Friday, June 28, 2013

SEKRIT Swingers or What I do on the Weekend.

 My youngest is now a teenager and for a while now, our poor old swing set has crouched in the back yard. Its chains were rusty, the slide was on the ground somewhere and it looked quite pitiful. I've tried and tried to get the dear husband to let me sell it or give it away. But, he couldn'l let go.
Then last weekend, he realized that our twin, six-year-old nieces had no swing set.


I called my sister to see if they'd like to have it. She knew it needed paint, and swings, and possibly a walker with tennis balls on the legs, and she still agreed.

This got the husband and I to thinking about when we had three small-ish kids and how hard it was to finish a project. My sister and her family left on vacation that night and we put our plan into action.

Before I was awake, the husband had purchased new swings and chains. Now the only problem was taking it apart and hauling it on a flat-bed trailer the quarter of a mile to my sisters house. Once there, we realized that the spot where the swingset would live was on a very hilly part of the yard.



Out came the shovels and my husband's levels of doom. Twelve hours later, the swing set was moved and tested by the largest people we could find. My husband and two of my sons. We figured that if 450 pounds worth of swinging couldn't tip the set over, three smallish humans couldn't either

The next day we scraped all of the old paint off, hoovered the yard with the shop-vac (I seem to remember small people wanting to eat paint) And put a new face on the old girl.





Luckily the Home Depot people were able to exactly match the paint. My sister and her family were gone and we couldn't call them to see if they had leftover house paint because it was a secret project and supposed to be a surprise! Here is the awesome hubster and two of my daughters, It was a real family project.










After we were finished (12 more hours on Sunday) I sent this picture to my sister and then called her to say surprise!


There was much squealing and screaming of small people.







Like this,

It was worth every minute.