Join Me in Snarkville

Since I’m still over the moon about the fort in my son’s room — and really, he’s lucky he’s cute because I’d SO keep it if that wouldn’t nominate me for the “Worst Mommy Ever” Award.  For now, he gets to keep his fort, for now.

Anyway, the part of the story you really need to know is that according to the directions, you are supposed hang this fort from the ceiling with 6 ropes.  Let me let that sink in for a minute.  Like you, I thought this wasn’t a big deal, until the ability to make six (actually 12) knots and lengths of rope be the exact same length is close to physically impossible.  But I decided that the fine folks knew what they were talking about and I tried.

First, since they included 3 equal lengths of rope that you are SUPPOSED to cut in half.  Deciding quickly that there would be NO way I could hang 6 pieces of rope from the ceiling (heck, trying to get the hooks even was hard enough), I came up with the perfect plan.  I would tie each end of the rope to the hooks on the fort and then loop it  from the hooks on the ceiling.  This would be more like hanging a picture and I could easily level it.  Great plan, right?  Um, no.

You see, I wanted the fort to g all the way to the floor.  The walls are really only about 4 feet high and we have high ceilings in Frankenhouse.  So, after drilling 5 of the six holes for the ceiling hooks (yes, getting sheetrock in both my eyes and all over my hair) it dawned on me that I was easily hanging the fort 5 feet from the ceiling.  And I effectively made a SWING, a swing that was already attracting the attention of a little kitty who should have been named ‘Trouble’.  No, not just any swing, a swing with the rigidity of a sheet hung from the ceiling.  It looked no more like a fort than my backyard looks like an English Garden.  I swore.  I cried.  I shook my fist in the general direction of the canvas sheet hanging from the ceiling and begged to know why it mocked me so.

Then, I had a flash.  When it passed, I noticed something odd.  The side of the fort that was in corner (you know REALLY close to two walls) looked so much better than the side hanging in the middle of the room.  Hmmm.  Do you think I could put those ceiling hooks IN the wall and eliminate the ROPE?  Wait, I’m going to hang a sheet (a heavy canvas sheet, but a sheet nonetheless) from something STABLE like a WALL and not from swinging ropes?  Will it work?  Hmmm.

The answer is yes, it does work.  The fort is held in place with 4 hooks solidly in the wall and two (ONLY 2) pieces of rope.  The front is pulled high to make the peak and the one corner is the one in the ‘middle of the room.’  It was then, after deciding that I can totally leave those three exposed holes in the ceiling alone, that I fell in love with my fort.  I sat gazing at it.  I marveled at the engineering of it.  I amazed myself with the “hooks in WALL, not in ceiling” plan.

And yes, by the time I figured out the wall hook idea, I totally knew why the fort was marked down from $200 to $20.