Several hours are needed to inventory and separate parts if you are doing this by yourself. Some instructions are a little vague. My son and I worked together on the construction when he was off work and a neighbor helped one afternoon also. I believe we put in about 40 hours. All of the pieces were shipped but we ended up going to the hardware store for approximately a half dozen bolts. It is quite easy to use the wrong screw or wrong bolt so I wouldn't say they weren't all shipped. My grandchildren love it. My grandaughter refers to it as her "Park". It looks great and we are happy with it.

When I received the playset it looked like a huge task from the 4 boxes of parts. I was able to complete this by myself in about 25 hours. The directions were fairly clear and the wood markings were mostly readable. Assembly was simple and when I ran short of a bag of bolts and 1 floor board a simple call to customer service had all parts on there way to me with no questions ask. My 3 year old is having a ball.

My husband finished putting this together last night, and the kids were thrilled!!! It took him 2 full days, plus several hours prior building individual pieces in the garage before he brought them outside. You won't find a better playset for your money! All pieces were in excellent condition when they arrived, and we weren't missing anything either. Also, shipping was super quick and the freight company who delivered brought it right into our garage (4 large boxes). We are looking forward to years and years of fun in skyfort!!!!

I chose this swing + set because of many reasons but some of the most important to me were the reviews from others that were very helpful, price/without added shipping, many extras that a 7-8 year old wants and just that I loved the look with the bay windows and lookout tower. Do sort the pieces and bag the hardware for each step. I had all the pieces with ours and it took two days 8 hours each to put together.

I normally don't do extended reviews, but since others' reviews were extremely helpful to me, I thought I would contribute by grading various dimensions of the purchase. This item has been up in our yard for two weeks now. PLAYSET SHOPPING AND DUE DILIGENCE: I will start by talking about my shopping experience. Wife and I looked at about 20 other units from various manufacturers and retailers ranging from Rainbow to Gorilla to others. Leisure Time's Skyfort offered the absolute best bang for the buck. Multiple activities with a cool and unique "crow's nest", giving up to 9 kids the ability to play on it. The reviews on this site were quite positive (and in hindsight, accurate). The product content on Sam's website was great (product descriptions, specs and images). Due to the detailed information, I was able to spot out where in my yard I wanted the Skyfort placed, and mark it with cones to get a look at what the footprint would look like in my yard. Sam's and Leisure Time's customer service is incredible. I was missing parts in the shipment. I called Leisure Time on a Friday and told them I needed the parts Saturday since I had hired help the next day. No questions asked, they shipped them to me overnight. Awesome. Grade: A ASSEMBLY AND ASSOCIATED COST: Finding a contractor to do the work was interesting. Some showed no interest due to complexity. The ones who were interested gave quotes ranging from $600 to $1200. You shouldn't have issues finding someone, but expect a high cost. I add that if you are anything short of `handy', farm out the assembly. It is consuming. It requires a ton of patience. I ended up paying $800. I will share that with the hired help, the setup itself took 2 people 2 full days, plus various parts of 3 additional days with one guy (approximately 50 man hours). Website says 24-36 hours for two moderately skilled people. My experience counters that. Mine was done with two highly skilled assemblers with very good experience putting playsets together, though not the Skyfort specifically. I was involved in about 4-6 hours of the assembly. It is not difficult, but it does require a TON of patience and time. And inventory your parts. It took me 5 hours to inventory stuff (I did that on my own since I wanted the contractor to focus on assembly). I was extremely meticulous about inventory. Grade: C+. RECEIPT OF MATERIALS: I was given a 10 day range within which I could expect to receive the item. I received it on day 2 of that range, exactly 7 days from the date of placing the order. The materials come in 4 large heavy rectangular boxes. The driver showed up at the edge of my driveway and struggled to pull the items out of the truck. My driveway is about 6 car lengths. I had to help significantly with the movement of the boxes from the truck to my garage. The website says `curbside delivery', but the driver was pretty much expecting to put the boxes in my garage. I tipped generously due to the effort. Grade: B. `A' on getting the product to me quickly and the effort to get it in the garage, but a `C' on the way the materials are shipped. Not user friendly. QUALITY: I was extremely concerned with quality. I can say that while the Rainbow sets are clearly superior in terms of quality (they use thicker cedar, longer bolts, etc), this set's wood is no slouch. Though I will say that the wood is `Chinese Cedar'. That is not written on Sam's website. If you go to Leisure Time Products' website, however, it is addressed there in the FAQs. Based on what I have seen one week in, it appears very sturdy. Some of the bolts were stripped, and in fact there were some bolts where we didn't have enough. My contractor found other ways to do the job. Grade: B. PLAYSET IN USE: Bottom line is that the kids love it. A ton of activities. My two year old is able to get everywhere except the crows nest. 5 year old can do everything except the monkey bars. 1 year old loves the swing. Perfect for them to grow into. I noticed a couple of people complaining about how close the swings are. They are close, but it if you have three kids on the swing, they have zero chance of hitting each other. I bought a few "after market" items from playsetparts.com like a steering wheel, periscope, two baby swings, some safety strips, etc. GRADE: A+ Overall, I want to give this 5 stars, but have to give 4 given the grades I gave above. It got dinged on the assembly cost/effort, both of which are substantial. Bottom line is that I would buy this again in a heartbeat. Absolute joy to see the kids on it.

It's huge. It has bigger kid appeal. It's beautiful in our yard. The neighbor kids are just as excited as ours. That said. The boards are thin. They creak when we adults have to get on them to build. The instructions are adequate in many places. Less than adequate in many others. I recommend keeping the foreign language instructions. Mostly you just need the pictures. I used the Spanish to look ahead to the next step and retrieve the boards and hardware needed, put washers on screws, etc. so it was ready to go when my husband finished the previous step. We also found one discrepancy on the crow's nest installation of L brackets, where the English instructions called for bolts and the Spanish called for lag screws. We went with the Spanish since the wood had been pre-drilled for lag screws. The English instructions left my engineer husband scratching his head on that one. Consult two sets of directions. This will take perseverance to build yourself. We have building and carpentry in our family background. If you don't, get some help or give yourself plenty of time. Our ten year old wanted to help. Although it's not recommended by the manufacturer, and two adults are absolutely needed in some places, we let him help with sorting the materials--you must sort materials before starting very well or you will spend a great amount of time searching for them later--and retrieving them, holding things down while we attached them, etc. We also let him help to put in some of the easier screws, pound t-nuts, etc. A good skill building lesson for a young man with very close supervision. Of course little ones want to help too, but that is not wise--even to have them around caused a lot of trouble and extra parenting. We gave ours the camera and made her the official photographer of our family project to enable us to work better without a babysitter. We have some odd 1,000 pictures or so of it all now--so clear your memory on your camera before you start. It took us about 6 days of work with interruptions. The neighbors took quite a few strolls around their yards with quick but obvious ganders over the fence trying to figure out what was going up. Just be prepared for interested onlookers. At this price point, it's a very good set. Just wish the floor boards and picnic benches weren't so thin.

Love this playset! We bought this for our 2 year old daughter. She outgrew her toddler set and we figured this set would last her until she was 9 or 10. She absolutely loves it! She plays on it for hours everyday. Loves the rockwall and the look-out tower (she likes to pretend she is Rapunzel). Obviously she is too small for the monkey bars but she hangs off them with daddy holding her. I would not hesitate to recommend this set. It is high quality and well made. We compared this to a set at a big box hardware store, and this set was much nicer and better made at a much lower price. A couple small comments... one, some, not all, of the hardware is cheaply made (screws stripped etc). For a nice set, the hardware should be better. Second, the pieces all come in different boxes with no rhyme or reason. My suggestion is to take an hour and separate the wood by letter and number. You will save hours searching for pieces. I did this for my husband and he was so happy. Believe the 24-48 hour time estimate for assembly. My husband and son built this in about 30 man hours. Overall a great purchase!

Very nice set. Looked for a long time before buying this one. Not hard to assemble, but is very time consuming. Parts are clearly marked. Diagrams are the problem. They use shading to show if boards are attached inside or outside of their rails. Have had to remove and re-install several boards, but overall the directions are easy to follow. Very solid feel to the structure. Has taken 3 adults 15 hours to complete. PS, the slide is pretty fast, watch very little kids so they don't bounce right off the end.

We are very happy with the purchase of this playground. My husband was able to build it in less than 2 days with some help. Our kids and their friends are having a blast playing and the little table is so fun for outdoor meals! A few of the boards did split slightly when putting it together, but overall it’s really good quality and should provide fun for years to come :)

What a great swingset! My wife and I worked together on this for a combined 40 hours. I'll list some of our "tips" that we used, or would use if we were to do this again in the future. #1) Sort out all of the wood pieces. This is vital to make sure you have all of the pieces, but equally important for ease of finding the pieces when it's time to put them together. We literally emptied out our garage and sorted the wood pieces by letter, placing them around our garage...it worked quite well. We noticed a piece was missing, and it was shipped to us within just a few days...great service! #2) We built the "base" in our garage, and then carried it out to it's final destination in our yard before anchoring it down. #3) 2 or more wood clamps REALLY helped us out. I would strongly recommend purchasing some if you don't have any. A big help... #4) We had a Dewalt cordless drill/driver with 2 batteries. We used both batteries on all 3 days that we worked on the project. We found ourselves using 3 different attachments for our drill. A) A phillips screw-driver attachment. B) A small drill bit to drill pilot holes (3/16" or so). C) A 3/8" drill bit to drill holes for the bolts. Having a second cordless drill with just the 3/8" drill bit would have been helpful for us, as we found ourselves switching that one out quite a bit. #5) We also had a CORDED drill/driver that we used only for screwing in the lag screws. This was very nice to have, as if we had used our cordless drill for these, I feel the batteries would have drained much faster. We used the cordless drill only to screw in the wood screws, to drill pilot holes, and to drill the 3/8" holes. #6) We used a simple ratchet with socket quite often to tighten the bolts. We felt it was nice to get a "feel" for how tight to get them, vs. using the corded drill which could overtighten the bolts and crack the wood. #7) We found a jig-saw helpful to us, but for a somewhat frustrating reason. We had to unfortunately cut a few pieces of wood that either didn't fit quite right, or were a bit too long, etc. We started with a sander to get pieces to fit, but ended up finding the jig-saw to be much quicker. #8) The screws, bolts, washers, etc. are very well labeled, which was awesome! We opened the little baggies very carefully so we could still read what was inside the bag. #9) We used a trailer pulled with our lawn mower to haul our tools and all of the screws, bolts, etc. In the morning when we were ready to work, we drove the garden tractor and trailer to the swingset and went to work. When we finished for the day, we drove the lawn tractor and trailer into the garage to protect our tools and keep the hardware out of the elements. This worked well... #10) My wife mostly got the hardware ready for me, got the pieces of wood ready, etc., and read the instructions. It worked pretty well...because you truly can only do one step at a time, so if two people were to try and work on this together, you would quickly run out of room... The time put into this project was worth every minute when we saw our 3 kids' eyes light up when they got to see it for the first time! We've researched a lot of swingsets and this one gave us the most bang for the buck. The kids have used it every day since we put it up! Enjoy! We sure are so far!