Our adventure park at church: three months later

Our slightly different park "rules" sign.

Back in June we started dreaming about building a play park at church. Lots of research was done, and we kept coming back to the fact that we wanted to make it as challenging as possible. We also really wanted to try to do it ourselves - not spend thousands of dollars on professionals. In addition, it needed to be as natural as possible - not one of these modern plastic and metal marvels that look amazing but are boring, and leave nothing to the kids' imaginations. Many of the apparatuses were to be built with beetle-kill wood and we planned on  bringing in several massive rocks for the edges of the play area.

Well, three months later (almost to the day) from when we started by trucking in the rocks, we are done. For now. The snows are almost upon us, so we have decided to leave anything else that still needs to be done until the spring.

It has been an amazing project to tackle - challenging for sure, but very very rewarding. It has also morphed as we went along. Mostly it looks like the original design, but several things that didn't quite work were changed, and where there were genuine safety concerns we tweaked designs too.

Most of the lumber was donated, along with the use of bobcats and augers to dig the foundations and clear the area for the pea gravel. All the concrete and pea gravel was also donated; as were the fireman pole, the baby swing and both slides.

Rather than leave you with hundreds of photos, I'm sharing the video that I played in church today.

(Oh, it does have sound.)

Lakeview Church Adventure Park from Robin on Vimeo.