Playground Project
By keeping an eye on garage sales and mailing lists, we've accumulated a world-class collection of little tikes® play structures. We now have a table, a picnic table, a big slide and a little slide -- and the crown jewel of our collection: a blue octopus merry-go-round.
We decided that my big "stay-cation" project would be to build a playground in our backyard. The yard was thoroughly torn up when we remodeled our house, so there wasn't any good place for Nate to play outside. I spent every morning for the last two weeks working on this area just off of our living room and mommy and daddy's offices, where we will be able to keep an eye on him when he is old enough to play outside on his own.
Yesterday, Nate got his first chance to try out his playground. Although we're going to continue taking him to the playground at our local park, he enjoyed these smaller play structures. They are just the right size for him to learn how to climb all over them without getting hurt when he falls off. And he's already fallen off all of them, with daddy hovering nearby but restraining himself from coddling too much.
The hardest part of the project was prepping the 16' x 16' area. The scraggly remains of the old lawn were full of construction trash, roots and weeds, old sprinkler pipes, and that annoying green plastic netting that they use to strengthen rolls of turf. So, I decided to completely clear the topsoil. I think I found nearly a hundred old nails, many that must date back to when our house was built in 1954.
Here, Frances helps out by cutting a bunch of roots that were growing through one corner of the area:
I had originally drawn up plans to do a more elaborate frame around the area, with a bench built in along one side, but I scaled back the plans to fit the amount of time available (and then spent a week more than I thought it would take). The simplified redwood frame is lightweight, but should be stable since it is half-buried in our nearly-hard-as-brick clay soil. Getting the frame square was the hardest part, but the contractor working on our hall bath gave me some tips. (By the way, the hall bath remodel is the reason for all of the trash piled behind the playground.)
Once I had the frame built, I graded the ground, adding back about half the topsoil, carefully raking through it to get out all the crud mentioned above. If you look carefully, you can see that there's a shallow ditch running across the grade. After I had started removing the topsoil, I realized that one of our downspouts has a drain pipe that runs under the sidewalk and drains into the play area. I'm hoping that the ditch will help the water drain to the down-slope side of the frame.
The frame is filled with about four inches of "playground fiber", a mulch of soft wood that doesn't splinter. And is very good at being tracked into the house.
When we were about to try out the playground yesterday afternoon, it was getting hit with some strong sun. So, we decided to move the canopy that we bought for Nate's first birthday party over the play area. It cooled it down nicely.
We decided that my big "stay-cation" project would be to build a playground in our backyard. The yard was thoroughly torn up when we remodeled our house, so there wasn't any good place for Nate to play outside. I spent every morning for the last two weeks working on this area just off of our living room and mommy and daddy's offices, where we will be able to keep an eye on him when he is old enough to play outside on his own.
Yesterday, Nate got his first chance to try out his playground. Although we're going to continue taking him to the playground at our local park, he enjoyed these smaller play structures. They are just the right size for him to learn how to climb all over them without getting hurt when he falls off. And he's already fallen off all of them, with daddy hovering nearby but restraining himself from coddling too much.
The hardest part of the project was prepping the 16' x 16' area. The scraggly remains of the old lawn were full of construction trash, roots and weeds, old sprinkler pipes, and that annoying green plastic netting that they use to strengthen rolls of turf. So, I decided to completely clear the topsoil. I think I found nearly a hundred old nails, many that must date back to when our house was built in 1954.
Here, Frances helps out by cutting a bunch of roots that were growing through one corner of the area:
I had originally drawn up plans to do a more elaborate frame around the area, with a bench built in along one side, but I scaled back the plans to fit the amount of time available (and then spent a week more than I thought it would take). The simplified redwood frame is lightweight, but should be stable since it is half-buried in our nearly-hard-as-brick clay soil. Getting the frame square was the hardest part, but the contractor working on our hall bath gave me some tips. (By the way, the hall bath remodel is the reason for all of the trash piled behind the playground.)
Once I had the frame built, I graded the ground, adding back about half the topsoil, carefully raking through it to get out all the crud mentioned above. If you look carefully, you can see that there's a shallow ditch running across the grade. After I had started removing the topsoil, I realized that one of our downspouts has a drain pipe that runs under the sidewalk and drains into the play area. I'm hoping that the ditch will help the water drain to the down-slope side of the frame.
The frame is filled with about four inches of "playground fiber", a mulch of soft wood that doesn't splinter. And is very good at being tracked into the house.
When we were about to try out the playground yesterday afternoon, it was getting hit with some strong sun. So, we decided to move the canopy that we bought for Nate's first birthday party over the play area. It cooled it down nicely.
posted by Mike Laursen at
1:19 PM
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