My last post kind of left the story hanging about my adventure in assembling the Sunray 2008 Playsystem. I apologize as life showed up and booted me in the gut with a bevy of far more important tasks.

As a brief recap to the previous adventure, I worked my rump off all day Sunday trying to make some real progress on the assembly of a new wooden swing set and while that did happen, I didn’t make but a dent in the overall construction of this monstrous thing.

Come Monday afternoon, I had about an hour of daylight to work with. After lugging out all my tools and gathering the necessary parts I think I completed maybe a step or 2 before it got too dark to work. Tuesday I left work about 2 hours early and got a full 3 hours of work in. 10 steps or so and I had an assembled roof and half of the vertical slats on the clubhouse portion. It was encouraging to see this thing start to come together. Wednesday night I worked for about an hour outside and then I moved indoors to assemble the rock wall.

The time constraint that I had put on myself was governed by the fact that at 10am the following morning a host of energetic children would be attending a playgroup at my home and this thing just had to be assembled enough so that the kids wouldn’t kill themselves. That was the goal.

After a late night in the garage, I got up early on Thursday and headed outside. I made quick work of the remaining steps, sans the swing assembly, and got to work only 2 hours late. The kids had a great time on the thing and spent the whole playgroup outside.

I spent the upcoming Sunday, also known as Super Bowl Sunday, building the swingset assembly and testing it out. As it stands, there are still a few extra accessories that need to find their home up on the Sunray, but I’m glad to report that the major assembly is done and the kids are loving it. This thing is even heavy duty enough to hold me without shifting. I mean, I’m but a paltry 5’11’ – 165 lbs, but still. Our last set would bow and creak if I merely sat on the swing, much less attempted to swing on it.

All in all, we are very happy with the purchase of the Sunray 2008. The instructions were clear and the included DVD was a big help. My words of advice to those of you considering building one is this:

Separate the hardware into bags or bins the night before. Searching bags A – M or whatever for a screw was a pain in the butt. Going to a bag or bin with the name of the screw or bolt on it would have sped up the process immensely.