Fort Matthew

Rome wasn't built in a day, right? Neither was what I've affectionately titled "Fort Matthew." Recently, my in laws and nephew moved about 15 min up the road from us to find a bigger yard for Matthew to play. The first project of the big move... Fort Matthew.

My brother in law's old neighbor built one of these in his backyard a few years ago. Mark and I looked over the fence at what seemed to be hundreds of cedar boards and chuckled. Not us, never. Little did I know...

I will admit that I enjoy building stuff. I owned a sizable amount of Legos as a kid and built my share of skateboard ramps as a teen and several Habitat Houses as a bigger fella. This effort crushes all. 

Mark (and Amy) started working on this on a week ago Thursday - ticking off the first 8-9 steps (of 125 total) in 6-7hrs before we came by on Saturday. I naively thought we could put the hammer down and crank out the next 100 steps that weekend...uh rrrrright.

Reading instructions that at times seemed to be printed by a drunk Ikea Designer, we managed to get to the 60s by the end of Sunday. This was after two solid days of 8-10 hrs each day of measuring, screwing, drilling, reading, unscrewing, and redrilling.

 

Last Thursday, Erin and I went over to help Mark slog through the last ~30 steps. After another solid 8hrs of manual labor, Fort Matthew was complete.  

I even bought a small flag to put on the "Crows Nest" (which took about 4hrs to build) because I thought that every Fort needs a flag. Let's hope that this one is never captured, or worse, falls. 

Thanks for reading...