Community Corner

New Addition To Swing Set Is A Fallen Tree

Lake Forest home's new equipment feels wrath of storm.

Diane Cristin Thatcher was readying the family’s Lake Forest house for summer.

Gutters and windows cleaned.

Power washed the patio.

Find out what's happening in Lake Forest-Lake Bluffwith free, real-time updates from Patch.

Landscapers had cleaned up the yard.

The finishing touch was the addition of a new swing set for her son, Kevin, to enjoy.

Find out what's happening in Lake Forest-Lake Bluffwith free, real-time updates from Patch.

She figured it was an investment.

Kevin is just shy of 3 years old, and a swing set would deliver many years of play time.

When the swing set arrived Tuesday from Lowe’s at the house on Oak Knoll Drive, Kevin had a chance to go down the slide.

“Everything looked great,” she said.

And then the storm hit Tuesday night.

Wednesday morning, the swing set was still standing but with a new addition. A tree in her backyard was now resting on the swing set portion of the unit.

She remembers asking the set-up people from Lowe’s to move the set a foot to the left.

“Had I not done that, the tree probably would have missed,” she said.

But as her husband noted, it didn’t hit the house.

Diane shared a photo of the swing set on the Lake Forest-Lake Bluff Patch Facebook page.

The family moved to Lake Forest in March from New York after her husband landed a new job with Snap-on Tools in Kenosha. The spring has been a mix of unseasonably cold temperatures to extreme highs. And now this.

“They keep telling me to wait until September and October. It will be nice then.”


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