construction begins

The weather (rain showers on and off all day) put the kaibosh on our plans for an all-day hike today, so we figured it was a good day to begin construction on our new playscape. The rain had ended by mid-afternoon, so that's when we set to work on it. The Map Man was in charge of actually putting the pieces together, while I sorted out the correct pieces and the required hardware. The kids were in charge of doing their best to stay out of the way, and helping out wherever it was possible.

J studies the directions and tries to keep us on track. There are 100 steps in the directions, in the above picture The Map Man is working on Step 1. J informs us that Step 100 is putting the swings on. We've got a long ways to go before Step 100...the directions say that it should take two moderately skilled people about 16 hours to put it together. But the place we bought it from (Sam's Club) said 24 hours is much more realistic. (And while The Map Man might fit the "moderately skilled" criteria pretty well, I'm not so sure that I fit that job description!) After 4 hours of work, we wrapped up the evening on Step 18. I'm guessing Sam's Club's estimate is closer to correct.

Zoo Boy tried his hand at working the ratchet to tighten a bolt. Between the electric drill, the cordless drill with screwdriver attachements, and the large pieces of lumber being swung about by us, it really isn't possible to get the kids as involved as we would like to with this project. They would need to be a bit older to truly help out with stuff like this. But we like them to feel as involved as possible. Tomorrow afternoon we have a babysitter coming to play with them for several hours while we concentrate on building, hopefully we can get the bulk of the "hazardous" stuff done then.

The boys play inside the framing while The Map Man plans his next set of holes to drill. The kids are SO excited at the prospect of having a nice playscape to play on right in their very own yard. I'm excited too, for it to look more like a playscape and less like something the neighbors might be scared of. You never can tell what we're going to build on our property next, and I think they've been biting their nails since all that sand was delivered a few weeks ago.

And here's how it looks tonight. We were hoping to get a couple steps further along (to the point where we could anchor it in the ground so that we wouldn't have to worry about a storm popping up over night), but the kids and the animals were all in need of dinner, and we knew that after we stopped for that, it would be hard to get anything else accomplished before dark. So there it sits in the side yard, waiting for us to get to work again tomorrow!

To be continued!!