Playground

Last Christmas (as in 2014), my family chipped in to buy a playground for Charlotte. We purchased The Brookside set on Black Friday from Sam's Club and it was delivered to our house by a freight truck. ( The exact set we bought is no longer available but this one is similar both in design and price). Well let me tell you that thing sat, and sat, and sat in our garage until this summer when Tim was on break.

While I was at work one day on a Thursday in June (very pregnant I might add), I get a text from Tim with this picture...

 

While Charlotte was napping, he had taken it upon himself to start assembling the playground. Being almost 8 months pregnant, I was super nervous about him starting this and not being able to finish without my help. Especially after the instructions recommended 2-3 people for assembly. However, I was pleasantly surprised that Tim was actually able to do 95% of the assembly by himself.  

 

The next day, we realized before we could really continue with the assembly, we had to clear the grass out. Tim attempted to do this by hand but we quickly realized that we needed a sod cutter. We rented one from Home Depot for a few hours so he could cut out the grass. After it was all cleaned out and leveled, he laid two layers of weedguard down. This is to prevent weeds from growing through the mulch. We have this in all the plant beds around the house and while it isn't 100% effective, it does greatly reduce the number of weeds that are able to pop through.  This is what things were looking like by the end of day two!

 

Next, we had to pick out what type of border we wanted. This was probably the hardest part for us. We didn't want stone as we were afraid the kids would trip on in. We wanted something with a lower profile that would hold up well in the sun and also wouldn't break the bank. We also wanted something that we could "shape"... not a traditional rectangle. We ended up coming across Dreamscapes on Pinterest and after a lot of debating, we decided to give it a go. We ended up ordering their decorative stone edging in sandstone.

 

The product came in about a weeks time. It is very light-weight and easy to install. We have had it installed for 6+ months now and it is still in perfect condition. None of the pieces have moved or popped up. So we are really pleased with both the look and the quality so far! We decided to use traditional mulch for now. Rubber mulch got a bad rap recently. In addition to that, we didn't want to spend any more money on this project while we were still working on the house addition as well. Here is the final product:

Our swing set actually came with two traditional yellow swings but we purchased a "baby" swing in a coordinating color on Amazon, knowing that we would need at least one baby swing for the next few years. Charlotte LOVES her playground. While we do have a neighborhood park, it is so nice to be able to sit outside and let her play freely in the backyard. Well worth the 6 month wait! :)