Last summer, our next-door neighbor Chris moved out of Willow Glen to be closer to where his daughter would be attending school in the fall. As he was packing up, he made a fateful (for us) decision: he was finished tearing down and reassembling the playhouse he’d built for his daughter every time he moved, and he graciously offered it to us.

Chris and Julie worked all afternoon one weekend, hauling the disassembled pieces of the playhouse over to our yard. The process was made more tedious by the dilapidated fence separating our properties; it might have been easier to just tear down the fence and carry everything directly across. Better still, the structure was apparently home to what Julie insists were black widow spiders, which lent the venture a heightened sense of excitement and danger.

The pieces sat on our patio for a few weeks, until Julie’s brother Bill and his friend Wayne swung through town for a visit. Never one to shy away from making good use of visiting family (as Bill probably should have remembered from his last visit, the month before Julia was born), Julie put the pair to work, and they got the frame of the first floor of the playhouse put together that weekend.

Julie and I made good progress on the second story—yes, the kids’ playhouse has more floors than our actual house—the next weekend, and there things sort of stalled. We took a trip to Chicago, the kids started school, and the next thing you know, the rainy season came.

This spring, then, Julie issued an ultimatum: we finish the playhouse by July, or she would hire someone to finish it for us. This made an impression on a couple of levels. First, not completing the project on our own would have felt like a massive failure of parenting, perhaps one that would leave a lasting mark on the kids’ psyches. Second, I’m cheap.

With renewed motivation, we pushed forward, and though we didn’t quite make it by the deadline, we did finally complete construction about 13 months after we started. Now the kids want to paint it.

We’ve posted pictures covering the long history of the project. Please don’t forward them to our insurance agent, as I’d like to avoid being forced to increase our personal liability coverage.