Now, although I don’t want to do a fancy ‘design brief’ and make this all formal, it’s always good to get the basic requirements and thoughts down before you start work.

Now, obviously a diagram is helpful – on some projects it’s all I use. Often just a sketch with some notes scribbled on. (As you can see from the artistic master piece below!)

Now, some thoughts on the requirements. For this project there’s quite a few of these, it’s not easy to draw this stuff on the diagram!

• Height adjustable: having seen the problems of finding the right place to suspend one from, it really needs to be flexible and able to work with whatever’s available.
• Easily to put up: it’s not going to get used much if it takes ages to put up, especially given the height requirement it may not be up for long.
• Strong: I need to be able to put my faith into it – not only for me, but it’s more than likely others will want a go. Anything that can have a load rating on it should have and provide a suitable safety margin on the breaking load.