She didn’t even know about it until she stumbled up on it.
One dad named Dylan got busy during the corona lockdown and built his daughter Ella a secret replica of Harry Potter’s Diagon Alley behind her closet.
The entire project took a few months to build and Dylan never told Ella what he was doing. In fact, he allowed her to stumble upon the magical new space on her own.
Dylan talked to Bored Panda about the project.. “I used mainly wood and MDF,” said the London-based dad, “but also I found wallpaper, for example, with books printed on it which really helped make it look good but take less time.”
Dylan had a goal of finishing the space before September, as he knew his daughter would be stuck homeschooling and she needed a special, ‘cool’ place to learn!
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The family already lives in an old Victorian home, so Dylan’s imagination just ran wild with ideas for the space.
Dylan did all the construction work while his wife did all the painting, including all of the signs!
In the end, they had what could only be considered a team effort. “The street surface is Lino, which is soft and warm to walk on. I also live in a street of many kind people, so I was given old photo frames which I used for shop windows,” Dylan said according to Bored Panda.
One of the biggest difficulties they faced was keeping it a secret from Ella until it was completed. Once completed, a game of hide and seek was set up when she got finished with school.
After a few rounds, she decided to hide in the closet behind the curtain in the back. She didn’t find it right away, but she suddenly said “I can see something in here.” The room was silent until she finally included, “Can we keep this here forever?!”
They worked their way through the entire alley with each other. Ella was busy exploring the details, including gifts that were in Ollivander’s wand shop.
Dylan said, “We played for the rest of the weekend, for example, making ice cream in the ice cream shop with a machine I found. I also dressed up as Hagrid which was hilarious for us both as my accent was terrible, but we went back through the wardrobe to the muggle world as Ella and Hagrid and took cushions from her living room for her reading nook above her bookshop on Diagon Alley.”
You can follow the progress of the space on the following Instagram page. It appears that Dylan is already planning on building a entire ‘shop’ area for Christmas!