We ordered a play set a while back for Bryson. We thought that it would entertain him for many months to come. It took a while to get it shipped, inventoried, and built.
The shipping wasn’t too hard as it was someone else doing it but they were going to drop it at the curb. This wasn’t too bad but it relied on me to be here and be able to move it to the garage without any dollies ore anything. It turns out that the truck came with 5 boxes (even though the boxes were labeled x of 6. The delivery guy ended up helping me put the boxes into our garage because he wasn’t supposed to ask me for help at all. Having a 5′ lift on the truck and 10′ boxes does not work. It worked out well for me and was very painless to get it in the garage.
After that came the task of taking inventory of all the pieces. Mo decided she would take on the task of doing all the inventory. It took a few days but in the end she was able to get it all inventoried and found 3 missing pieces, 1 damaged, and different wheel than advertised. They showed a ‘large boat wheel’, what came was a small steering wheel. She called and they shipped out the pieces (including the actual boat wheel) to us the Wednesday before we planned to assemble it.
We also decided that since it would take me 2-3 days with minimal help to assemble it we would seek more help and get it done in one day. We turned to our old Ultimate Frisbee team Steamboat. They gathered some current players to help me assemble it in one day. The directions said it would take 6-8 hours, but I did not know if that was for 1 person, 2 people, or x people. We decided that about 5-6 people at a time was good.
The day of assembly came and started off slow. The main part of the play set took a while to get done (and longer than I thought). The rest of the stuff was easier and took less time than I thought so it evened out. We budgeted for 9 hours of work from 9am – 6pm. We started a bit late at 9:30am but we were also finished by 5:20pm so it only took about 8 hours. We even had time to get some mulch from the hardware store and put it down for cushion in case Bryson would fall.
It was awesome to build it with a bunch of friends that we haven’t seen in a while and with new ones that we just met. I have added a time lapse gif of the assembly process.
I love that in one of the pictures, you can see Bryson wearing his hard hat. He loved helping and picking up all the worms and building a worm house, complete with a flag and couch! This is awesome!