Operation: Skate Zone stage 1 complete

The rink is assembled! It took a few days, thanks to the lack of daylight after I get home from work, but it's done! Man, that was a good feeling. Father-son bonding time, working together as a team...it all came together. Now, it's just a matter of filling it and letting it freeze.

This is how it looked the other night when I first mentioned the rink. The tarp was laid out, and we had the wood more or less in place. Looking back, I realize that we didn't need to do more than just trim the boards, instead of cutting them to twelve-foot lengths; the sides are almost sixty feet long anyway. Still, it gave us some smaller pieces to use, which came in handy later on.

And here's what it looks like now.  The ground isn't exactly even; the near left-hand corner is definitely lower than the one with the two stakes, and there's a gap on the far end in the middle where the boards are held up by the cross-piece. Honey Bunny wasn't going to let me dig up the front yard to make it all even, though, so we make do. If you look very closely, you'll see that there is a small piece of wood under the left-hand corner, raising it up off the ground to even things out a bit more. It's still not perfect, but it doesn't have to be.

And yes, that's the highway behind the rink; we put it in the front yard. We couldn't have done this back on our Ontario property, that's for sure; the backyard wasn't that big. Here, we had to weigh pros and cons of where on the property we wanted to put it. Having eighteen acres is pretty awesome.

So, the next step is filling it up, one bit at a time. Ashton is going to hose it down today and get a thin layer in place so it can start to freeze; we don't want to overdo it, of course, since we don't want to drain the well dry. But if we work on it a little bit each day, and the weather continues to be cold, we'll have a nice rink before Christmas Day.

One of our neighbours stopped by yesterday and mentioned that there's a pond up the road that freezes in winter, and someone keeps it clean for skating. Well, that's great, but that's nearly two miles down the road; this is a hundred feet from our front door. I know which way I'd rather go. And we can invite people over to skate, too; it's a great way to socialize, even in the days of Corona-mania.