I’ve always wanted to put in a great big jungle gym for the kids.  We have the room in the backyard and I like to build things so I got started.  I built it this last summer, but figured I would start recounting my projects around the house.

1.  I did a lot of research on different jungle gyms.  They can get pretty expensive and we didn’t have much of a budget.  I didn’t really like many of the “piece-together’s” at Costco, etc.  Many didn’t have monkey bars (a necessity for the boys), and the one’s that did were really expensive.  So, I went by Home Depot and saw that they had some “kits” that were bigger, sturdier, and had monkey bars.  The challenge with their “kits” was that the hardware comes in a few boxes which are shipped from somewhere in the midwest but you pull the lumber yourself from your local Home Depot.

2.  I went with the Home Depot option and ordered up the hardware which took way, way too long.  They called me up to tell me that everything had arrived.  When I went down there they handed me a slide and 2 swings.  I let them know that I needed a LOT more hardware.  So, they called around and to make a long story short, it would be another 2 weeks.  In the meantime, I pulled all the lumber and brought it home.  What I like about this gym is everything is built from 4×4’s, 2×4’s, and 2×6’s.  It makes it nice if anything needs to be replaced.

3.  The hardware finally came and I went to work.  And by I, I mean my Dad and I.  The gym is far too big for one guy to put it together himself.  At certain points we even needed extra hands (Mom, Miriam, Noah, and Luke) to put it together.  Every board needed to be measured and cut before being placed which meant it would take us a while.

4.  About 80 man hours later, we had ourselves a jungle gym and wow, it’s solid.  Lots of kids and adults could play on it at the same time and it doesn’t move anywhere.  It’s really heavy duty and exactly the finished product that I wanted though it took a little longer to get then I wanted.  I even poured the monkey bars in concrete which firmed it all up even further.