Staycation, Part Six

Our final adventure took us to... our backyard!  We had initially planned on using our time off to work on some home projects, but scrapped most of them in favor of enjoying time with our guests.  We were able to squeeze one project in though: our new (to us) swing set.

My sister has become obsessed with Freecycle and has found some treasures for Cal.  One of them was a woodern swing set.  It had definitely seen better days, but comparable new ones were going for more than a thousand dollars!  All this one cost was the hour and a half it took us to disassemble and move it.

We still need to buy a new slide and install a replacement board as well as stain the whole shebang, but we got the ball rolling by prepping the base for the structure.  Billy and I, along with David, marked out the area with spray paint then used shovels to level the area before laying down some landscape paper.  After a few discussions, we chose pea gravel as our base and called up a local landscape company to arrange delivery .  I was super pleased with their driver, who neatly backed his truck through our back gate and dumped the load perfectly in the middle of the area we prepared.  All that was needed was a little spreading.

Cal watching Daddy.

Child Labor

Of course, shoveling gravel on a 95 degree day is tough work, so a little cooling down was in order.  We broke out the sprinkler Cal had received for Easter and he and David had a blast.

Hopefully we will have a chance to tackle the rest of the project soon!

Why pea gravel?

• My mom (a former elementary school teacher) told us that her school preferred gravel because sand attracted animals (giant litterbox) and wood chips attracted bugs.
• Gravel does not freeze or get muddy when it rains.
• Young House Love recently built a "rockbox" and has some great reasons on why it was better than sand.