I am very disappointed in the Swing-N-Slide Clubhouse kit that I bought at Lowes. Here's why:
1) The instructions give incorrect measurements. For the height of the floor, they showed the measurement of 59.5 inches from the inside of a 6" board to the top of a 2x4 (shown the same in two different diagrams). But after I had the frame all built, I discovered they should have shown it from the BOTTOM of the 6" board. Now my club house floor is 5.5 inches too high which means the slide is too fast (it makes quite a difference--I have since raised the bottom of the slide), the door to the club house is too low and all of the openings up to the fort (rock wall, ladder, slide) are too low.2) The hardware is zinc electroplated and not zinc hot-dipped. The new ACQ wood calls for hot-dipped screws and bolts because it is more corrosive than the old CCA wood (which contains arsenic). The ACQ wood manufacturers say that electroplated screws and bolts should NOT be used. I had to buy all new hardware because I didn't want all of the fasteners rusting in a few years.
3) The instructions are incomplete and contain numerous errors. The instructions say to attach carriage bolts to the frame at the noted locations, but no where in the instructions are those locations shown. There were also at least three other places where the measurements were incorrect (but they weren't as serious as the error for the floor height). I seriously doubt anyone at Swing-N-Slide actually built something from these instructions.I went with Swing-N-Slide because I liked the design and I saw a few people on this forum say that the directions were clear. After going through a very aggravating week building this thing (the instructions say 12-16 hours!), I wanted people to know the drawbacks of going with Swing-N-Slide.
Sean