Nathan's Blog: Wooden Playhouse Project!

Well, since I'm on a roll and already have the pictures uploaded I might as well make it 3 posts in 3 days! I'm finished with Eli's Playhouse!

I've actually been looking on craigslist for a wooden playground set for over a year now, but there just aren't many that come up for sale in Lubbock and when they do they go quick and for pretty high prices. As a last ditch effort, I checked ebay and found a really nice one, but it was on the other side of Dallas and I really didn't want to drive over 350 miles each way to get a playground set.

I did have a meeting in the Dallas area on Tuesday though, and the auction ended on Monday so I asked if I could pick it up Tuesday if I won the auction and they said that would work for them and sure enough, I won the auction. I ended up paying less for the entire thing than just the curly slide on the end costs at Home Depot!

I ended up driving to my meeting in Dallas instead of flying and pulled my 16' utility trailer to haul the playhouse back with me. After my meeting I got to Royce City around 4:30 and with a lot of help (the guy I bought it from, plus his wife, plus at least 1 other guy helped the entire time) we ended up with it disassembled and loaded onto the trailer around 8:00.

Thankfully it all made it back to Lubbock with me and I pulled down our driveway at 3:00 a.m. on Wednesday morning!

I'm very thankful to have a tractor with a front end loader. I have some pallet forks I can strap onto the loader and I was able to pick up the base to the playhouse and set it where I wanted it all by myself Friday evening. It had taken 4 of us to load it onto the trailer and we never did actually lift it all the way up, we just picked up one end and slid it onto the trailer. I'm guessing it weighed somewhere around 700 - 800lbs.

I bought a couple boards that we had broken getting it apart and a 5lb box of good decking screws and called a friend to see if they could help and had everything ready to go on the assembly on Saturday afternoon after we got back from Thomas the Train.

Here's Ben helping get the platforms bolted to the 4x4's. The assembly really went smoothly and we didn't hit any major snags.

Here's another a couple hours into the afternoon. Putting it back together was like a giant jigsaw puzzle. The biggest help was that they stained it after they had assembled it so you could usually figure out where things went by the gaps in the stain where they attached to another board.

Putting the slide on. This gives a pretty good perspective on how big this thing is. At the peak it is about 15' tall. The main structure is 5' wide x 10' long with one 5'x5' platform at 4' high and another 5'x5' platform at 6' high. It also has a little triangle coming off the end where the 2nd slide goes.

Here's how it looked when we finished the day.

About 6 hours of work with 2 guys. At that point most of the beams just had 1 or 2 screws in place holding them up, but everything that required more than one person was complete.

Sunday after church, I put on the rest of the slats and put in nearly a full 5lb box of screws. A little smoothing with my tractor where I had to dig down to get the swing set level and I was happy with the finished product.