My dream backyard : thescruffypirate.org

My dream backyard

When I am on long road trips by myself (like driving from Oregon to Colorado or vice versa) I do a lot of day dreaming. This day dreaming varies in topic quite a bit from websites to songs I want to learn on the guitar to hiking the Pacific Crest Trail again to the best way to design a tent to what I want my dream house to look like and so on. Well, on my last drive (in February, it's taken me a while to post about this!) I had a stroke of genius about the yard for my ideal house.

There are two things I want to be able to do in my yard:

Play badminton
Play soccer

So, the first thought (and we currently have this in affect at my home in Portland) is to have a removable badminton net and polls so you can play badminton and soccer in the same area. Duh!

But then I decided that it would be neat to have short walls around the playing field so if you are playing soccer you can bounce the ball off the walls and such. So this means around our badminton field we are going to need walls.

But you wouldn't want them too high, because you don't want to feel like you are playing in a cage, and so that people who aren't playing can watch easily. Indoor soccer courts are built with high plexiglass walls but that is just too much. So, we want shortish walls (3 or 4 feet maybe) but above that how about netting? This would work for soccer (if you are going to bounce the ball off the wall, keep it low) and also be beneficial for badminton (we are constantly having to climb over the neighbor's fence to get stray shuttlecocks.

Then at both ends of the court we need to have small goals for soccer. I'm thinking 2 feet square. And this is where the idea really came together. Instead of just having one goal at each end, have two! One low and on the ground and one maybe 5 or 6 feet up in the air. AND have them connected by a rounded tunnel, so that if you score in the bottom hole the momentum will carry the ball up and out the top hole. And vice versa!

I drew up a diagram for the whole idea:

I can't wait to grow up and have a house!

The one problem with it all is that based on the current drawing the thing is about 55 feet long which would require a big yard!

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