As we mentioned previously, Day 1 was Wednesday March 30th. The playset was delivered in the afternoon and my wife let me know while I was at work.

I know that the stereotype of these types of endeavors is that it’s a ton of work and not enjoyable at all. But at least at this point, I was really looking forward to it.

The kids and I often do these Build and Grow kids clinics at Lowe’s. They’re just free kits that let kids build various things out of wood. So we were just calling the playset “Dad’s Build and Grow” 😀

So I was pretty stoked to come home. Unfortunately, I was informed that there was a Toys R Us Birthday Gift “emergency”. So I had to take him down there which cut into my day time.

But when I got back, everyone was excited to start!

When I got home, I asked if there were “instructions” or anything and Carolyn said she didn’t know. An examination of the boxes indicated that the instructions were, oddly enough, in the box labeled “Instructions in this box”! The site said it came in 5 boxes, though it turned out that one of the “boxes” was just the slide. The other 4 boxes were chock full of wood (and fastening and other hardware)

The kids all know what the first step of any Build and Grow is – “make sure you have all the pieces!” So that’s what we started with. You can see us in the first picture all carrying piece “A1”.

We started out trying to find all the pieces in order (As, then B, etc.), but quickly found that to be difficult – each box had a packing list that did say which pieces were in which box, but within each box, they could be anywhere in the box, so it was hard to find where in the box a particular part would be.

So we decided to just take all the parts out of the boxes, organize them, and then inventory them after they were all organized and out of the boxes. When darkness fell, we had managed to empty out the first two boxes.

Day 1 time: 1.5 hours
Total time: 1.5 hours
Mistakes made: 0 (but can you feeel the foreshadowing?)