One other thing we had to use was Dad's firewood pile. We had a wood burning heater back in the day and so every fall dad had a truckload of firewood brought in to chop up and feed the heater. It'd be all gone by the spring so it became a seasonal thing for us to play on.

To be honest, it wasn't used much for action figures but more or less us. We'd get crayons, draw on scanners and command keys on the logs and set up our own impromptu starship! Of course as spring approached it was completely disassembled by Dad.

Though his credit, our crayoned pieces he saved till last.