It was always the plan to have an outdoor playset for our daughter to have fun on while we got outside work completed. While most playsets are pre-designed, pre-cut, and boxed all ready to go with instructions to make everything that much simpler (or they come with someone who sets it up for you), my husband is an engineer who likes to tinker and I have engineering and “artful” designing in my blood.
That mixes together to create two crazy people trying to design their own playset.
As is always the case, the idea in our heads looks amazingly cool. How the final product will look might be a completely different story. Which, you can take our (my) drawing design as a perfect example once I find it after losing it somewhere in my purse:
(I promise I’ll find it!)
Regardless, we’re moving ahead and hoping for the best. The first section is going to be what we call “Tire Mountain.” From what we saw as examples of other tire mountains online, the tires need/should be filled. Our options for filling were sand, fill dirt, and stone/gravel. We went with sand because it was competitively priced, was softer than gravel, and would be less likely to have weeds sprouting in it like dirt.
For tires, we are going with an array of large tractor tires, semi-tires, and regular car tires. The larger tractor tires will predominately be used for the base.
Because it is just the two of us, this is going to take some time. Luckily, we were able to set up the slide on a flimsy, quickly stacked tire mound for our daughter to start enjoying it.
Yes, I had a few heart attacks with this set up, but my husband and daughter loved it.
So:
- Step 1: Get tires
- Step 2: Get sand
- Step 3: Mark out where mountain is going and prepare area
That was the easy part. We’ve known for awhile where this tire mountain was going. Since we’re building it in stages, I only marked out the area needed for now and mowed the grass pretty close to ground level.
Next, we started laying out the tires to figure out which sizes should go where and the proper placement to make this work.
We weren’t able to finish laying out the tires before rain came and, as you can see in the photo above, we realized that we were going to need drainage holes in these tires. So, we drilled one inch holes into the bottom of each tire.
With the first section laid out and ready, it’s time to fill the tires.
For now, part one has begun! Wish me luck as I head out to shovel more sand.