Turn Your Home Into A Life-Sized Gingerbread House With This TikTok-Approved DIY

Finding the right time to start decorating your house for Christmas varies for everyone. Some folks have all their holiday décor set up after Thanksgiving, while others wait a couple of weeks before Christmas to take out their holiday boxes. Now is a perfect time to start hanging your Christmas lights and light-up candy cane walkways to bring festive cheer to your home. We're still at the beginning of the holiday season, so it's the best time to start prepping the DIY holiday décor you've wanted to recreate. We've encountered one DIY project from TikTok user @bbethyyb, who turned her house into a life-size gingerbread house.

While most of us decorate gingerbread houses from kits we buy at Target, this TikToker took it upon herself to completely transform her home with gumdrops and frosted trim. She used foam board, insulation foam, glitter, beads, pastel-colored paint, and gumdrop garlands to create the most stunning life-size gingerbread house. You can buy the gumdrop garland from Hobby Lobby for $8.99 and the foam board from Walmart. When painting your insulation foam, it's best to purchase small paint bottles so that you don't have a lot of leftover paint from sample cans. You'll need bright pink, orange, yellow, blue, and red paint colors, along with an Xacto knife, a pen, and outdoor velcro from Amazon for about $8 to hang up the finished pieces. Once you've gathered your materials, take them outside to start building.

To create the frosted cover for the roof's fascia, start by outlining a semi-circle pattern along the longest side of the foam board. Then, using your Xacto knife, cut out the outline you made and cover the entire surface with insulation foam. Place a gumdrop on every other semi-circle, round beads on the leftover sections, and glitter over the whole surface while the insulation foam is still wet. Set it aside and let it dry. Repeat the steps to make more gumdrop boards.

Next, make the window trim by cutting a long, thin piece of foam board the height of your window. Cover the surface with insulation foam, sprinkle it with glitter, and let it dry. Once the insulation is dry, paint every other section orange, leaving the other ones as is. Set it aside and repeat the steps to make other foam trim, painting them a different color, like pink, blue, and yellow. After your foam boards are dry, attach the backing of the outdoor velcro to your home and the foam boards. Finally, carefully stick the foam board to the house, placing the gumdrop foam on the fascia and the marshmallow foam on the window trim. TikToker @bbethyyb has multiple videos showing how she created her gingerbread house to make it look realistic. You can add a few frosted snowflakes ($50 at Amazon), extra gumdrops ($17 at Walmart), and peppermint swirls ($5 at Michael's) for added cheeriness.