We bought the Backyard Discovery Skyfort II for our Grandchildren. We purchased in at Sam's Club in Florida and delivered to my son's new house in North Carolina. Our visit was planned for this past weekend, driving there on Saturday and returning Monday, with the weekend to set up swing set. First, I did (or thought so) carefully research size of boxes to ensure it would fit in our truck. When my husband went to pick it up, yes the boxes all fit perfectly in bed of truck under our Tonto cover but somehow the slide was never mentioned anywhere for pick up size dimensions. (This was pretty much our only hiccup). After securing slide to top with ratchet straps, we made our way to NC arriving around 3:30 Saturday afternoon. Weather was great so we proceeded to unload. My daughter in law had googled and researched everything she could find about assembly and was ready. Research said it would take anywhere up to 60 hours to complete. We were able to complete project with 5 adults (2 of which were very handy with building and tools and at least 3 people working at a time) in about 16 hours. It went extremely smoothly thanks to organizing everything ahead of building and having a system that sort of evolved but worked splendidly. First in a large area, we separated wood into piles based on letter (leave lots of room especially for "M" and "H") and actually used alphabet wall hangings for identification. After separating by letter, we organized each pile into numerical order. On afternoon of day 1, after organizing wood, we decided to start with building the first main pieces - rock wall, ladder, gable windows, monkey bars and swing brace. It did not take long to figure out that the hardware also needed to be organized. So best advice I can give is to save plastic containers and separate all the hardware into them. keep all bolts together, screws together, etc and label containers with sharpie with size and last two letters of part number. They also go in order so very easy to go find 2 of bolt #19, etc. The minutes you take to organize will save you hours during the construction! My daughter in law and I collected the pieces needed, my college age daughter read out instructions while my son and husband built. FOLLOW DIRECTIONS, GO IN ORDER!!!!! While they were working on one page, we would take picture of next page on our phones and one of us would collect wood and other would collect hardware. This kept everything flowing smoothly. Day 1, we worked about 4 hours and that was organizing and completing the extra sections. Day 2 we began building the actual fort following same process. We worked from 9:30 am until 9:30 pm stopping for a couple hours each at lunch and dinner so about 8 hours total. Not everyone was working all the time, there were children to watch and food to prepare but always at least 3 people were busy. We were able to finish everything except the roof on the club house. Day 3, my son had to go to work so we were short a person but by this time we were down to big sections and had a routine. We were able to complete roof and attach all the major sections. I know I said go in order but we actually skipped the railing on the crows nest while we completed the other major things for 2 reasons. We had to leave after lunch and knew that was something my daughter in law could finish without us, also it allowed the girls to start swinging and using slide while we worked. However we were able to finish by lunch time with everything, so we worked about 4 hours day 3 - and back home in Florida by 10pm. It was a lot of work but we had a great time and definitely allows for family bonding!
Customer reviews for Backyard Discovery Skyfort II Cedar Swing Set/PlaySet for
