Residents of Washington Square and Sherwood Court now have a new playground in their own Zapata Park. Two hundred and fifty volunteers gathered at the park located at E and Ninth streets Thursday afternoon to construct a new playground. The construction was completed within five hours.

A welcome sign for Kaboom and Home Depot.

The new play space is thanks to the sponsorship and fundraising of The Home Depot Foundation, Kaboom and Community Housing Opportunities Corporation (CHOC).

A view of construction at 11:30 a.m. of construction.

Construction began at 8:30 a.m. and wrapped up at 1:30 p.m. Volunteers in orange Home Depot shirts worked to music playing over large speakers, occasionally doing a small dance.

Volunteers around the mulch pile.

"Kaboom is a national nonprofit, and what we do is make children and communities healthier by creating great places to play," Kenny Altenburg, Kaboom project manager said. "There's only two or three representatives from Kaboom here today. We just help facilitate. All the work, the recruitment, putting all this effort is done by the residents, Home Depot and CHOC."

Volunteers repainting the basketball court.

The Home Depot Foundation partnered with Kaboom to build more than 30 playground and play spaces this year. One of the markets chosen was Sacramento. The Zapata Park project kicked off only two months ago.

Concrete mixed by hand.

"When we were reaching out to this area, we had several applicants come in and they blew us away," Altenburg said. "These kids at Washington Square and Sherwood Court really needed a safe place to play. They had a dilapidated playground about half the size of the one here. We knew they were up for all the two months of planning and outreaching, it's a lot of work they had to put into it."

Constructing the playground.

The new playground is complete with spiral slide, rock-climbing wall and down slide. Volunteers added picnic tables, a mural frame, refurbished existing picnic tables and benches and repainted the basketball court and backboard. Ten trees were planted in conjunction with the Sacramento Tree Foundation. Extra landscaping was added, including a trellis wall and plant box.

Painting hopscotch.

One hundred and fifty cubic yards of mulch was moved into the playground by hand. Almost 15,000 pounds of concrete were mixed by hand for the posts' foundations.

"The Home Depot brought out about 150 workers today," Altenburg said. "They took the day off and chose to come out here and help build a playground. In addition to that, the community recruited local residents, other smaller organizations and folks that just wanted to be a part of this. They recruited, over the past two months, 100 people to help today."

The playground complete and fenced for the concrete to set.

The Home Depot Foundation donated a $65,000 grant. CHOC also fund-raised $7,500.

Kaboom builds almost 200 playgrounds a year across North America. Zapata Park was the 1,764th play space built in Kaboom's 15-year existence.

The repainted basketball court.

"The help of Kenny and Home Depot made this happen," said Brenda Watson of Washington Square. "I had a great time out here working with the crew. And we talked about a new park long before this started."

Kaboom hosted a design day at the beginning of the project for residents and children to design their dream playground.

The completed playground.

"All the kids and parents, we came out to design the park and pick the colors," Watson said. "This is what we were hoping for, this is more modern and much more fun for the kids. It's enough to keep everybody busy."

The playground is currently surrounded by gates to allow the concrete to set. The playground will be open for play Monday.

Agnus-Dei Farrant is an intern for The Sacramento Press.