Matt ripped out the carpet this week, and we're experimenting with staining the mismatched flooring we found underneath (3 kinds of wood! Maple, Fir and Pine!). It's really weird how the carpet made the room look bigger -- it now has a more intimate feel. And the bare floor gives us a place to do a little fun faux-painting if we get around to it. Also, a mundane little detail is that problems with our HVAC system seem to have made this room sort of musty -- we're hoping that getting rid of the carpet will help with that.
Regular visitors know that we rebuilt the whole slide mountain in 2007. We wanted a lower slide that wasn't quite so steep, since most of our visitors are tiny. It took two tries, but I think the current design works great. Someday, we'd like to get around to replacing the pump pipe organ that used to be under the mountain. And then we should invent something for the area behind the ropebridge that would fit with the room's theme, which -- if you didn't know -- is "World Music Instruments Re-interpreted as Playground Equipment".
The urge to spruce up this room came when I stumbled across this photo on the internet, by a Kidcity visitor who also happens to be a great Flickr photographer: Lizzart? When I saw this close-up of the saddle on the see-saw, I thought: geez, we need to get in there and do some touch-up painting! So I called Ted Esselstyn, the amazing artist who worked with me on our early exhibits, and he's going to stop in some time this summer to brighten these creatures up a bit! By the way, you can see more about Ted's career in making lots of Connecticut places more funky at his website.
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