A mom created an epic toy playhouse village dubbed Tike Town after a single roadside purchase spiraled into more than 50.
Jayde Hoban’s summer project has received millions of views online, but it all started in the humblest of ways.
Having discovered a disused kids’ playhouse on the side of the road, Jayde, from Union City, Pennsylvania, decided to take it home for her two children, Ren, 3, and Max, 1.
As expected, the vintage playhouse became a hit, but also created tension as her two kids constantly fought over who got to lay in it.
So Jayde, 28, decided she needed to add another – one for each of her children.
In a lucky break, a friend reached out to let her know she had purchased one from a seller on Facebook Marketplace, but when Jayde contacted the man and looked into the listing, she discovered there was an entire collection for sale.
Jayde made four trips and loaded her grandfather’s truck with playhouses created by the likes of Little Tikes, Fisher-Price and Step2, before turning to other sellers, too.
Eventually, she built a collection of 50 houses – 15 from the one initial seller – as well as many accompanying toys from Facebook Marketplace.
Many of the houses were missing parts, but Jayde set to work on individual restoration projects for the likes of a police station, fire station and an iconic Mushroom Kottage.
With social media viewers invested in her collection, she decided to turn it into a small-scale municipality – called Tike Town –with real paved asphalt roads, a beach area with a water table, an airport section with an airplane coaster, a campground, and vintage pieces like a Little Tikes Tuggy Boat Sandbox.
The collection turned out to cost more than Jayde had initially expected – but she decided that you couldn’t put a price on spending every summer evening with her husband Alex, 30, and children, working on the toy town.
Social media viewers were invested in the project, too, with Jayde sharing regular update videos, such as how she landscaped and laid out the area she had dedicated to the project.
By October, Tike Town was ready for its grand opening.
On October 18, Jayde welcomes between 100 and 150 guests from the local community in a closed ceremony, where kids ran around the houses, finding themed totes attached to them with toys tied to that house.
It was at that point, Jayde said, that she took a deep breath and appreciated what had been a summer well spent, thinking about how a playhouse from the side of the road had spiraled into a big project of beautiful memories.
She added: “My husband and I actually had a moment the other night, because every night leading up to this grand opening, from the end of April to now the beginning of October, every single day we have been outside working on Tike Town, trying to get as much done as we could every single day, and now the grand opening’s over, it happened.
“The other night we just went outside and we just watched the boys play; we didn’t have a to-do list to do; we just sat, we just reflected and watched the kids playing.
“We were just able to really take it all in and think about everything this summer has meant to us.
“Tike Town does mean so much more than just a little playground of houses.
“It’s kind of like a we-made-it feeling, because my husband and I started dating very young.
“We got married when we were still teenagers, and we’ve always known that we wanted kids and we wanted to be able to give them more than either of us had growing up.
“So, to be able to just sit there in this little town we built in our backyard for our kids, it was just this feeling of relief.
“We are giving them the childhood we always dreamed of giving our future children someday.”
