Building a Play Area - Part 1

Because Jack is a little boy that loves to climb on things, slide down slides and swing in swings, he of course needs a playground of his own in our back yard. For most families with a house that has a decent sized back yard, installing something to climb or swing on and slide down would be as simple as selecting the items, having them delivered and then following the pages of instructions to put them together. But, of course, we are the Mulley's and nothing is ever that easy!

We love our house but the back yard is on a slope, quite a significant slope which isn't illustrated all that well in the photo below. So, I decided I'd need to level an area of the yard to allow a swing set and some type of climbing frame and slide to be installed safely.

If you look closely you can see the string between those posts.

After some measuring (and research on materials) I settled on an area 24 feet by 16 feet and set about trying to determine how much of a slope I'd have to level. The photo above shows the "stakes and string" method that I used to determine that over the 16 feet from back to front there was 21" of slope! This meant that the front of the retaining wall that I'd need to build would be nearly two feet off the ground and that I'd need to fence the area in to ensure that Jack didn't fall out.

I scribbled a design down on paper and calculated the number of 8 foot pieces of lumber and the number of 8 foot fence panels I would need and got some quotes. I would have loved to support a local company, but when their quote was nearly 60% more than Lowes they unfortunately didn't get my business. Lowes delivered 52 pieces of 4"x4"x8' lumber and 10 fence panels the following day.

Scout wondered if I was building her a Molly-free house

I framed out the area of the yard and found a spot that I was happy with.

If the yard was flat I could have stopped here!

I dug holes on Friday evening around the base pieces along the back and quickly found that the trees from the neighbors yard had roots extending at least 15 feet in our yard, some of which were barely below the surface and required a lot of work to break/cut and remove. It took over 2 hours to sink and level the three pieces of lumber along the back wall of the play area!

Luckily the rest of the digging was root free and once I worked out how to best stagger the pieces along the side the frame quickly (read: all day Saturday) took shape.

Molly wondering when the roof of her new kennel would be installed

On Monday I installed the fence posts and put the fence up

Fort Mulley is taking shape

Here is a look inside the fenced in play area before the soil and mulch goes in and the area is finally level.

Here you can really see how sloped the yard was

To be continued...