Dream On

My wife dreams big. She gets a picture in her head of what something could be and it quickly becomes very real to her. No sooner had the idea struck her to build a hobbit-hole in our backyard, it became one of her main ambitions. We were going to have a hobbit-hole in our backyard. We just were.

My wife is the dreamer. I am the doer. I get to be the one who turns the before picture into the after picture. Usually, I just can't see it (at least at first)--whatever the idea is. It's not that I think her ideas are bad, it's just that I can't see a realistic possibility that I will be able to achieve her vision. But through our marriage, she has proven time and again that if she can dream it, I can do it.

For a long time, I kept telling my wife that this is one dream that would have to remain a dream. I thought it would be totally awesome IF we could do it, but that was a really big "if." I ran countless scenarios through my mind on how this could come to be, and each time I thought, "There is no way." Whatever design I thought of seemed like it would be either structurally unsound or else ridiculously expensive.

I tried to put it out of my mind, but my wife was persistent. She didn't prod me or anything. She just continued to talk about it as if it were a matter of fact--to family, to friends, to the kids and me. "It is going to be so great when we get the hobbit-hole built," she would say. I wanted it to happen, too, but I lacked the vision.

Trampoline Project (Genesis of the hobbit-hole idea)

As mentioned before, the idea for the hobbit-hole was sparked by a pile of dirt resulting from an in-ground trampoline project. Here is a brief summary of that project.

When we first got the trampoline, we just stuck in on the corner of the weed patch.

We hired someone to dig a pit for us, and I rounded it, flattened it, and built the retaining walls.

When the trampoline was done, we no longer had a weed patch, but a mound of dirt. This we had flattened out, as we weren't sure what we were going to do with it yet. Looking at this raised region of dirt, my wife began to envision a hill sort of "growing" up from it. And then she realized, "Hey, if we are going to put in a hill, why not make it into a hobbit-hole?"

You may be wondering about now how a person can look at a dirt patch like this, raised only about a foot and a half above ground-level and think hobbit-hole, but you don't know my wife....

Before... (a weed patch)

When this is all done, I will have before and after pics. For now I have before and in-progress pics. This is what the area of the hobbit hole looked like when we first moved in. (It's the weedy patch to the right, in front of the fruit trees.)

Apparently, this lighter green-colored area used to be a garden spot, but at the time, it was overgrown with some nasty weeds--goat heads and burrs everywhere. It was the furthest thing from a fun place for kids to play.

To the left was a dilapidated play structure, standing in another weed patch. This used to be a play area, with wood chips as a ground cover. This area would also factor into the genesis of the hobbit-hole as I will explain later.

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...