I think I wanted to build a new wooden playset for the kids about as much as they wanted a new one. This spring I decided that the girls finally out grew their old one, and it was time for something new.
When I looked around to see what was available from the big home improvement, I found there was no limit to how much you could spend, or how big of a playset you could build.
I came across some nice kits at Menards from a company called Playstar. With these kits you could really pick and choose exactly how big a set you wanted, and which acessories were included. My favorite piece in this kit was the hole-template provided for marking the holes to drill in the wood. That's the red square on the left.
I decided that I wanted to keep it relatively small and simple. Something that wouldn't take up half of the back yard, but that they wouldn't out grow in a few years.
As it turns out, I already had a big plastic slide from a friend who's kids had already grown up. This saved me a nice chunk of change, since it alone cost as much as the rest of the kit hardware. The slide wasn't included in the kit, neither was the lumber. I wanted to use cedar so I didn't have another thing needing re-finishing every few years.
Even though the kit I chose was relatively small, it still took me two trips to the lumber yard to get all the wood home in my minivan. I stacked the lumber in my garage and proceeded to mark and cut all of the pieces throughout the following week.
As I started to put the playset together, I realized my existing play area wasn't going to be big enough. So I was back to store to rent a sod-cutter. Using the sod-cutter I enlarged our existing location. I then had to put down land scaping fabric, and pickup 2 more yards of playset wood chips. All of this was more work than the whole rest of the playset project (I suppose I should've done this first).
With the location done, I was able to whip together the playset in no time. Using my trusty cordless drill and impact driver, I installed almost 500 screws, and bolts before I was done. All in all, the playset was a very fun project - for me and the girls. I may just have to build them and addition some day.
