Clarification, format apology, and some recognition of credit/thanks

In retrospect, I think the layout of my scattered plans might have given the idea that I had complete originality and some measure of talent in creating the plans I used for the play structure. My original intent had been to create it all from the ground up, but uncertainty crept in and I purchased a kit from Timber-Bilt. I couldn't be happy with their default plans of a single tower play structure, so ended up doing a re-write of sorts where I wanted to derivate to add in a second tower. The re-write was what got me the numerous pages of scribble that I called "my -plans".

Regarding the format of my last post, it looks like poo, I'll admit it. Tried to get fancy doing alternate justified pictures, but the text got a bit wacky even with going through a number of permutations. Hazards of WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editors. After seeing how bad it looked I wanted to go back and redo it, but it's readable, so I'll just live with the results of my ineptitude.

Recognition, props, credit... As much as it might have seemed that I was trying to do this myself, I did get a lot of help. I couldn't bear to ask someone to sit full time to help me as they'd end up sitting around for hours on end while I'm doing a re-draw of plans, or just trying to figure out what it was that I had intended in an earlier drawing.

Along the way, help was there though. My father in-law Rick helped me pick out and haul an immense load of lumber that accounted for about 90% of the wood I used. There was definite concern as to if we'd actually make it back from the lumber yard when we finished loading his truck up, but somehow it survived.

Larry from work was mentioned in the writeup, but I didn't do him justice for the amount of help he gave me. I think he had overheard me trying to sucker another co-worker into coming over to help raise the swing beam between the two towers when he volunteered to come over. My intent had been to just get the swing beam taken care of, but when we finished that up fairly quickly, I casually brought up that I could use some help with the spiral slide which didn't go in any fashion that could be called quickly. The instructions had called for assembling the spiral slide, then affixing it to the tower after it was whole. Obviously that would have been cheating, so I came up with the idea to assemble it section by section from the top, securing the first component to the tower, then assembling on down. It did work out, but we didn't get wrapped up from banging our knuckles against the sections for a good two to three hours later.

Last words of credit and thanks are to Angie. She was there through this whole saga. Watching the kids through weekends and evenings while I was out planning, measuring, cutting, building, re-measuring, and re-cutting. She helped all along the way, from the tower frame raising and random board holding, to assistance with the spiral slide that Larry had come over for.

Thanks again for all the help!

A year between updates?!?!?!?

Technically it's only been 51 weeks, so I'm going to try to pretend I haven't been slacking...

So I have been slacking, but I've also been busy. The tree house building guy in the Toyota Sienna commercial that gets dissed by his kids took four weekends, but my labor of love has been a bit closer to four months, so hopefully the kids won't give me the Toyota Sienna treatment...



The leveling took about a month of the effort, and honestly it wasn't that far off from being level.









I knew it was going to be a lot of work for what I had planned.









The leveling didn't go as far as I'd have liked, there was no staking, surveyor's tripods, or laser line generators, but it was still taking quite a while. My wife gave me several reminders, as I was swinging my pick ax that Summer would be coming. So at the start of April, breaking ground stopped, and the first tower frame came up.






Work was slow, running back and forth between the build area and the garage. Hunting down a tool I'd forgotten or trying to get a reinterpretation of my plans for the fifth time.







The first tower was filling out, and a start of the structure could be seen.








With the help of Larry from work, the green spiral turbo slide came up.








Both climbing walls go up, eight cubic yards of playground mulch is hauled from delivery at the front of the house and spread.









Second tower has filled out, two swings are in place, and the monkey bars have started to come up.








Another eight cubic yards of mulch is delivered and spread, the second slide is mounted, monkey bars are finished, step ladder to second tower is affixed, remaining swings are hooked up, and a tortoise sand box that Allen and Kelly gave us is put in place.

First kid to say "nah, we're good" from the mini-van is getting a whooping.