As a parent, we all know that when your kids are too quiet, it never bodes well! When it gets silent… we usually go looking for the noise makers that are now unusually silent!

Not my parents… no no… somehow, they were never really concerned about where we were, or what we were doing. Due to this lack of supervision, we tended to get into trouble. I told a story once about how we let nearly 2 dozen baby mice loose in the house by accident, only to have my mother discover the mass graveyard in between the cushions of her favorite couch, some months later!

There was also the time when I was riding on the back of my brothers bike and he nearly decapitated me while trying to cut through a trailer park that had one of those steel cords strung across the driveway! Try explaining that mark across my throat to my parents… there aren’t many believable stories to cover over what looked like a noose burn around my neck.

Then there was the time we tied helium balloons around our cats tails and they tore through the house in terror, knocking over anything that wasn’t nailed down… that was a crazy mess! We hadn’t thought about how hard it would be, recapturing the the little fur balls, in order to remove said balloons.

Anyway, I think you can see a picture developing in your minds, as to how unsupervised we were, thereby providing ample time for our latest DIY project!

My brother was about 9 and I was barely 7, when we came up with an idea to build a fort, but not just any fort… we needed a secret one! The problem lay in the fact that we lived in Eastern Oregon… hot dry and flat… no trees for forts! What’s a kid going to do? If we can’t build up, then the logical thing to do is to build down… but where? We decided among ourselves that the back yard seemed the best place to work, because no one went back there and it was easy to hear my mom call us in for dinner.

At first it was easy to cover the hole with the grass we had cut out for digging down underground, but eventually we had to steal a plank of wood to lay over the hole, covering that with the grass. We had nearly dug up against the foundation of the house, before anyone noticed the mounds of dirt we had been throwing willy nilly over the backyard fence. Yup! Got our hind ends paddled and the hole was caved in, refilled and grass restored.

If you’re thinking that this was the end of our DIY ing… think again, my friends! All true DIY ers know the golden rule… if you fail the first time… try try again! And again, we did! We simply moved our construction zone further out into the desert behind the neighborhood we lived in at the time.

We first dug down nearly 6 feet, carving out steps for us to climb up and down out of the hole. From there we dug straight in nearly 15 feet before carving out a hobbit house sized hole under the desert above us. We took the dirt from the hole and spread it all over the area nearby, so that there would be no mounds to be seen by spying eyes… we had learned from our first attempt. We spent nearly a week sneaking blankets, toys, food and water from our home, to stock our new underground bunker.

It wasn’t until my brother got a spanking for stealing candy out of the cupboard, and angrily running away to hide in the tunnel, that anybody had any reason to go looking for our hideaway. All the grown-ups cornered me and questioned if I knew where he was, scaring me into giving up the coordinates of our outlaw camp… the gig was up!

It was a good thing that we were in the heat of summer, when there was no rain to fill the hole and drown us, or worse yet, cave in on us. I will never forget the look of shock, surprise, fear, and awe on my stepdads face as he climbed 6 feet down into our DIY creation. He was both impressed and terrified at what we’d managed to do without accidentally killing ourselves. But he also never trusted us again, regularly patrolling the property and surrounding areas, and locking up all of his tools!

What can I say… if I’m gonna DIY something, I say, “go big or go home!”

Here, have a cookie…