"The Playground!"

Our year long ambition to build a fort in the back yard came to fruition recently!

We had many grandparent, Aunt and Uncle, and mommy and daddy donations hanging out in Joseph's savings going towards this play structure, as well as a couple of years of planning and preparing ourselves for the answer to the question "Are we ready to loose our backyard to our children and all the craziness that goes with a play-scape?"

The answer was a resounding "Yes!". Yes, bring on the fort!

Bring on the days of endless cutting and sanding and nailing and bolting. Bring on the 100-some-odd page instruction manual. Bring on the bag of 400 nails that arrived shiny and ready for the job.

So we were Fort bound...


The nice little "space saver" fort was going to fit perfectly in the corner there, over by that telephone pole but on D-day we decided to move it a bit more towards the center. "There will still be plenty of room to run and kick balls, right?" we asked each other. The answer was a resounding "Yes!" and we set up our footprint. It looked nice and compact with plenty of room to still run around on the grass.



And believe me, we would never have been able to finish the job without our little helper. Actually...he may have truly helped more than this five months preggo mama did.

We had to level out a bit of the lawn and this was the first of many moments I found myself really hoping that this wasn't all my idea - because I really couldn't remember who had muttered those first words, "we should build a fort!". But now, I was afraid the smell I smelt in the air wasn't just cut lumber and fresh dirt, but the stench of resentment. This project was going to take way more than a few 2x4s and some screws.


But by golly, we were sure proud of that square hole!


Joseph held his first earthworms and found all kinds of treasures in our hole.


I think I heard Josh muttering something about running out of screws in his sleep one night after working all day. Then another night I'm pretty sure he was having a bad dream with a giant bag of 400 screws chasing after him with a huge drill.


Meanwhile, after each night came morning again and they were right back at it! Joseph is a fantastic gluer.


Joseph is a fantastic board marker too. He is marking that board as L7 front facing, 3/4" counter sink 1 1/8" bolt with large washer...or something like that. I'm just glad Josh knows what all that means so I didn't have to figure it out.


Getting closer!

Lol, actually, in the grand scheme of things we might as well still be back at Home Depot spending two hours hand picking each board. But I can say we were well on our way!


To be continued...