Playhouse Project: Day 1

As I mentioned last post, this was a project weekend for us.  Hugh borrowed a truck from work and went to pick up the wood for the playhouse on Friday evening.  When he got it home we had to clear a space in the garage for it as the garage is currently junk central.  This is where we stored the entire contents of our basement during our reno and we haven't brought anything except toys back into the basement since it's been finished.  We have a ton of sorting/organizing/purging to do but in the meantime we just shoved everything over to make room for the wood.

Saturday morning was crisp and cool.  When I walked outside I felt like I was camping.  The air had that tang of Northern BC mountain air and the pre-Saturday activity stillness on the street was very reminiscent of hushed mornings around a campfire sipping tea and coffee. 

Speaking of tea and coffee, rather than linger over ours, as is our usual Saturday morning tradition, we put them straight into travel mugs so we could get an early start.  Ridiculously early in my opinion.  Until Hugh told me the forecast for later in the day was snow and rain and wind and that we were working till we got done up to a certain point no matter what the weather was.  Suddenly I couldn't wait to get outside!

The building process started with digging holes for the posts.  Because of the crazy prairie wind that has tossed our trampoline around our yard like a rag doll we decided to cement our posts in.  If we're going to all this effort we don't want to have to reassemble the playhouse every time the wind kicks up.  We dug those holes deep! And by we I mean Hugh.  Someone had to take pictures and keep our travel mugs filled...

 While we were busy so were the kids.

This is just for gratuitous cuteness.  I love those freckles!

Sebastian was so much more interested in the building process than the other kids.  He watched Hugh very intently and then copied whatever he did.  It was very sweet but I had to put my foot down when I saw him making a run for the table saw.

Once we got all the posts in and level we had to cement them into the ground.  Again by we I mean Hugh.  Those bags of cement are heavy!  My contribution was to take pictures and man the garden hose, making sure the cement was the right consistency as Hugh stirred it with a shovel.

Did you know that water out of a hose tastes better than regular water?  

The weather held off for most of the day - the snow had only just begun to fall as we were cementing our last two posts. Wasn't that good timing? And this is where we finished out Day 1.

The vision is the big deck will be the house part of the playhouse.  It will big enough for a kid-sized table and chairs and big enough to have sleep-overs once they're a little older.  That's the place where I will attempt flower boxes and curtains and "housey" things like that.  The slide will come off the taller "lookout" deck and the plan is to have a suspension bridge or something connect the two play decks.  We are also going to have swings coming out the left side of the playhouse deck but they won't get done until last as we have to prep the ground still.

It was good to get all this work done and Hugh definitely couldn't have done it alone but as I stood there holding posts level I felt profoundly bored with my jobs.  Hugh was shoveling and drilling and sawing and cementing and I pretty much stood around and held things up.  At about 1:00, after I put Sebastian down for a nap, I hit a fade - partly out of boredom and partly from all the years of napping while my kids napped my body is now conditioned to shut down at 1:00.   I decided to pull a chair out of the garage so I could sit down until being called into action.  As I was sitting with my eyes closed I heard Ava say to Hugh, "Oh Dad, look! Mom's sleeping.  Oh, poor Mom, she's been awake all day!"  Hugh, who was in the middle of wiping the sweat of hard labour off his brow, started killing himself laughing while I laughed so hard I cried.

We ended the day with friends over for dinner.  The evening didn't go late and by 9:00 Hugh and I were cuddled on the couch while I fought to stay awake and watch a movie.  At 9:30 I decided to give up and just go to bed.  "After all," I told Hugh, "Being awake all day is exhausting!