What a cross between Stonehenge and the Taj Mahal would look like if it were being built in So. GA

For about two years now, we've had a plan to build a playhouse for the girls. A playhouse complete with electricity (and therefore A/C) that could also double as storage, and just maybe a guest house for when people come to visit. Our neighbors heard about the plan and laughed. The next day we came home and found three chairs on the front porch with a note saying the chairs were a "contribution to the girls' first apartment".

These playhouse plans were also part of the motivation for James to bring home all that wood last spring. He built the compost bin last spring, and the pile of wood had been sitting ever since. In James' defense, he's a busy man. But with the addition of the chicks (and the return of longer days) James has been working hard in the back yard.

Which brings me to last week....

James' plan for the permanent chicken coop involved a long yard and a coop with nesting boxes, tall enough for us to walk inside without having to bend over. We planned things out together, spray painting marks on the ground where poles would stand and things would go. I left him to his work. James had been outside digging holes for poles for about two hours when he called me out back, saying he had an idea. This is what I saw.



His idea was to build a small "treehouse" on top of the coop for the girls to give them a place to play until the "real" playhouse was built. In our minds we were thinking of the treehouse my Granddaddy had built over at the compound.



You can see it in the above picture. Something simple. Something easy.

*cue ominous music*

The girls loved the idea, of course, so James go to work going through the piles of wood to see what he would need to use. About this point I suggested that it might be nice if the playhouse was just a little bit bigger than the coop, making a balcony up top, and a covered place underneath where the girls could park their bikes and scooters. James thought this was a fabulous idea and adjested his plans accordingly.

I'm not sure what happened next. The next time I went outside things were...bigger than I had imagined.



See those cross boards? Those are the supports for the playroom floor. Let me show you from a different angle.



James is over 6 feet tall. The floor will be 8 feet in the air. The playhouse itself will be almost 6 feet tall with a pitched roof. To say that this thing will tower in the air would be an understatement.

Then I got to looking closely. All of the posts seemed kind of far apart. James then explained to me that the dimensions had changed a bit to make it easier to work with the wood we already had.



All told, from one end to the other, starting with the entrance to the chicken yard to the end of the balcony this structure will be 38 feet long. The playhouse floor itself (8 feet off the ground, remember) is 8 1/2 by 14 1/2 feet. For the record, this is almost as big as our bedroom. It started out 5ft by 8ft. The plans now included enclosing the area underneath the playhouse and building shelves/cabinets for even more storage.

Please tell me why we can never, ever stick to a simple plan.

TO BE CONTINUED, AGAIN