It’s that time of year where we might be having visions of sugar plums dancing in our heads. Or perhaps, if you live in a particular Salt Lake City neighborhood, the visions of sugar plums are coming from across the street!
While most people have already put up their Christmas decorations by now, we doubt that anyone has gone all out with the same gusto as the so-called Sugar House.
The winter wonderland home located in the Yalecrest area was transformed into a giant, real-life gingerbread home complete with large gumdrops, peppermint swirls, candy canes, a striped fudge cookie, and even a gingerbread man!
The woman behind it all, Virginia Hoffman, said to Fox 13 News Utah, “It’s all homemade, and it’s all been kind of ‘figure it out as you go.’”
As Hoffman explained, a few years ago she was inspired to create the display after coming to the conclusion that her brick home, which was built in a Tudor style, would make the perfect basis on which to create a real-life gingerbread house. Hoffman got to thinking about how she’d go about bringing her vision to life. And luckily for her, her family was behind her idea.
She said, “I told my family about it, and luckily they didn’t think I was crazy. And so we painted these gum balls in the kitchen over Thanksgiving of 2019, and then my daughter and son-in-law helped me figure out how to attach them to the house.”
Little by little, Hoffman showed how patience can pay off, as the creation of the elaborate decoration proved to be very, very time-consuming. It easily took hundreds upon hundreds of hours to complete. And even when she wasn’t building it, she was thinking about building it.
Hoffman further added, “If I’m stressed at work and can’t sleep, a lot of times one of the things I would do is lay in my bed and think, ‘OK, what will be the next good thing?’ and it would just be a distraction.”
But despite the big undertaking, she had the help of her husband, her kids, and even her grandkids to bring it to fruition. And as she later stated, it was an “enjoyable project” that she got to share with her family – one that has bonded them more as they continue to add to the gingerbread house. This year, the latest addition has been vanilla wafers.
“We made that out of foam, insulation, and then my husband melted out the squares with a soldering iron, and I painted them and got the exact right colors to look like the cookies,” Hoffman revealed.
Hoffman’s attention to detail has resulted in her home becoming a beautiful work of art that ended up going viral online. Her daughter posted photos of it to Reddit, where people were amazed by how it is coming together. Check out the photos below:
What do you think of the real-life gingerbread house? Have you ever tried to make something similar for your home? Let us know!