Bouncy Castles

I may have mentioned this on a number of occasions, but our brother-in-law has his own bouncy castle business.

Last year we were called on a lot to assist him with putting the castles out and then collecting them again. For the majority of the year we enjoyed the work. It was a complete change from our day to day work and meant we also got some much needed exercise. The castles range from an 8' x 8' ball pit for the little children up to a 25' high slide.

For some reason, towards the end of last season, the question of how much money we were getting was raised. We're not sure why, but it was felt that we charged too much and we always came as a pair. This put our backs up a bit to be honest. We both felt that we didn't change a lot for our time, and we worked hard when we were called upon. We felt that we never dictated how much we should be paid, and if they only wanted one of us, they should have said.

However, as the season was drawing to a close we didn't pursue it any longer. This year we have realised that working all those weekends caused us a number of issues last year, most noticably, when do we get the washing/shopping and cleaning done. This year we have therefore decided that we are only available one day each weekend.

Today was the first day we'd been used this year. We were supposed to assist last weekend, but the expect rain put paid to that job.

The hirer today was church in Horsham, West Sussex called Kingdom Faith. They have a number of events throughout the year and we are fortunate enough to be able to supply them with castles for these events. Today's task was to provide 6 castles for them, including the big slide.



We arrived on site at 7:30am and started more or less straight away. Working as a team, the three of us unloaded the castles from the two vans, tied up the blowers and the redudant tubes, and then plugged all the electrics into the generator. Once the blowers were working, we were then able to hammer in the pins holding the castles down, and putting out the safety mats. All told this took us 1 1/2 hours. A great effort by all of us.

Packing up the castles took a bit longer as we needed to take all the air out of them before rolling them up again and then delivering everything to the secure lock-up but this only took 3 hours.

We're not needed again this coming weekend, but maybe soon we'll be required.