Taking the park playground home - building a play structure

Sunset, April, 1995 by Bill Crosby

A hand-holding guide to building the play structure your kids want

My kids wanted a play structure, so my wife, Robyn, and I went out to price nice wooden sets we wouldn't mind as a dominant element in our backyard. Once the apoplexy from the $2,000-to-$4,000 price tags subsided, I decided I could build a set myself for much less than the manufactured units cost and, in theory, give my boys exactly what they wanted. What you see here is a combination of elements, in large part dictated by a 6-year-old and a 3-year-old, designed to fit into as compact a space as possible.

First, we went to different parks armed with notebook and tape measure. When the boys took a play break, the interview began: What do you like? What's fun; what isn't? What's challenging; what isn't? A slide became a definite, swings were vetoed as being not fun (but could be added later), at least one steering wheel was a must, there had to be more than one way up or down, there had to be hiding places, and there had to be places they could jump off. The boys seemed to gravitate toward the spiral platforms common to many public structures, which was fortunate given my goal of compactness.

Next, we started the hunt for the components that would make the structure fun for them and easy to build for me. Locating manufacturers for a slide and for ready-made ladder rungs gave the project the green light.

All told, the structure took three solid weekends to build, plus another day for grading at the beginning and one for covering the ground with fill material at the end. Total cost for the structure: $864. The surprise additional expense was the fill, Fibar (engineered wood fibers), which cost another $850, though you could use bark chips and spend less than half that amount.

The drawing on page 128 shows the basic design of the unit, which was ultimately dictated by the height of the slide, the width of the rungs, and an 8-inch allowance for the fill. Spacing between rungs, platforms, and activity areas is based roughly on guidelines published by the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, though our open-sided "jumping-off" platform is about 8 inches higher than recommended. Depending on the space you have and your budget, you might modify the design for a slide of a different shape or height, or omit the horizontal monkey bars and add swings to that part of the structure instead. Other features are also possible. Phone numbers for parts catalogs are on page 130.

STEP BY STEP

1. Buy materials. A complete parts list is on page 128 I used pressure-treated hem-fir called sunwood, a cheaper alternative to redwood. Local lumberyards didn't carry sunwood 4-by-4s in 12-foot lengths, so I substituted redwood for those six posts.

2. Set the posts. These are all set so that the distance between the inside faces of each pair of posts is 22 inches. Do everything you can to make this precise, but know that it still probably won't be. You'll likely have to take some corrective measures later.

Each posthole is just less than 2 feet deep. I set the two slide support posts in concrete first, clamping a 2-by-4 scrap to the posts to keep them 22 inches apart and in line with each other. Once these two posts were solid, I set the next three posts I could clamp to them in a similar manner, and so on until all nine at the slide end were set. I used 12-foot 4-by-4s for all except the back three posts. For them (from left to right in the diagram), I used two 10-footers and an 8-foot 4-by-4. I also clamped a 2-by-4 spacer to the two 10-foot posts at the far end of the monkey bars; careful measuring put them 10 feet from their matching pair in the main structure.

Setting all the posts took about a day off and on.

3. Install the slide. The next thing I did was assemble and hang the slide so I'd know the distance from the ground to the top platform. The bottom of the slide sat on temporary scrap blocks to make up for the depth of the fill before the slide's permanent support bracket was put in place. The instructions for the slide were absolutely correct about needing two people for assembly and three for positioning and installation. This step took half a day.

PARTS PRICE LIST

6    12-foot 4-by-4 redwood posts                  $96
4    10-foot 4-by-4 sunwood posts                   46
1    8-foot 4-by-4 sunwood post                      8
11   bags fence post concrete                       17
6    8-foot sunwood 2-by-4s                         29
10   10-foot sunwood 2-by-6s                        90
2    12-foot sunwood 2-by-6s                        20
1    10 lb. box 2 1/2-inch deck screws              25
     Turbo slide and 2 steering wheels             426
30   ladder rungs at $3 each                        90
22   5/16-by-1 1/2-inch lag screws with washers      5
38   5/16-by-2 1/2-inch lag screws with washers     12
     Total                                        $864
     Fibar underlay                               $850

4. Build the platforms. Our installation put the entrance to the slide roughly 78 inches off the ground. With the top platform at that height, I needed five additional step platforms, spaced 13 inches apart, to get from the ground to the top of the slide. There's some flexibility on the exact level of the slide platform, and there's some adjustment you can make and still roughly match the public structures we were using as inspiration. Most of these had the first platform 16 inches off the ground, and space between platforms varied from 12 to 14 inches.