Monday, June 18, 2007

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!

1 comment:

Shawna Barlette said...

Perseverance has paid off handsomely. This is such an awesome play structure Ramesh. You have much to be proud of. It makes me wish my Dad built us one when I was growing up. All we had was the old fashioned metal swing set. The kind you could tip over if you went "too high"! Your play structure ROCKS.