‘I’d be happy if everybody had an igloo in their yard’: Father-daughter duo builds colorful Eastside Hill igloo

This is just the latest project the Rowekamp family is adding to their belt loop. You might remember the Little Free Sled Library at Eau Claire’s Seven Bumps Hill from last winter? Well this time Chad Rowekamp and his 7-year-old daughter Molly teamed up to build this colorful igloo in their Eastside Hill yard.

EAU CLAIRE, Wis. (WEAU) -It’s the perfect recipe and 7-year-old Molly Rowekamp has all the ingredients.

“We had these tin things and then we put like hose water in it and then we put some food coloring in it and we let it freeze,” she explains.

Standing 6 feet tall and 10 feet in diameter, an igloo fit for any Eskimo, with no details left behind, “we put this lamp here to like make it light up at night,” Molly adds.

Chad Rowekamp, president of the Eastside Hill Neighborhood Association, says he devised the idea for the igloo as a way to match his kids screen time with outdoor time.

“There’s no such thing as bad weather just bad clothes, so if you dress right, you can enjoy it all,” Rowekamp laughs.

When Rowekamp asked Molly if she thought they should start building, “she saw it and jumped right on board, so we went out and got 60 tinfoil pans from the Dollar Tree and started at it the next day.”

160 ice blocks later the father-daughter duo had created a work of art.

“You can look out all day and people are parked right out here, looking at it in their car or walking by,” says Rowekamp.

It even has the approval from Molly’s friends. “They think it’s cool and we usually ice skate first and then come in here and drink hot cocoa,” Molly says.

“At the end of the day it’s more about just building the place you want to live, these are the kinds of things I want to see I guess, I’d be happy if everybody had an igloo in their yard, it’d be pretty cool,” says Rowekamp.

He is hoping with a bit of maintenance and continued frigid temperatures the igloo will last through February, but already has his sights set on building an ice castle in the yard next winter.