So, You Want to Build a Treehouse - Part 1

Today we have a special Guest Post from my sister, Jesse. She and her family live in Wisconsin where, among other things, they are building a treehouse in the backyard.

SO YOU WANT TO BUILD A TREEHOUSE

I wanted a tree house when I was a little girl. Okay, more accurately, I wanted to live in a tree house, Swiss Family Robinson Style. Regrettably, though our lawn was often littered with sticky green hazelnuts, their behemoth parent tree grew from the neighbor’s side of the lot line instead of our own. Well, sometimes those childhood fantasies fail to wilt with age, instead festering into a desire to one day build THE GREATEST TREE-HOUSE EVER which you justify with the lame excuse of having children of your own. Oh, yeah – And a build-able tree.

Our tree is a Maple, about Thirty years old (I know this because our next door neighbor owned our house for twenty five years and watched the thing grow from a seed!), with good limbs that branch out a bit before they grow upwards. The maturity of the tree means that in order to build amongst the branches we have to build pretty high up, and the density of the limbs will cause us to cut some, and build around others so that they grow right through the house itself.

Since about 18 months ago, when my husband bought me a couple of books about building tree-houses for my birthday, I’ve sketched out a half a dozen plans while staring at our tree. I now know that this is not a productive way of spending one’s time. You have to get up into your tree with a few pieces of scrap wood, a partner, and preferably, no fear of heights, before reaching any semblance of a layout. And, quite honestly, after completing our fair share of home remodeling projects, this has also got to be the best thing about building a tree-house; no concrete plan, no diagrams, no real instructions. It’s just us and a tree.

In our case, we’re going to make things more difficult on ourselves by creating, not just one platform to build a house upon, but three. (Remember, this will be THE GREATEST TREE-HOUSE EVER.) By doing so, we’ll be able to take the greatest advantage of space up in the tree, and also, because the platforms will be on different levels, we will only have to cut two of the tree’s many branches.

Okay, fast forward a couple of weeks, and here we are with two branches cut and two platforms built. The frame of the larger platform consists of four 2”x6”s, the first of which we positioned in place with a 6” lag screw at both the main trunk and another at the lesser trunk you can see veering towards the camerawoman.

(One note on lag screws: Our book’s directions instructed us to pound the lag screw into the tree trunk a few times before turning it a quarter inch with the wrench and then pounding again, turning again, etc… We haven’t figured out a way of pounding it into the trunk without the use of a sledgehammer, which, at 20 feet off the ground on a ladder is not an option, however, we’ve found that the wrench does a fine job of securing it, sans pounding.)

The second 2”x6” of the larger platform we placed parallel to the first, connected to the two main limbs that branch out that way. However, unlike the beam attached to the trunks themselves, this one is attached to an improvised support system which is then bolted through each limb.

The other two 2”x6” beams making up the frame of our first level were simply attached to the existing two with screws. We then framed it out in a sundial style to maintain a rigid rectangular frame (triangles are stronger than squares, according to the engineers), then added supports at the two corners that were not attached directly to the tree. The support nearer the camerawoman is a 2”x 4” with a few detailed, angled, and hand sawed cuts at the higher end to make it fit into the inside corner and have a “lip” supporting the frame itself. The second (which is you can’t see as it’s on the opposite side) is a hanging support; a simple chain and lock mechanism with two eyebolts (one at the corner of the platform and one at the branch above) for connections.

As for the second, triangular platform, we constructed it in much the same way. There is a 2” x 6” attached with lag screws to both the main and secondary trunk of the tree, then two 2” x 6”s that veer out and are supported by a 2” x 4” connected to the trunk below at a 45 degree angle. As for supporting these beams before they were connected, we found that the easiest way, was to drill a hole in the beam itself and tie it off with rope around a branch above.

The plan is to have one more platform towards the back of the tree at a level in between the current two. After that, the only thing I know is that this is going to be THE GREATEST TREE-HOUSE EVER.

There is a certain raw beauty in laying one board before you even know for sure where the next might go… In not knowing what you’ll do next, or even what you might have to scrap. Watch out Swiss Family Robinson… we’re inspired, we’re building, and like I said before: it’s just us and the tree.