The Playground

The big project this summer was building a new playground for our backyard. The old one was fun, but one of those metal, old-style ones, that had huge spaces between the very tall ladder up to the slide that required just a little too much parental supervision for toddlers. Not to say that I don't need to supervise with our new one, but I feel more comfortable with Austin climbing the stairs for the slide on this one by himself.

We found this one at our local grocery store back in May, $100 off the original price. After having looked for months on craigslist, etc., for the perfect playground, we found this that beat out everything else. Jason started building it in mid-July after his classes got out and the World Cup was over. Actually, he started building the border that he made for it then. He didn't actually start building the playground until late-July. Of course it took more time than we had planned (he says he knows why it was such a good price), but I think personally think it was worth it and the kids agree.

One thing that added to the length of time this project took was putting the border around and then killing the grass within it. We decided that since we have more than a quarter acre of a yard, which takes a fair amount of time to mow, and we didn't enjoy mowing around the other playground, that this would be a good solution. We have a little less grass to mow, we don't have to mow in and out of swings, a slide, and a playhouse, and we won't have parts of the yard with half grass/half dirt (ie. the parts of the grass that get run down from swings and slide).

So we laid down landscaping fabric, 3 yards of sand, and 5 yards of mulch. Now, 1 1/2 months later, we have our playground! Even better, we didn't have a chance to get rid of the old one yet, so we have our own park which all the neighborhood kids enjoy!

Here's the chicas enjoying watermelon at the picnic table right after the base was set up.
Austin has become a huge fan of the slide!!
Karissa likes both swings (it does come with two"big kid" swings, but since she can't pump yet this works for now so Austin can swing too). Austin just climbed up the ladder by himself and was very proud!

Victoria enjoys the see-saw, but especially loves the regular swing! She swings on it whenever she gets a chance, even when it's getting dark out and she's by herself! She also enjoys the monkey bars.
Here's what it looked like after we put the sand down.
Here's the playhouse, which everyone loves to "decorate" with chalk, something they couldn't do on the metal one, which can kind of be seen in the background.

All done!
We even re sized the sand box to fit inside the mulch area. Jason just finished making the cover for it tonight.