This is one of the only projects that I have completed and I am very pleased with the way it turned out. Though a word of caution it was more work than I thought it would have been.

My daughter absolutely loves going to the local parks. The climbing frame, the swings everything about it. Where we live is about a mile and a half from the nearest play area! No doubt some of you are thinking, well make her walk, but the busy roads and the fact she is six put me off. Although I know you would have had to walk it when you were younger infact you have a 10 mile round trip to school etc.

So now my mind was made get a climbing frame. It seems there are two choices in the climbing frame market wooden or metal. I'm not too keen on the metal ones, the look mainly rather than anything else. So wood it was. After a few hours research it appeared that if I was to buld a climbing frame I also have to comission a surveyor so I could get a mortgage on it. The cheapest method I could find was buying a flat pack including all the fixings and wood and then assemble it myself, but it would cost £800+. Bit more than I wanted to spend! Back to the research.

Several hours (read days) later I found a better solution provided by a company called Jungle Gym. Next was to find a supplier. Not a lot seems to written about Jungle Gym, B&Q are suppoed to sell it but never seem to have any in stock. I did find a company in Sussex called North Park Farm Activity Toys. However now having done too much research and running out of time I couldn't use their delivery service. So a 120 mile round trip and I had the stuff.

Jungle Gym provide the kits in a modular form so you can add exactly what you want. The kits included all the fixings required for the frame, you just had to source the wood and you had to cut it all to size yourself. As a rough guide I paid roughlt £150 for the various kits for this project. I'm going to make a bit of plug here for Wickes. They were cheaper for the wood than the local timber yards so £200 ponds worth of wood later I was ready. A quick word about the wood here. I opted to buy softwood and then treat it myself, the cost of hardwood being prohibitive and the fact that I don't really want the climbing frame to be there in 50 years time. So if the stuff does do exactly what it says on the tin, I'll have 10 years. If not I guess I'll have to replace a few bits.

The kits themselves are very good and the instructions very clear, a word of warning though, they suggest that two inexperienced adults should be able to construct the kit in 5-6 hours. I spent twenty hours fetching, cutting, sanding, sealing and staining the wood. Then it took 3 of us (granted we're not master craftsman, but we have used a saw before) 9 hours to put it together with all the power tools under the sun.

I can though throughly recommend Junlge Gym.