Ultimate Guide to Kids Play Structures and Tree Houses: 10 Easy-to-build, Fun Projects

It unfortunately didn’t have what I was looking for in this book.

Many ideas for child play. Good instructions, may not be for the beginner craftsman

This is the first book I've owned by the Creative Homeowner series and I have to say I'm impressed with the quality of the work put into the book. The illustrations are very clear and plentiful. The book is split into 4 sections, part 1 (5 chapters) deals with planning, design, materials, wood types, finishes and general pointers to help first time builders. It's typical generic starter stuff you find in a lot of construction reference books, but there is some very useful info such as in the wood selection section. Part 2 deals with the swing set construction. Part 3 deals with the smaller easier projects like the sand box and picnic table. Part 4 deals with the harder tree house projects.I didn't put 5 stars for two reasons, 1st reason is I found the book tittle is a little miss leading stating 10 easy to build fun projects. It's more like 5 out of the 10 are easy weekend builds, the bigger projects like the swing set and the tree houses are certainly not projects that a beginner builder would want to tackle alone. All the projects are very well detailed with respect to the wood cutting schedule to give a beginner the confidence in attempting to build these projects, but the harder or bigger projects will take a seasoned builder min of 2 weekends to put together if not more, so a beginner may take twice that.2nd reason, it didn't cover any ideas about using reclaimed wood. The book does have a green edition badge on the cover but don't be fooled, this is simply for the book print itself which is more of a light green seeing how it only used 10% recycled paper. With more and more construction material reclaiming centers popping up, I thought it could have had a small section on covering something that could save people money and the environment. It's a 2008 printing, I can't believe there wasn't enough available info on such a subject to print a least a small page on how one could go about going green on their build.As you can see my criticisms are fairly superficial and if I could I would have put 4 1/2 stars because of this.I highly recommend this book to beginners and seasoned builders alike. It's a great reference to have on hand and for less than $12 dollars this book is a steal for what it offers you. Myself I will certainly give the other Creative Homeowner series a serious look at because of how well I found this one to be put together, easy to read, lots of illustrations, and tons of details.

I bought this for my father, who is interested in building his own playhouses as a side business. When he received it, he told me he had spent some time in Barnes & Noble checking out the book previously and had decided not to get it because of the price. Apparently it's a good book and the price here makes it worth getting!

Great book, can’t wait to start building a play ground for my kids.

This is not a really helpful book for a novice builder. If you already have experience at building things, this book would be fine.

Great book of ideas!

Great guide for designing and building play structures. I wanted to design and build my own structure and found this a useful planning tool. It provided the data I needed to answer safety and design questions like how to determine the height and length of a slide, what is the safe spacing and height for swings, what is the right spacing for ladder rungs and railings to avoid entrapment, what is the recommended clear space around the structure? I did find the designs somewhat dated and there are better hardware options available now, than when this book was originally written. For instance, rather than build an expensive single multi-board wooden post to support a beam, you can substitute a heavy welded bracket that accepts 4x4 legs and 4x6 beam for perfect A-frame designed with a safe angle away from the swings. A lot of discussion on lag screws and carriage bolts and importance of recessing them, but obsolete if you use the new washer-head star-drive construction screws engineered to hold better and not require pre-drilling!