We built the kids a pirate ship playstructure in the backyard in the summer of 2007. At D’s pirate birthday party that year it looked like this: 
(It had removable fabric sides made largely from bedsheets and other repurposed material, held on with velcro. These had portholes, appliqued waves along the bow, etc.) The kids LOVED it. Of course, back then, my kids looked like this:
(Pink and blue pirates in the middle, of course. They were working on decoding a treasure map at the birthday party that year…)
Unfortunately, during my annual post-winter safety inspection of the ship this year, I realized it wasn’t totally structurally sound anymore (the giant hole in the plywood we used as decking was my first clue) and banned the kids from the ship. So they’ve been on me to fix it. Charles and I decided to start by removing the plywood, and here’s what we found:
Apparently, a bunch of the crosspieces and some of the framing boards had rotted as well. Our aversion to using chemically-treated decking material came back to bite us. The vertical pieces are sound, however, so we may just start over, and add on some features appropriate to larger kids (monkey bars, rock wall, etc). The plans have yet to be drawn up, but we’ll be looking for some inspiration and trying to move on this quickly. In the meantime, here’s how our ship looks. It makes me kind of sad:
It is strictly off-limits for the kids, and they are kind of sad about that too, so we’ll have to move quickly on this! And yes, that is our neighbor’s really spendy and fancy playstructure that you can see through the trees… so what?
