Picture it: you spend two weeks building an intricate, three-story backyard playhouse for your kids. You question every life choice you've ever made as you're putting it together, but somehow, you get it done. It's glorious. Your kids love it.

And then...a plane crashes into it.

That’s exactly what happened to Megan McKey and her family on the evening of Monday, June 30. Around 7 p.m., McKey was at home on Midway Road in Slaughter when she heard a strange noise—like a boat roaring through her backyard. She put her baby down and ran to the window, just in time to see the nose of a small plane headed straight for them.

“It happened so fast!” McKey recalls. In an instant, the aircraft turned her kids’ beloved playhouse—built just four months earlier—into what she calls “confetti.”

She rushed outside to check on everyone—only to have the pilots, miraculously unharmed, shout at her to stop. “I guess in case it blew up,” she says.

The Aftermath: Feds, Neighbors, and One Bold Pilot

The crash brought more than just property damage—it brought quite the parade of officials and neighbors to the McKey household.

"FAA came out and Homeland security. It was crazy!" McKey says. But perhaps the most memorable visitor was the pilot himself, who showed up the next day with a rather casual request: "He said he needed his plane back."

The incident did have one unexpected silver lining: "We met all of our neighbors!"

The Real Cost of DIY

For anyone who's tackled a major DIY project with their significant other, the McKeys' story hits particularly hard. The playhouse took a grueling two weeks to construct and, as McKey laughs, "caused some marital problems” in the moment.

The couple built the structure in February to avoid professional installation that would have cost $900. "That's realllll high, but it probably would have been worth it to pay and not deal with it," McKey says. 

Moving Forward

The good news is that the family expects the playhouse to be replaced. As for whether they'll tackle the assembly themselves again, McKey's response suggests they've learned their lesson about the true cost of DIY projects—especially when aviation incidents aren't factored into the equation.

Sometimes the universe has its own way of resolving those "should we have hired professionals?" debates.

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