Four years ago, my family moved here to Maryland. We decided that Idaho was just too crowded, so we found a nice little place in the country and now most of the year you don’t even know we have neighbors (the trees hide them, when the leaves are on).

And before you go jumping to any conclusions on what this post is about – no, I’m not going to be discussing the great connections I’m making with my neighbors. I’m not going to be talking about how I have been able to reach out and form wonderful friendships with them. I’m actually going to be talking about building a bridge. Literally. A bridge.

So our property is pretty big, and a chunk of it is forested and has gone wild with a nasty thorned vine. After about 3 months of living here, I noticed that I hadn’t gone to the wild section of our property yet. That was when I decided to make a goal for myself. I decided that I wouldn’t cross our teeny tiny creek to go into the big scary woods until I had built a bridge. That was 3 and 1/2 years ago.

In that time, I have done a lot of stuff. But one thing I have not done was figure out how to build a bridge. It was always just in the back of my mind. We’d go to Home Depot, or a nursery and see a bridge and I’d think, ‘Oh, yeah, I need to build that bridge’. Certainly I could have just looked up a video on YouTube, but there were always too many other fun things to do, so I kept putting it off.

And finally, just recently, I was looking out our back window, where we dumped our stair stringer ‘temporarily’ 2 years ago. There it was sitting, doing nothing, just minding my own business. As I was looking at it, I though ‘What would happen if you removed all of the steps, and hammered them into the underside of the stringer instead? That would look like A BRIDGE!’

So on Saturday, my boys and I did just that: they helped me pry off the steps and I did the nailing on the other side. Voila! A bridge.

Now, some of your smarty pants out there may already have thought of the problem with this particular bridge – the bottom is jagged, because that’s where the steps used to be. Well, again I requested the kids’ help and we gathered A LOT of rocks from our creek bed. Luckily we have a limitless supply of rocks there. We put the rocks on either side of the creek for the bridge to rest on, and there ya go! One bona fide method of traversal from one side of our property to the other!

Take that 3 inches of water! You’ll never stop me from crossing you again!

Since it’s 2016 construction, the Wooden Steps Bridge has been crossed tens of times. And I’m proud to say that I’ve now explored the final frontier of our property.