Post by ilikedonuts on Mar 5, 2015 21:59:31 GMT -5
The tire swing is the most used part of our entire playground system.
Our playground store has free play 3 times a week so we had gone so much that DD1 knew exactly what things she liked the best and the tire swing was one she said she really wanted.
I found a guy on Craigslist that builds custom sets. Have you looked to see if anyone locally builds them? We paid $2500 but we exchanged some work ourselves so normally it would've been around $3000. It's probably about what Rainbow would have charged for something similar but it was designed to fit in our small city backyard and the quality is insane. DH can stand in the top of it, it'd take a bomb to get that thing to move, it's so solid & extremely heavy. It's got a tire swing, monkey bars, slide, trapeze, climbing wall, play house. We are putting up a zipline to it soon as the weather gets nice. This pic is from a while back. It's covered in snow now.
Post by whitepicketfence on Mar 5, 2015 22:42:03 GMT -5
DH built ours. It's buried under snow and all of the swings are off or I'd take a picture. We probably had about $600-700 into the materials but it's much sturdier than the store bought ones.
It looks similar to this but has a sandbox built into the bottom under the climbing area (note: this is not my photo) :
DH built ours. It's buried under snow and all of the swings are off or I'd take a picture. We probably had about $600-700 into the materials but it's much sturdier than the store bought ones.
It looks similar to this but has a sandbox built into the bottom under the climbing area (note: this is not my photo) :
We're the DIY type who likes to overbuild things, so we're thinking of building it ourselves. What materials did you use? Did you get the plans somewhere or design it yourselves? How long did it take? I feel like cutting all of the pieces wouldn't actually take much longer than assembling it ourselves anyway (longer, yes, but not a huge amount).
DH built ours. It's buried under snow and all of the swings are off or I'd take a picture. We probably had about $600-700 into the materials but it's much sturdier than the store bought ones.
It looks similar to this but has a sandbox built into the bottom under the climbing area (note: this is not my photo) :
We're the DIY type who likes to overbuild things, so we're thinking of building it ourselves. What materials did you use? Did you get the plans somewhere or design it yourselves? How long did it take? I feel like cutting all of the pieces wouldn't actually take much longer than assembling it ourselves anyway (longer, yes, but not a huge amount).
I'll admit, I just sort of sat back and told DH it looked pretty lol. Otherwise, I didn't have much involvement in it.
I'm not certain what kind of lumber it was that he used. I can ask him tomorrow and get back to you on that. We bought the slide on Craigslist. It had never been used. Everything else came from either Lowes or Home Depot. The sand for the sandbox came from a local landscaping business which was pretty cool as it had a bunch of small seashells in it. It was real sand vs. the play sand that comes in bags and the girls thought that the seashells were just about the coolest thing ever. DH drew up the plans himself and it probably took him 2 weekends to cut everything and assemble. I was 8 months pregnant with DD3 at the time so he enlisted my BIL's help instead.
It's incredibly sturdy; so much so that adults are fully able to climb up to the top of the 3 story playhouse easily. I like this aspect of it for when my kids continually left their crap up there and I had to go up to retrieve it.