Our Treehouse

Every child needs a treehouse at some point in their life. We had one when I was in elementary school. My dad built it onto a huge eucalyptus tree in our back yard. It was a pretty simple box supported in two corners by posts and the other two corners on the tree. Boards nailed to the tree led to a trap door in the floor. A wall high enough to keep us from falling out went all around, and a roof kept all the eucalyptus leaves and berries out of the treehouse. Simple, but it provided hours of fun and entertainment for us. Though I think it was mainly the older kids that played in it. I don't think we let the little kids come up very often. Sorry guys! They're all grown up now and are all taller than me, so I don't think I can call them the "little kids" anymore :)

Our property has lots of trees, but no low branches to support a treehouse, so we built one using two trees as supports and two 4"x4" posts as the other supports. But first we cleared out some of the underbrush so we could see what we were doing and to make room for the future play area.

We started by attaching 2" x 10" x 12' boards to the trees to act as the center support. The ground isn't exactly level, so on one tree it's about 6' above the ground and on the other it's closer to 7' above the ground. It was a bit difficult keeping everything level while drilling the holes for the bolts. Luckily my dad was out for a quick visit, and he helped. We then built a 12' x 9'4" frame and filled in the joists.

Since the frame was made of 2" x 6" boards, it wasn't exactly light, but we (Mr M and I, because my dad had to leave to catch his plane) managed to drag it over to the center support.

We leaned it against the support, then attached ratcheting straps to the higher end and tightened them as much as possible.

We then lifted the frame and rested it on the ladder, so we could tighten the ratcheting straps again.

Then it was a matter of wiggling the frame back and forth while tightening the ratcheting straps. It wasn't the easiest process, but we eventually got the frame centered on the supports. We toed in the frame to the supports, then moved on.

Mr M and LMS ran to Lowe's for a couple more pieces of wood for the diagonal braces (we forgot to factor those in when we bought the wood) and some more bolts (which we'd also forgotten to factor in). While they did that, I got out the leaf blower and cleared out all the fallen leaves so we could see the ground better. We kept tripping over tree roots and holes in the ground, so it seemed like a good thing to do.

We wanted the corners supported, so we cut diagonal braces that meet in the center and are attached to the trees. We made sure the corners were level and then screwed the supports to the frame.

After that, we measured and then dug the holes for the posts. We screwed the posts to the frame to hold them in place, then we mixed water and kwikrete in both the holes.

LMS wanted to help us throughout the process, but the wood was too heavy for her to actually help with anything, so she was quite excited to help stir the kwikrete. This is her posed "I'm smiling for the camera" face and Mr M's "Hurry up and take the picture so we can finish this" face. :)

At this point, we were out of time, so we left the concrete to set. The next step will be drilling holes and bolting the posts to the frame, the supports to the frame, and the supports to the trees.

This is very much a work in progress that will evolve as we work on it. We need to add decking and a railing, a ladder, a "house", swings, a slide, a climbing wall, a telescope, a rope and a pulley, the list goes on and on. And LMS keeps coming up things to add- the telescope and rope and pulley are her ideas :)

Unlike most of our projects, this one actually went faster than expected. Though maybe that's because I hadn't really thought about how long it would take, other than that it needed to get done. In any case, we got this done all in one day, and now the hard part is done. The rest will be a lot easier to do and can be done in small increments.

Did you have a treehouse when you were little?

The trail through our woods

Looking at the trail from the "trailhead"- the large rocks on either side border our parking area

A couple weekends ago we rented a stump grinder and a wood chipper. There were several stumps that were in the way, especially one in our driveway from a tree we took down to enlarge the driving space. And there were some brush piles left by the previous owners that we wanted to get rid of. After taking care of the brush piles, we walked the lot, picking up a lot of the downed branches and clearing up the underbrush. I wouldn't have worried about the underbrush, but we wanted the wood chips for our trail, so we chipped as many branches as we could.

The grinding generated a lot of sawdust (lower right of picture), which is finer than the wood chips (upper left of picture), so we spread that on the trail with the wood chips.

We also lined the path with some of the fallen trees that we didn't chip up. We weren't able to do all the path (the wood chips end at the right edge of the picture), but we got a good start, and I'm excited to finish off this section of the trail. Once we do that, we can clear another loop through the trees.

Have you gotten to use any loud power tools lately?