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NO PLAYING AROUND

I am assembling a playground unit for my daughter, and I have full confidence that it will be ready just in time for her grandchildren to enjoy it.

I knew going into this endeavor that it was going to take a while, but I never imagined -- despite my clear acceptance of my own mechanical ineptitude - that it would be this consuming.

The unit that we ordered is called Fort Frontier. It's one of those wooden ones with a slide, some swings and a little fort area. It is a far cry from the swing sets of my youth, which were assembled with flimsy, hollow metal tubes and pre-rusted bolts.

When it first arrived at our home, my wife called me with a hint of concern in her voice. The delivery truck had dropped it off in our driveway, and she felt there was no way that the future Fort Frontier could be housed in three boxes. Clearly, she did not try and move these boxes. You would be amazed how compactly a bajillion pounds of lumber can be stored for shipment.

The first thing I noticed when I started unpacking Fort Frontier was the bag of hardware that it came with. It was about the size of a kitchen trashbag, and was filled to the brim with screws, nuts, bolts and the like. I held it up to my wife and she, in a ringing endorsement for my abilities, said, "Oh, noooooo."

From the beginning, I had planned to recruit assembly help from friends. But when I saw that the manufacturer said that it would take between eight and 14 hours to put together, I knew that I would not be able to corral people for that long. For one thing, there is a limit to the amount of beer a cooler would hold.

So I decided that I would try and assemble some of the smaller parts ahead of time. Then, when I needed to put the pieces together, I would call in the cavalry, and we would have an old fashioned Fort Frontier raisin'.

Well, after about four hours, I had finally unloaded all of the lumber. I am assuming that the manufacturers did not count unpacking time into the assembly time, because when I cast a glaze over my garage, I saw what looked like numerous log cabins that had been hit by a category five hurricane. My wife came out into the garage, looked at the lumber strewn about and said, "Uh, how can I get my car in here?" I laughed a hearty laugh, because even at that point, I knew that it was going to be a long time before her car lived a sheltered life.

I opened up the instruction manual and decided to start at Step 1. I know this sounds like the logical move, but trust me: That is a major improvement. Used to be, I would pick whichever section in the instruction manual looked like it would be the most fun. Generally, that is the section that involves the use of a hammer.

I started on Step 1 at about 2 p.m. At about midnight, I was ready to take on Step 2. And I am pretty sure that the remaining 24 steps would not be a four-hour deal.

There are two main reasons why Step 1 took so long. First off, progress is slowed greatly when I have to stop every seven minutes to answer the questions, "Is my swing set ready?"

Secondly, had I done Step 1 the right way on the first try, it probably would not have been as time intensive. But doing and undoing Step 1 20-30 times tends to add on to the process. Each time I thought I had completed the first step, I would realize that I had a board turned the wrong way or the wrong bolt or had accidentally fastened something to the wall of the garage.

Even my wife came out to try and help me make heads or tails of it at one point, and that was just a bad idea from the start. My wife can look at these things (instructions, I think they're called) and figure them out in a matter of minutes. Well, let's just say that eight hours into the process, my guy ego can take only take so much more.

I managed to make it through Steps 2 and 3 over the next few nights, and I feel like I will be ready to bring the help out to assemble the entire project. Hopefully, I will have plenty of help from kind friends. Hopefully, they will know how to read instructions.