Swing Set Upgrade

We bought the swing set we have for the kids a few years ago. It's a plastic Little Tykes one, and it has worked pretty well for us. But the kids have now pretty much outgrown it. The slide was small, and really the whole thing was small. But our kids are bigger, and even though Hannah's not that big, she likes to do big girl things since the others do. Plus, it only has two swings.  This is a problem, because we have three kids who like to do the same thing at the same time.  Maybe this is an opportunity to have them really learn to share or take turns or something, but whatever.  We need three swings.  So we needed a new swing set.  The problem is that getting a new one is super expensive.  The really nice ones are several thousand dollars.  But you can get a decent one at Costco for $1000 or so, but that's still a lot of money.  And everyone says they are a nightmare to assemble, because there are a billion little pieces, and that it typically takes a couple adults working at the same time two full days to do it.  I don't have that kind of time.  Or you can pay someone another couple hundred bucks to do it, but that further drives the price up.  You can find decent ones for free or close to it on Craigslist, but most of them will say that you have to disassemble it and move it yourself, which means you then have to transport it and then reassemble it yourself.  That's a ton of work.

So with no good solution, it occurred to me that there is a decent one in the yard behind ours and that I haven't seen their little kid play on it in a year or more.  I talked to them, and they were willing to sell it but I had to move it myself.  I knew this wouldn't be too big of a deal, because I could just take out a section of the fence, and then take off some of the major pieces, and then get some help to muscle the biggest parts 20 feet from their yard to ours, and then put the smaller pieces back on, and then put the fence back together.  I say "not too big of a deal", but it's relative.  That's still a multi-hour job, but it's better than starting from scratch.  Andrew and Julie had expressed interest in our old one, so we sold it to them, and as part of that Andrew and I would do the moving of our new one and our old one to their new homes.  We started tonight, hoping to get a good chunk of it done.  In the above picture you can see us disassembling parts of it.

We worked through the evening and into the night, figuring why not just keep going?  It took us about four hours, but we completed the move of our new one!  We were a little surprised we were able to do it that fast, but between the two of us we figured out solutions and clever ways of solving some of the logistics and physics of it all.  We then decided we might as well see if we could finish everything, so we disassembled our old one and loaded it in Andrew's truck and delivered it to his house.  It was a late night, but it was satisfying to have completed everything with the exception of the assembly of what is now his new one, but that's a reasonably quick task compared to everything else.  Now we have our new swing set, and I'm excited to see what our kids think of it.