The recliner in our family room has a great view of the TV, and is where I write most of these posts. It also looks out onto our back deck.

That last part is what leads to things like: “It’s going to snow like a mother. I bet I could use that patio furniture to make a cool snow fort.” When the forecast called for 16-22 inches in our area, I set to work arranging the pieces into a rudimentary frame.

With a table, two Adirondack chairs, four side tables and a pile of leaves, I came up with this:

This storm turned out to be one of the biggest snowfalls in my lifetime in the Washington, D.C., area. I was here in 1996 for a similar storm and remember making snow forts the hard way back then. The process involved making a huge pile of packed snow, and then digging out the inside for a sort of igloo effect.

While it was a good system, it took forever. It also had stability issues since in trying to maximize your interior space you have to make the walls thinner and thinner. Eventually that leads to disaster.

So in 2009, using a patio table as the roof seemed like a much better way to go. Initially I didn’t plan to do any construction once the snow started falling. But once there were 7-8 inches on the ground I decided to try to make a nice stable layer for the rest of the snow to sit on.

Here’s what it looked like just before I intervened:

A lot of snow had made it through the sides and into the fort, but I still had to add some more from the rest of the deck to get the walls solid. Fortunately, the snow packed pretty well and I was able to get it all closed up without too much trouble.

And then the snow kept falling. And kept falling. And kept falling. We ended up with about a foot and a half of the fluffy white stuff. By the time the sun was setting, the fort looked like this:

The photos don’t even do it justice — this thing takes up most of the deck. It’s almost laughable to glance outside and see how big it is.

And if it snows again this year, we have a lot more patio furniture sitting around and thus will have a much bigger fort. I bet we could make a sort of tunnel that reaches the back door.