our little man

5.10.2008

this summer's project

last summer we built the fence around the side yard so that the kids would have a nice, safe area to play.

this summer, we decided we needed to add something fun to play with. after much back and forth, we decided on a playhouse. it's something that i always wished i had when i was little and have always wanted to build my kids. we also would like to do a swing set, but in the end decided that the house made more sense this year - and maybe we'll do the swing set next year. there were several factors that went into the decision, but primarily it was their ages. even sophie isn't quite big enough to have free reign on the larger type of swing set we'd like to have, and for ben it would be more frustrating than anything because he'd be too little to use much of it. the playhouse, however, is going to be great for both of them - and hopefully will continue to be for years and years to come. we took them for a little trip to the mill store, where they have a playhouse similar to what we wanted to build, to show them what it would be like. they were both totally enamored with it - in fact, ben screamed like we'd tried to remove a limb when we had to finally pull him away.

so having made the decision to build the playhouse, we had to figure out exactly how we wanted to do it. there were a couple of kits we found - the one from the mill store that i mentioned, as well as a kit from toys r us that seemed pretty reasonable. but after pricing everything out, we decided that we could build one on our own for a similar cost and end up with a much higher quality product. like i said, we hope this will last them for a long while... when they're past the "playhouse" years, it can become a cool kind of fort, clubhouse, whatever. i figure we should get at least a good decade out of it - and when you look at it like that, the cost and effort seems well worth it.

we actually found some plans online and bought those rather than try to draw up our own. i'm sure we could have done it, but the peace of mind knowing that everything is being built correctly, cost-effectively, safely, etc, was worth the $15 fee for the plans. we knew that we wanted a porch on the front and roughly 8'x8' total size - so the plans we found are perfect.

we hoped to spend today getting started. tomorrow is mother's day, but adam actually has to work (he's part of a rotation where he has to cover a shift in production every 6 weeks or so) so we're going to kind of celebrate on saturday instead. what i wanted to do was just spend the day with adam and the kids out in the yard and see if we could get the floor finished. earlier in the week a friend helped adam pick up some of the lumber, so we were ready to go. we had a nice breakfast and then got our materials together and headed outside. we took our time and just had fun. the kids were fantastic and spent probably two straight hours in the sandbox together. we took a break for lunch and got ben down for his nap, then went back out to finish the floor.

here's sophie showing off our day's work...

i can't wait to get more done. we need to make another trip for lumber, but hopefully we'll be able to do that before the weekend so we can get the walls up then!

posted at 8:20 PM by aimee // 0 comments