When my daughter and her husband bought a new house, it came with a swingset/playset/treefort whatever you call them these days. That was the good thing. Bad thing is the dry climate and intense sun had beat it to death and made it rickety.
You have to treat any wood outdoors around here. Especially soft woods like pine. Even cedar will only last so long before it gets dried out and hopeless. That’s what happened here. The wood gives out, and if it’s structural, you have a big problem.
So they bought a new one and asked me to help assemble it.
For the record, I prefer to build them myself. You can buy kits with the hardware like swings, bars, structural metal fittings for the wood. They come with a list of lumber you need as well as cutting instructions. Really the only difference is you have to cut and drill the wood. Another added benefit is you buy all the screws/bolts/lag screws. And you’re only going to buy a few sizes.
This kit came with a huge assortment of chinesium hardware. Behold:
Ok. Pro tip: When you agree to help on a project like this, have them send you a pic of the ‘tools needed’ page. There is not one phillips in that pile. They have ‘robertson’ (a square hole), and hex. And for our Chinese frens, 5MM is not the same as 3/16″. We had a 5MM bit. It didn’t work. I went to Home Depot to score the proper driver bit for my impact driver. In typical fashion, they had one left. I was lucky. Not so much with the socket. I had to buy a set.
Screwit. I needed those hex sockets anyhow. Who doesn’t?
We were smart enough to start the build in the garage, out of the sun. It was still very hot, and me not drinking beer to keep hydrated either. Man, that was painful. That’s usually the grease that helps me get stuff done.
So there’s dozens of boards. There’s dozens of packs of screws, washers, bolts, and whatnot.
Each step in the install guide was usually one board. So the process went like this:
- Stare at the page
- Root around the pile to find the board.
- Dig through the packets of screws to find the right one
- Screw it on
- Lather, rinse, repeat.
It was a painfully slow process that only sped up as we ran out of parts day #2. This sort of thing didn’t help, and made me erupt. Behold:
See it?
Does your measuring tape go to 3.08″ or 78.38mm? Really?
I dead reckoned it.
My son in law, to his credit, sorted the bags of screws and boards, putting them in numerical order. That sped things up bigly.
The only thing left when I left was the roof on the top.
It was a fun couple days that took my mind off my misery.
It’s still easier to build it your self…
Inspected By Pat 