Backyard Pirate Ship Playhouse - rained out - AGAIN

Good evening all.

So Friday night it rained, them Saturday it rained, then I'll give you one guess at what happend today.  This is bullcrap!  As I write this at 7:30 at night, it's still pouring.  I'm this frickin close to rounding up the animals in the barn and getting them on the ship, just in case.

Anyways, it did let up just long enough for me to install the crane.

Now this thing isn't quite finished yet as I am not filled with confidence that my son will follow my instructions to not lift anything heavier than a bag of potatoes with this.  Something tells me that at some point I'll catch him trying to lift the dog or one of the goats onto the deck of this ship, so I'm going to reinforce the aft mast with angle steel I have in the barn.  I need to sand it a bit as it's rusted a bit over the past few years and I'll paint it black as with all the other hardware. 

Anyways, as you can see this thing swivels so he can work with it on both sides of the ship as well as anywhere he wants on the forward deck.

As I've mentionned before, our son is very mechanicaly inquisitive, so I know he's going to play with this feature A LOT.  If you were to build this for younger children or if this was for a playground where you wouldn't have a lot of adult supervision, you'd probably want to stick with a slide and some swings on this.

You can see that pine that's been soaking for a few days isn't too pretty.  I will remedy this next weekend (Canadian Thanksgiving) when I will have a long weekend to work on it.  Plan is to spend a day finishing all the pine then a colleague has loaned me a paint sprayer that I'm going to use to stain the whole thing.

As for choice of colours, this has been the subject of a light debate that will quickly erupt into a full blown argument when we finally come to buying the stain.  My opnion is to go with a more traditional pirate colour but my wife wants to go all technicolour on this bad boy.  I'll let you wait for the pictures to see who won.

So then it started pouring again so back into the workshop I went.  Slowly getting ready for a few projects that could keep me busy when it's raining as well as after I'm done with the ship. 

Thinking of making a few adirondak chairs.  They're pretty pricy, the nice sturdy ones at least, and I'm getting cocky enough that I think I can build one myself.  In fact, I'm so full of myself that I think I can improve upon the time tested design.  We'll see.

Also need to build another shelving unit for the ever increasing Lego collection.  I've got a nice sheet of birch plywood that I don't really remember buying but Im sure going to use it.

On the topic of buying and forgetting about it, one piece of advice, KEEP YOUR RECEIPTS!  While sorting through the barn, I have discovered enough electrical supplies to build another barn, and tools I've likely only used once.  Although this project has required a lot of tools I hadn't used in a while.

Suffice it to say that I probably have 1000 to 1500$ worth of good supplies that I'm going to need to find another project for next spring.  Possibilities are endless.

Be sure to drop by again.

A.