Install a Swing in Your Living Room to Make Life Significantly More Awesome

A swing in the living room is a game-changer.

It’s one of those possibilities that has probably remained dormant for most of history. It’s one of those things that 99.9999% of people never realized would imbue their living space with an all-permeating aura of playfulness and awesomeness.

But that’s exactly what it does.

From the swing, life looks more interesting.

Living in a house with 7 other people in which someone is almost always enjoying one the more benevolent potentialities of the laws of physics by swinging, Tarzan-like, across the living room, does something to the psyche.

It is a constant reminder that leisure and play are integral to a full and beautiful human life, and it is a whisper to take things less seriously and to view every paradigm with a creative eye. It is an invitation to question all normative modes of being and existing and living and to ask, “What small tweak or cool addition could I contribute to make things significantly more awesome?”

How We Built It

FYI, our swing was built by my friend, Charlie. He found a board and a couple large bolts in the basement of our house and bought some rope from Menards.

He drilled two holes through the board, ran a piece of rope through each, and tied the ends on the underside of what would become the swing. The other ends of the ropes he attached to a beam near our ceiling with the two large bolts.

Charlie getting horizontal on the swing.

I understand that many houses probably don’t have beams or a room with a high enough ceiling to make a swing quite like ours. However, if you’re in a situation similar to ours, this is a potentiality worth actualizing. I’m also sure that there are other ways to install a swing in a doorway or in a room without beams.

Get creative and see what you can come up with, while being sure not to fall off of a janky swing and break your pelvis. Making a swing yourself is probably the cheapest option, but if you can’t, a cursory search shows that you can buy a simple rope swing on Amazon for about $50.

Note the swing dangling in the center of the room.

Conclusion

This probably won’t happen, but I would ideally like to always have a swing in my dwelling. It’s subtly nourishing and fun and beautiful to the point that it skews my day-to-day perception in a more playful, free-flowing direction. That makes me happy.

Here’s one final video of our swing shenanigans. Soak it in and begin to dream of how you too might install an in-home swing to awesome-ify your life a bit more.