Park Place

Owner collect $2000.

Not really. And I'm not even sure if the value is right for Monopoly.

And it looks a lot different with the fence.

My daughter loves playing outside, especially at the park. Slides, swings, sandboxes, that sort of stuff, makes her day. At our old house, we had purchased one of these swing set / slide contraptions, and at the new place, we needed a good place to put it. So we made one.

We picked out a 20' x 20' patch of land (which happened to be where the grass was growing best) that was fairly level. 400 sq ft of landscape fabric was rolled out and pinned down. We tried the kind of plastic border stuff that you simply hammer into the ground, but in the soil we have up here, that wasn't happening. . .basically, there's a minimum of 500 rocks per cubic ft of soil. Stakes work ok, but anything bigger is a pain in the arse. We ended up using the roll up plastic stuff that you see in the gardening section of Walmart, with a bunch of plastic stakes pinning it down. This worked remarkably well.

So the point of all that was to create an area in which to put mulch. Not just any mulch, but the good rubber mulch, made out of old tires (you can actually see some of the imprints from the tire on some of it). This stuff is expensive, but it doesn't decompose, you don't have to worry about splinters (unless there's some kind they make out of steel belted tires - ouch!), it won't float off in a heavy rain, and it's relatively soft. We probably should have a lot more in there, but it's kind of cost prohibitive, and it's not really like anyone's going to be falling very far into it.