Updating the old swing set

The swings broke on our swing set.  I looked up the cost for new swings (yikes! they're expensive). Our youngest is 8 and doesn't swing a lot. I thought about taking the whole thing down, but then we would lose the water slide.  (As noted before, my children are anti-water. They've seen The Wizard of Oz a few too many times. The water slide is for their friends and cousins who appreciate my brilliance.)

Incidentally, we found a way to get the slide in the pool.  The slide doesn't lift so we slid the pool under it before inflating.  It was one of those duh moments. If you want to check the original water slide post, go here.

Anyway, back to the swing part.  I decided to get rid of the swings and put in something that we can all enjoy - a hammock!

First, we rearranged the chains. We had one of those teeter totter things at the end so we left one side in place and moved the other as far to the other end as possible. My original plan involved canvas and a lot of wasted time.  As I said, that was my original plan.  We don't need to dwell on that.

Then we discarded the original plan and got a simple rope hammock from Amazon.  (My bamboo had quite the growth spurt, didn't it.  One day it will cover the neighbor's weird addition. I call it my bamboo jungle.  My husband calls it a weed bush.)

I used a knife to cut the plastic covering the chains and slid a hook inside, then I used the rope that came with the hammock to secure it.  Here's what it looks like.

 And some detailed shots of the set up.  You probably could just skip the chain but I wanted to be sure that it was secure (because falling isn't fun). I also hung the foot end a little lower than the head end so we wouldn't have our feet as high up as our heads.

The hammock would have been crooked if I hadn't used the chains.  The blue rope just keeps it from folding weird.

Here's a better shot of the hook I used.  I got them from Walmart.  They can support about 200 lbs each.

One more shot of the finished project.  My daughter is looking forward to curling up with a book outside.