From scrap wood to a playset...

As I mentioned in a previous post, Jackson was gifted with a play set for his birthday from Nanny & Poppy. While we were grateful for this new addition to our yard-o-fun, we were a little weary of the amount of time & expense it would take to "polish this turd" as Ben calls it. And with less than 3 weeks before New Baby makes his/her debut, he's tripled the pace in attempts to appease me & my "it better be done by the time this baby is born" deadline.
The original wood arrived in the form of bee-infested cedar, closely resembling a stack of broken down pallets.



After 2 weeks of killing hundreds if bees that had planted roots in our cedar, we invested in expensive bug killer & enough wood filler to plug over 100 holes.
Next was the pressure washing, which culminated in purchasing a new pressure washer as our current one had issues that were not worth fixing. So add 2 weeks of pressure washing to the schedule, and then realizing that despite the e washing, the wood really ought to be sanded as well. After all, no one wants to get splinters!

So sanding commenced. An extremely timely project when you are using a 5" orbital sander and have an entire stack of lumber to work through. Enter in power tool purchase #2 -- the belt sander. While this little guy helps speed up the pace, he also roughens up the boards enough so that you have to go back over them with the orbital. Double Duty, that's right. After 3weeks of constant sanding, Ben finally wrapped it up early this week and I must say, the wood looks amazing. The finishing he did on it to round the corner and completely smooth out the boards truly paid off.



Now on to the staining. Ben got a slight head start on staining on Monday night and had 2 teenage guys from church come over today to help finish it up. It's amazing how much time you save by hiring a few extra sets of hands. With me having back pain and some mild contractions, Ben's sense of urgency has increased, for good reason! That piece of the project is knocked out and now, all that is left is assembly!

Saturday morning, J & I headed to the pool so Ben could have some uninterrupted play set construction time. In typical form, he had to do some minor repairs to his air compressor before work could even begin. I spent the afternoon keeping J from peeking out the back windows so we could surprise him with something substantial before bedtime. It was worth the wait...just before 9 pm, we took J out back for a "really big surprise" and he went nuts going up the ladder & down the slide until we decided it was too dark to keep playing.







Today after church, Ben hit the backyard to finish up this project. He managed to get the heavy roofing panels attached to the platform, creating a fort. He installed the awesome picnic benches under the fort and Jackson & Bella have already shared some snacks in their new hangout.







Monday & Tuesday nights rolled around & Ben tightened up some bolts & righted the A-Frame of the swing beam. However, the legs of the beam were too long and create a slanted swing beam. So 3 options: 1) raise up bracketed end of beam (difficult), 2) cut off the legs of the A-Frame to level it up, or 3) bury 6" of the legs to lower it, making it level. I think we are going with the third option but that may be a few weeks from now, seeing as the set functions perfectly as-is and we are pretty much dying for a few days of relaxation prior to New Baby's arrival.



All in all, the play set looks amazing & we can already tell we will get many many hours of pure fun our of this piece of work. We plan to put a cost on what it took to get it from point A to point B...our preliminary estimates are around $500.  The question is...how much is Ben's time worth?


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad