Treehouse

I have always loved trees; in fact I used to hug trees a lot in middle school because I had no friends and then everyone thought I was really weird. Anyway that's beside the point.

The part of the treehouse that I did complete was built in two phases, one of nearly complete incompetence and one of relative competence. On the incompetent day Steve and I hauled all six 2x12x12 boards that would make up the frame out to the building site with a good amount of difficulty. Then Steve cut down the dead wood around our trees while I bought the hardware I had forgotten to get beforehand. I learned how to use a hammer correctly or at least somewhat correctly and nailed the boards together in pairs. Then we somehow managed to get the first board aloft and level using only a small pool ladder and a long piece of wood. We drilled holes into the boards and trees and screwed in the lag bolts, only to find the lag bolts were too thin and could snap! I also managed to break off the drill bit in a tree the first time I used the drill.

On the day of relative competence we (Steve, my dad, and I) mounted the two other supports and replaced the lags on the first support with thicker bolts. Drilling all the holes and screwing in all the lags required a lot of lateral force, and it was difficult to push hard into the tree while ten feet in the air, so there were some weird drilling positions and some heel hooking of trees. Getting the other two boards in the air proved more difficult than the first as they were higher in the air. Steve and my dad each lifted an end while I propped it up in the middle with another piece of wood, then we lashed the boards to the trees with tie-down straps and drilled them in place.

I'm sad that I subjected these trees to all this drilling (I don't think it will hurt them since only the outer layer of a tree is actually living) and I didn't end up finishing the treehouse. Maybe in the future I'll finish building it, this time with all recycled materials like I was hoping to do (partly since the cost of the wood for the house was very high) and without the stress of a time crunch. Until then, it's a pretty cool little platform.