A hobbit-hole in my backyard? It may sound crazy, but I can tell you that my kids love it. It is the coolest playhouse ever. Plus, they can enjoy the grassy hill for sledding in winter and water sliding in summer. This was all my wife's idea. She dreamt it, and I got to be the one to bring it to reality. I'm not a construction expert; this was a total do-it-yourself job by a complete amateur. It has turned out rather nicely, I think. Here is the story of how it came to be.

Since this is in blog format, the posts are in order from newest to oldest. To read this in chronological order, start with How it all Began and use the "Newer Post" links. Or click on the links under Blog Archive, in order.

Sunday, May 25, 2008

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...

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