The Great Inflatable
With my daughter’s 8th birthday party coming up, I started looking into renting a backyard inflatable bounce-house water park thing. I quickly learned that the cost to rent was not that far off from the cost to BUY one. Sooooooooo…. I did.
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Overall result?
Hands down: amazing, kids love it, they spend days on it (while I can get things done) - success!
Which one did I buy?
This one: Sunny & Fun Mega Climb N’ Go Inflatable Water Slide Park
Things I did NOT know that I know now:
Sooo…leaving your hose on for hour and hours and hours (as you need to so the slides stay wet) results in a massive amount of water that all needs to go somewhere. You either need to be OK with turning your yard into a complete mudpit -OR- be ready to buy a pump to recirculate the water AND to help you pump the water out when you’re done. It took me some trial and error to get an appropriate pump - not realizing water HEIGHT is an important spec (in this case the water needs to be pumped up about 9 feet). Oh, AND various accoutrements I found I needed to hold the pump’s intake in place without just sucking up the fabric.
Other than the pump, there were a handfull of other items I didn’t anticipate purchasing that I needed - longer hose, an extension cord, and a giant vacuum sealing back to keep it in (not actually necessary…but I like it because this thing takes up a lot of garage space! A leaf blower is also hands to get it dry before storing it. We had some insanely hot days where I just left it in the sun to dry - rolling it up over the course of a couple hours to methdically dry the underside too.
Last but not least on the list of things I didn’t think about — this thing is HEAVY! About 70lbs of dead weight.
My selection criteria:
1) Size: Has to be appropriate for an 8 and 12 year old. SO many Amazon listings showed inflatables that looked MASSIVE in relation to the kids on them…the NOT REAL Photoshopped kids, that is. (Include an example). That’s, like, REALLY bad. So - I looked for reviews with ACTUAL photoss and videos.
2) Play features: Thy inflatable shallst not be lame! If there’s going to be a slide - I want a slide, not a slope. So I looked for something tall. And - multiple kids means fighting over things, so, multiple slides and multiple activities were obviously key. The one I chose has double slides, a wide climbing ‘mountain’, a water cannon, a “hot tub” (not a hot tub, but, see pic) with a showerhead, and a large open wading pool / splash area. Originally - my criteria also included “must have bounce-house area in addition to water slide” but I quickly learned anything trying to combine bouncing and siding was sort of a "jack of all trades but master of one” scenario.
3) Color and overall appearance: If I’m going to stare at this thing in my back yard all summer, it can’t look absurd. I could not risk catching the creepy eye of a maniacal dolphin or try to match my yard decor to a pirate ship theme (though my BF would love that). There’s some lovely, minimalist, all white bounce houses for weddings and bougey kids’ parties…. though, sadly, no water park version. So - next best thing was to find solid colors…and, fresh colors, not stagnant red/yellow/blue like the McDonald’s play places of my childhood (ye olde Mc-th Donalds-th).
4) Durability: If I’m going to drop that many dollars, I expect this thing to last several summers. Any reviews I came across that mentioned thin material were immediately nixed! The brand I picked (Sunny & Fun) seemed to have repeated good reviews about the materials. All that said, I will mention that what I purchased is far from the commercial, thick, plasticy vinyl ones you’d expect at a carnival. As far as I could tell, ALL of the “consumer grade” ones I was looking at (at least, the ones in my price point) are more of a thick, waterproof woven nylon. Which is really nice actually - feel and looks wise.
5) Cost: Admittedly, when my search began the narrative way “Rent for $450!? I can buy one for that!” . . . While, yes, you can buy one for $450, the ones I found in those price range turned out to be pretty small once the poorly-Photoshopped children were translated into REAL human scale. Now, those would have been TOTALLY fine and great if my kids were smaller, but, with an 8 and 12 year old (and a couple fun-loving adults)…there wuld be no point to spending that much money on a disappointingly small inflatable. Sooo…the budget crept, and crept, and crept. I eventually spent $650 (After finding a 15% off new-user deal HSN combined with a cash back deal through my Capital One credit card).
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