Has anybody built their own playset/swingset?

[JoyNChrist]

I'm thinking about getting a playhouse/swingset for DS1 this summer, since we won't be able to get out to the park and children's museum and all as often with the babies.

DH is super handy (his dad is a contractor and he grew up building houses with him), and we basically remodeled our whole house by ourselves. I'm fairly certain we could build an awesome play structure relatively easily. I'm just a bit unsure where to start.

- Is there somewhere we could see or purchase plans? I know Ana White did a playhouse, but did she do any type of swingset/slide/sandbox thing?

- Would it really be any more cost-effective after buying all the lumber and supplies? If it's just as much as a pre-fab one, I'd rather go that route and save DH's time.

- What about the components like slides, swings, etc? Any idea where to purchase that stuff?

If anybody has any BTDT experience, I'd love to hear about it. We really enjoy doing construction projects together (we've built a lot of the Ana White furniture) so I think this would be a fun spring/summer family project.

[o_mom]

I would look at some of the kits you can buy with the plans, hardware and accessories all in a package. The local lumber stores here will print you out a price list of all the lumber for a given set so you could compare it to the prefab kits. The ones they sell are PlayStar: http://www.playstarinc.com/Playsets/BuildItYourself.aspx

We helped build one for friends. It was a basic set with a small fort, rockwall, ladder, slide and then a swing beam. It took three guys pretty much two full days and then one guy a few more hours. It was not hard for anyone remotely handy, just took time to cut everything and assemble..

[justlearning]

We purchased a Rainbow fort with canopy, slide, trapeze bar, and ladder from CL for $200. That was SO MUCH cheaper than it would have been for those materials. We power-washed it and it looked like new once we stained it to match the rest.

DH then added onto it, building a rock wall, monkey bars, and then a tire swing area along with a swing beam to hold it. In our situation, the ground slopes somewhat so it was easier for us to level the area just where the fort was and then for DH to custom build the rest instead of trying to make all of the ground perfectly level. We also already had swings hung under our deck, so we didn't need swings.

He purchased redwood from Home Depot, we bought the rock wall holds from ebay, the monkey bar handles from Home Depot (special order), Rainbow-brand tire swing and swivel from CL (great deal at $50 total), and the stain for the set from a paint store. (I called the local Rainbow store to find out the color and stain that they use.)

Building your own set is not as cheap as you'd think, especially if you use nice wood like we did. If you can buy a nice used set off of CL or at least part of the set like we did, that would be the best route to go IMO.

ETA that DH looked at some pictures online of rock walls, monkey bars, tire swings, etc. to get ideas but then he just built it himself without following any plans. He did work construction back in high school, which helped him know how to build things in a safe manner. I forgot to say that we also added onto one side a red chin-up bar that was $30 or so from some online store.

[WatchingThemGrow]

I saw a really cool one a family built UNDER their deck on their sloped back yard near our gym. It was nicely shaded under there!

My DH thought it was enough of a project to prepare the ground and assemble the Play-A-Round set from Sam's, then to fill in all the ground cover while having 1.5 DC. But we're old and tired...