Growing Up

Posted byRandall 586 Comments on Growing Up

I was thinking of getting a couch or something for my room, somewhere for guests to lounge around.

Fuck new couches. I now have a ball pit in my room.

I talked a little bit to Mike Machenry, who built a ball pit last year after reading my comic about it. The big problem with ball pits is that they’re expensive. Filling a room costs on the order of $4000, give or take. You can use this calculator (set up by relsqui of #xkcd) to find the cost for a given room. I’d use 64% for the packing efficiency — that’s about what I’ve found.

So given the expense, I didn’t fill my whole room — just an area the size of the bed, to a depth of a couple feet — and even that cost as much as a reasonable couch. The cost was as high as it was largely because Mike strongly recommended crush-proof balls, which allows for a lot more roughhousing but cost about twice as much as regular ones on eBay.

But it was totally worth it. After seeing how much fun it is to lounge around in it, we’ve decided to get together and build a larger one in the living room and throw parties there (though we want to solve the cleaning problem first in a scalable way). The day we put it up, we spent probably twelve hours, on and off, lounging around throwing plastic balls at each other. It’s totally worth it, and everyone’s excited about expanding it. It’s wonderful to be able to wake up and roll sideways, blanket and all, into a ball pit, and sink slowly down to the bottom. I’ve padded it with pillows and blankets to make it more fun to, uhh, wallow, or whatever the appropriate verb is for ball pits.

And before you jump to comment — over the last 24 hours we’ve completely exhausted all the balls-related innuendo, so you needn’t bother.

Here are some more pictures:

Abby, on the left, descends slowly into the balls. We never did find her again.

As Mike discovered, you can sort the balls pretty quickly by throwing only certain colors away from yourself.

Everyone I know seems to use Fujitsu Lifebooks. ❤ ultraportables.

To the above situation, we can only say:

586 replies on “Growing Up”

  2. OMG!
    I have been waiting for this blog post for 24 hours. ;_;
    That is amazing.

    I obviously don’t have the right type of friends… the type who make ball pits in their houses… and then throw parties with them. 😦

    Have fun!

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  3. On the cleaning note, go to an army/navy surplus store and pick up a large net. Spread net under ball pit. When you’re done with the pit, just net it up, shake out the loose change and clean up. =] err, also something about ???? profit! apparently…

    This is in theory. I haven’t actually tried it, as I do not have a ball pit of my own.

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  4. Oh my god, I never actually thought you’d do that. Pretty damn cool though. I’m wondering if I shouldn’t raise a fund with my friends to do that ourselves, now.

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  7. I sure hope those pictures aren’t chronological, or you’ve just struck a blow to the laws of thermodynamics.

    I notice in the third picture the balls are segregated into their separate colors. Then things revert to their initial disorder.

    Or maybe one of you was playing the part of Maxwell’s demon?

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  8. Awesome. You totally rock! I seriously want to do this now. I live in a house with 7 other people, and it would totally make our hang out place more awesome than it already is!

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  9. Pingback: Cleaning » Blog Archive » Growing Up

  11. It strikes me that Google should do this somewhere on their campus (if they haven’t already…?) It would fit their whole motif pretty well 🙂

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  13. I once worked at a place that had a ball pit. To clean them, all you need to do is buy several large net bags. Gather all the balls in the bads, hang them up somewhere, and douse them in disinfectant. Then you can hose them down and whatnot.

    Come to think of it, at my job we usually just hosed them down. I wonder how much disease we spreaded…

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  16. Pingback: :: about:blank :: How Random Is That!? » At home in your very own private Ball Pit.
  17. Pingback: Adult-Sized Ball Pit « Manhattan Monarch

  18. Right, the only thing I wondered after seeing this, what is like to have sex in a ball pit.

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  19. I’m wondering about the laptop use. Do the balls manage to provide a more-or-less solid surface, so you don’t have to keep lifting your computer up to the top? And does the fact that there’s so much empty space make for good ventilation? I know there are some surfaces on which I just can’t set my computer or it gets very angry.

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  20. Pingback: mobília / furniture « bauermann
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  23. Make it ultra portable, put it all inside a beanbag shell/rope net so you can hook and hang it anywhere and have a mid-air ballpen 😀

    Must get a job just for awesomeness like this!

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  29. Pingback: lessthanthree <3 » Screw Couches, Get a BALL PIT!

  31. Seconding Rachael’s suggestion about the bags. I worked at McDonalds for two years, and cleaning the ball pit was a weekly task that involved bagging up all of the balls in big mesh bags and sending them through the industrial-sized dishwasher. The balls were then hung up in the back room overnight to dry off so that the morning staff could dump them back in. You get to keep all of the band-aids and nickels that you find.

    As an aside, one of the best parts about doing this was dealing with the kids who wanted to play in it while it was being emptied. All you had to do was let them know that there are snakes and alligators at the bottom, and they cleared right out.

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  33. Maybe you could rent a dry ice cleaning machine, and just clean the balls in place (probably not worth it for a small amount, but for a whole room… Link)

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  35. Now I’m seriously considering the feasibility of my own ball pit. I suppose if one splits the cost between one’s housemates, as you might with a washing machine, it’s fairly reasonable. I think the only thing preventing it in my house is that there’s no space. Well, that and the fact that my housemates are permanently skint.

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  36. I was thinking of sending this to my sister, but the swearing content would offend her.

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  37. What swearing content? “WTF?” I don’t see any other words that could offend anyone. She would probably get a kick out of the people having fun!

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  40. this might be the first post including photos of you

    Oh god how I would love a ball pit, now this is something nobody expects

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  44. Are these people serious? How about instead of a ball pit they spend the money on a handgun and ammunition, then take turns placing it against their heads and pulling the trigger. WTF is right.

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  45. Let’s just hope you have fewer incidences of pink eye and e.coli than the ball rooms at McDonald’s. 🙂

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  46. Kim — the second sentence begins with the word “Fuck”. It doesn’t bother me, but it would bother her. I think sometimes people forget that there is a large proportion of the U.S. for whom such words still have meaning.

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  48. Randall, it looks great! I am jealous that you can actually roll out of your bed into yours. Mine is under the lofted bed so rolling out of bed at all is highly discouraged.

    This makes me wonder now. Do you think Somerville, MA now has the highest private ball pit per capita of any town in the country? We should start some kind of registry so we can see where all the ball pits are. That’d be fun.

    -mike

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  49. Google does have a ballpit on campus, and one night a friend of mine and I sorted it in exactly the way you described above. Pics here. It took about half an hour and we conclusively determined that the distribution of colors in the Google ball pit does not match the distribution of colors in the google logo.

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  50. I suddenly have an overwhelming urge to make my own ball pit, and I can’t seem to figure out why. Too bad the cost is so high.

    Obviously Derek up there killed his inner child in a very violent manner. Poor guy.

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