When we bought our house last year a sizeable chunk of garden was taken up by a mysterious circle of paving slabs in a sea of golden gravel. Not a druidic ritual site, but rather the footings for a 15ft trampoline that the previous owner – I am delighted to say – had gifted to the next-door neighbours prior to our arrival. With two young boys and another baby imminent, we decided the major spring project of 2019 was to transform this space into a climbing frame area.

I thought about designing and building something from scratch, a progression from the sandpit with fold-out benches I’d built in our first house. However, when I investigated the cost of buying all the treated wood, plus the effort of having to cut, plane and sand it all to size, an off-the-shelf kit worked out as easily the most cost-effective option.

A bit of Googling led us to Fatmoose, a company based in Germany that uses a modular system to produce a vast range of timber climbing frames, everything from a modest swing to an epic five-level jungle temple. Our criteria was: slide, sandpit, double swing and we chose the mid-range ‘Fruity Forest XXL’ (We bought it from the company’s ebay site, where for some reason it was about £100 cheaper than the same product on Amazon or their own website – we paid £409.95).

While the frame made its way across land and sea from Germany, we prepped the site – an epically laborious task of scooping up several tonnes of gravel – 120 rubble bags of the stuff. On the plus side, rather than cart it to the dump we chanced our luck by sticking it on gumtree for free and ended up getting offered £50 for someone to come and take it all!

With the gravel gone I enlisted the help of my brothers to heft the paving slab circle out of the way, lift the supporting concrete, smash it to smithereens (30 more rubble sacks!), and do a little bit of levelling.

The climbing frame took about three weeks to arrive, but when it did it did so in style on a full-size articulated lorry complete with pink flaming paint job. Pretty astonished it made it down the street.

The climbing frame kit contains all the wood, nuts, bolts, screws and accessories (slide, swings etc) you need as well as comprehensive building instructions. The wood is all pre-cut, but it requires all the ends to be rounded off with a sander and some pilot holes to be drilled. Some of the wood was also a bit mouldy on the outside when it arrived, but this is normal and rubs off.

In addition to the climbing frame kit we bought: • 40 x 70 litre bags of play bark from CPA Horticulture (to cover an area of approx. 5x5sqm), • A replacement ground sheet to suppress weeds, • 6 bags of play sand from B&Q, • 12 bags of Postcrete from B&Q• 12 Light Duty Steel Flat Straps 30 x 2.5 x 300mm from Tool Station (as ground anchors) • An assortment of lager and real ale.

In terms of tools, you will need a rachet set, drill-driver, sander, spirit-level, set square, 8mm allan key, and a few spare PZ2 bits as there is A LOT of screwing.

Construction was pretty straight forward. I did it over a couple of days – and with some much-appreciated assistance from my brothers. Attaching the swing beam is also ideally a two-person job, but my brothers had naffed off by that point, so I managed it with the aid of a couple of clamps.

The climbing frame needs to be anchored to the ground and rather than spending another small fortune on the official ground anchors from Fatmoose (£12.95 a pair!), I bought a dozen 300mm steel flat straps from Toolstation (70 pence each!) which I bent the ends of before attaching to the climbing frame and setting in Postcrete with the help of a young assistant. Once the climbing frame was built and anchored rock solid to the ground, I had the final job of spreading 40 bags of bark.

All in this project cost about £800. £410 for the frame, £250 for the bark, £100 for the sand, postcrete, ground sheet and flat straps, and £40 for beer. Not cheap, but I’m think cost-per-use over the next 10-12 years will make it a sound investment…..and definitely preferable to a trampoline!