Tree Stump Tic-Tac-Toe

If you can remember back to this post where we built the swing set and club house, you'll remember that we left a big tree stump coming up through the center of the fort floor.

Building Stairs for the Club House

There are lots of tutorials on the wonderful world wide web on how to build stairs.  We read almost all of them.  However, I'm not entirely sure we followed any of them.  The good news is that we have stairs and they turned out great!!

The standard rise (up and down measurement) for stairs is somewhere around 7 inches while the run (horizontal measurement) is around 10.5 inches.  Since we were making these stairs for little feet, we decided to make the rise only 6 inches and the run 6 inches as well.  This made for a much smaller step "up" as well as a smaller spot to put your foot.

So how'd we make the stairs? 

Because we used a "square" number for our cut outs (6 inches by 6 inches) it made the math super easy and we were able to use just a regular metal framing square.

Swing Set Lumber List

So I have mentioned in a couple of posts now that we've been spending some time working on building a play set... We originally found inspiration from Carmel who writes a great little blog called OurFifthHouse.  Well, we sill have the stairs to build and an additional swing to purchase, but here's the play set!

If you're interested in building your own, here is what we ended up purchasing for all of our lumber:

The Swing Set Continues

Things got real once we started putting giant timbers into the ground to start getting our swing set planned out further.

The two large posts on the left side of this picture are 6x6's.  They're a whopping 10 feet long and nearly 3 feet are buried below ground.  

Since the ground is clearly not level where we chose to have the swing set, we placed the 4x6 board across the top to check for level and adjusted the depth of the holes accordingly.  This was a painful process since we had to lift the 12 foot long 4x6 on top of the 6x6 posts several times as we adjusted the holes and the amount of gravel that we placed in the bottom of the holes to help with drainage.   Once we were happy with the results, we were able to set the posts in quikrete.  It was important to constantly check the level of the post while poking the concrete into the post holes. We took our time with this process because the main posts would determine whether or not the rest of the set would be level down the road.

Swing Set Surprise

It has been unacceptably long since I have last updated!  So much has happened recently that I was just too preoccupied to hop on the old blog.  For shame!

First of all, the hubby is home from a 37 day "adventure".... Ah yes, now I remember why I haven't been blogging. Bryan enjoys taking up all of my spare time; and I truly enjoy filling that role.  Well, in our spare time we have definitely had the projects rolling.

I rarely let my husband rest.  We also cut down another tree.