Building a Playground without Spending a Fortune (Part 4)

In part one we prepped, in part two we built the fort and part three attached the hardware. That leaves us here:

I left one of the support posts tall in order to attach a flag pole to eventually. I staked out the area and used landscape timbers to separate it from the rest of the yard. After filling the area with a few yards of quality mulch, filling the sandbox with sand and planting a replacement tree, all that is left is to stain it after a few months.

It had to survive a few freak snow storms before it could finally get stained.

After trying out a few stains on some scrap wood, I eventually settled on the Sikkens translucent mahogany stain. It is dark red and matches our deck. In this picture, you can see the rock climbing holds on the ladder, the yellow handles and after a nephew whacked his head on the 2x4 crossbars I added two safety pads .

After a year, the playground and sandbox has gotten a lot of use and I expect that it will last for many years to come. The fort easily supports several adults without so much as a wobble. 

I plan on staining the landscape timbers to match when I get some time. I am also not happy with the quality of the sand that I got from Home Depot. I am going to look for volleyball sand in the Spring. I may also upgrade the mulch to red rubber mulch, but right now it just seems to expensive.

 

That wraps up the playground project. Please let me know if you have any questions or suggestions on how I could have done this better.

-Chris