If anyone needs us, we’ll be in the cardboard Japanese snack house we just built [Photos]

A home within a home for snacking, relaxing, and more snacking .

Last year at Christmas time, our Japanese-language reporter Natsuno Futon built a gingerbread house using a kit she purchased at housewares store Mujirushi Ryohin/Muji.

She was happy with how it came out, and she might make one again once we get to the end-of-the-year holiday season.

But before that, Natsuno has a different edible architecture project she’s been daydreaming of: building a secret fort-style house that’s big enough for her to relax inside of, and covering it in snacks .

Natsuno got this idea from a friend who’d recently done something similar in her own home.

Setting a modest budget of 3,000 yen (US$19) for herself, Natsuno knew that lumber, brick, and concrete were going to be too expensive to use as building materials, so she followed in her friend’s footsteps and decided to build her snack house out of cardboard .

After a trip to home center chain Viva Home, Natsuno had three large-sized cardboard box sheets, with exterior dimensions of 54 x 39 x 46 centimeters (21.3 x 15.4 x 18.1 inches) when folded into shape.

However, instead of making them into boxes, Natsuno instead took two of the sheets and taped them together, forming the four walls for her home within a home .

Since this was going to be her special spot to relax in, she made sure that she had enough floor space for a chair, and then got to work folding her remaining cardboard sheet into a gabled roof, which she secured to the rest of the structure with more tape .

Some strategic slices with a craft knife let her cut out a door and window , and she used the trimmings to fashion a fashionable faux chimney .

OK, so now she had a house, but it wasn’t a snack house yet.

Unfortunately, the cardboard and tape had cost Natsuno 1,500 yen, so she was going to need to stretch the remaining half of her budget for the snacks.

As always, when you want to get the most bang for your buck, 100 yen shop Daiso is the place to go.

A shopping run at the discount chain turned up a whole bunch of wallet-friendly candidates of salty and spicy snack packs, which were just the sort of flavors Natsuno was looking for, since this was going to be a mature, for-grown-ups kind of cardboard playhouse.