Playground

I woke up early this morning in order to help my church build a playground. For the entire time that I have gone there, we have had a fenced in area for the children to play in. There was one Little Tykes slide in that area, and the whole of the area sloped down to the back, where we have a creek running through the property.

As part of the preparation, we had to have an old dead tree chopped down, and we had planned on leveling the slope of the yard. The tree was removed about two months ago, but the stump still exists in the yard. As for the leveling, we could not afford to have it done, and so the design of the playground equipment had to take this into account.

Crews have been working for the last two days to get some preparation done. Some holes were dug, while in some places, fencing was removed in order to make room for a Bobcat, and a tractor's from end.The large base structure for the slide was built and put in place. Today, we had more the 80 people show up to dig, hammer, screw, bolt, paint, and whatever other construction activity that you can think of. We built planters, benches, musical instrument stands, stepping stools, a tire crawl, a stage, and finished out the slide.

Many times it did not look like we would finish. In truth, there is a second coat UV protection that could be applied in places, and there is some extra mulch that we could bring back to level out more of the yard, but we finished it this evening. And the kids played on it, and they were having a ball. I had trouble getting my two young ones to leave for dinner.

I'll upload pictures tomorrow. I was too tired to think of the taking a picture of the finished product for the blog. I might even be able to get a hold of a picture of my wife sitting on my shoulders in order to paint protectant on the top half of the slide platform. But until then, I think I will go to bed and rest.

Update (2007-04-30 11:37 PM): So I finally got around to taking the pics yesterday, and just got them uploaded now. I figured it was some way my phone could be useful while the service was out.