Backyard Playgrounds

It’s pretty easy to create backyard playgrounds for your children as all you’ll need are a few important components:

• Children (naturally!)
• A backyard (goes without saying)
• Time
• Money
• A love of DIY!

When my children were a lot younger, my husband and I set to and built a couple of wooden play-sets. We opted for the least expensive route, which involved buying the swings and slides and what have you in a kit form, then calling at a local lumber yard and purchasing the timber separately.

We enlisted the help of my brother and a friend and over a period of about two years, we built two different wooden outdoor play-sets. And by two years I don’t mean that’s how long it took us to build them, so much as we built the first one in a weekend (once we’d got all the separate gear) and the second one we bought and added a couple of years down the line.

For our kids they were a great addition to the backyard and for us a complete godsend. At the time we didn’t live close enough to a public park pr play center so the alternative was coming up with a sensible way of utilizing the enormous space we had out back.

Back then the bottom part of the yard was a little neglected and we’d wondered for a while what we could do with it. As the kids got older we decided to turn it over to them and eventually turned to whole bottom part into a backyard playground. It became the place to hang for our kids friends, as well as a place for my friends and family’s kids to play when we had cookouts or parties.

I know that price wise they can seem kinda daunting but if you can be bothered to to a lot of the work yourself, they’re hugely rewarding and easily become (for our children at least) the favorite place to be when at home. One of our two wooden play-sets was centered around a fort, with cool features like monkey bars, swings and a small climbing wall.

The fort part became a kind of club house when they got older. It was pretty big from the outset as we altered that initial layout on order to create a bigger ‘building’. It wasn’t hard to do, more the effort involved as it took longer to assemble! In all I’m a big fan of creating an outdoor space for your children to play.

It allows them to play naturally and to relax away from their parents. It also encourages socialization and imaginative play and, ultimately, they play educational games without even realizing. A definite plus for any backyard, and a highly recommended method of allowing your children to play in a safe environment that’s right outside!