My Life with the Boys: Our BIG Project...a.k.a. Our Basketball Goal--April 20-May 1, 2012

Instead of doing several posts about our basketball goal, I'm going to lump everything together into one enormous post...mainly because I'm getting a little tired of blogging, since I've covered several months in the last week. So, here we go...

Pat and I have wanted to get a basketball goal for quite a long time. Oliver loves to shoot around on our neighbors' goals, and honestly, Pat and I both like to play, too! And since we had a little extra money (thank you, tax refund) we decided now would be a good time to get one. After much thought and lost sleep (Pat seriously woke up one night worrying about the placement of this basketball goal) the process began. These are basically the steps involved in building our basketball goal.

1. Dig a 4 foot hole for the base of the pole.
2. Fill in the hole because the placement was not quite right.
3. Dig another 4 foot hole, one foot beyond the first hole.
4. Fill the hole with 18+ bags of cement.
5. Be patient while the cement hardens.
6. Dig out the desired shape of the extended driveway. (Pat thought we needed to extend our driveway to make it more of a straight edge instead of a weird curvy one, thus adding more space to play. I agreed.)
7. Build forms for the new section of the driveway.
8. Fill the new section of driveway with 40+bags of cement.
9. Make the cement look like an actual part of the driveway.
10. Be patient while the cement hardens.
11. Install the basketball goal minus the rim (to deter kids from messing with it as we waited for step #10.)
12. Install the rim and net.
13. Play basketball.

Thanks to Pat, my dad, Wayne, and our neighbor, all of these steps were completed and we now have a new goal!

And now for the photos!