How it all began...

My wife and I are huge fans of Tolkien, and so are our kids. I read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings to my daughters when they were 6 and 7, and have now started reading them to my 5 and 7 year old boys. We all love the movies as well.

Like most kids, ours have active imaginations and they love to play outside. We have a big backyard and ever since we moved into our home, we have wanted to make it a fun and adventurous place for our kids to be. At first we were thinking along more traditional lines: a sandbox, a swingset, perhaps a trampoline. The idea for building a hobbit-hole in our backyard was not in our original plans.

We had friends in our previous neighborhood who had a small man-made hill in their backyard for sledding and water slides. We thought that was a neat idea, but at first we did not seriously think of doing something like that ourselvses.

Then a family member unexpectedly gave us their trampoline. Our first project was to put that in the ground, which resulted in a pile of dirt. It was that pile of dirt that sparked my wife's imagination...