The Neverending Basketball Court Saga....

Less than a year after Daniel and I got married, we bought our first home- a cute little rambler. The sweet little house was 960 sq feet with a one car garage. It was an older home that had been completely remodeled.With 3 small bedrooms, a tiny living room, and a kitchen with just a few cabinets, the washer and dryer were actually IN the kitchen. I was just 18 at the time, so owning a home seemed pretty swell :-)

Well, years have gone by, we've multiplied and replenished, and have been blessed to move into our new home in Utah. When we decided to build this home, we knew we wanted to do things our way. We decided we would do them step by step, one thing at a time, to make sure we did things just the way we wanted.

One thing we knew we wanted was a basketball court. This was very important to Daniel. We have 3 sons. Dan has so many fond (some not so fond ;) memories of playing basketball with his dad and brother when he was growing up. He has always wanted to be able to create those same memories with our 3 boys.

And boy, is there a story behind our basketball court. Our lot slopes up significantly in the front. We knew this would limit the room for a court on the driveway because it wouldn't be flat. Because of this, we asked the builders to slope the driveway as steep as possible toward the road, and then flatten it off toward the house. To make a long story short, they didn't do that. The slope of the driveway made it impossible to use any of it to play basketball.

If you know my husband, you can pretty much guess how it went down from there ;-) In the end, the builder agreed to pour a separate basketball court behind the garage, to make up for the mistake. This was a perfect solution to what appeared, at first, to be a big problem.

The court has been in since we closed in November, but we didn't have a hoop. We had been looking for one, had called on a few, but nothing was quite right. One day, Daniel called me from the sporting goods store. He was giddy. Lifetime had come out with a brand new, regulation sized backboard, in the ground hoop. It was 72 inches of glass goodness. However, it was quite a bit more (like 3-5 times more) than we had agreed to spend on a hoop. But THIS was the hoop of all hoops. I knew how important it was to Dan to have a nice court, so I gave him the go ahead, and he bought the hoop.

The hoop in the store

Now the work began. First, Daniel had to dig a 4 ft by 4 ft hole, by hand. He had some help from the Js though, so that made it easier ;)

Once that was done, he had to build a concrete form, insert it into the hole, back fill the dirt around it, and then fill it with concrete. We thought we knew how much concrete we would need, but we ended up making trip after trip to buy more concrete. I think we ended up using 27 bags, to the 13 we thought we would need! The concrete then had to cure for several days.

After that was all done, he was able to install the monster hoop, with the help of a few friends- Voila! Here it was in all it's glory....

Dan, our friend Rob, and Mason, testing it out.

Mason and our neighbor, Jacob, playing ball.

Well, it seems the story should end there....but nothing is ever quite that simple, is it? A few days later, we had a horrific wind storm. The boys had been playing on the hoop the night before and all was well and good. But the next morning, when Dan went outside, this is what he found:

Our $2,000 hoop made it 3 days. It took almost a week, between buying it, having it delivered and getting it installed, just to be able to play on it. In 3 days, it was shattered. We weren't sure what happened. We wondered if it might have been the windstorm. Upon closer inspection, however, there appeared to be a circular impact mark, just about the size of a golf ball. Since we do live on the golf course, we assume that's what happened.

Dan called Lifetime to see if it was under warranty. It turns out that the rest of the hoop is, but not the glass. Replacing the glass would be about $1,000 *gasp*cough*cry*. The Lifetime employee took mercy on us though, and said that one time only, they would replace the glass at no cost to us.

It was several weeks of waiting for the new glass to arrive. We came up with a plan to protect the glass from future damage. Dan bought some plexi glass from Home Depot and cut it to the size of the backboard. He then bolted it onto the back of the metal frame, behind the glass. This way, if another golf ball comes waaaaay out of it's way and happens to hit our glass again, it will only hit the plexi, and hopefully not damage the glass itself.

After that little task was complete, Dan and his buddies once again worked their magic and installed the new backboard.

 Now we HOPE this is the end of this story- besides many years of good-natured (HA!) basketball between my husband, my boys, and many friends and family!