Our Great Treehouse

It’s been a really long time since we were able to get down on the type of DIY projects I enjoy most: Construction. It just doesn’t happen enough anymore. Eager to make our house a family house and make it feel like ours in a permanent way, we set out in sketching playhouses and making lists of our dream treehouse features right away when we moved in last summer. Our big goal has been to raise one this springtime, and if you followed along patiently as we cleared brush and vines and branches from one 50’x50′ section of our yard, you’re about to see more of our progress.

When it came down to inspiration, I’ve been side-eying all of the tree houses in our ‘hood – you know, scoping them out during walks without trying to look like a creepster with a dog. And of course, thanks to there being more online tutorials than I know what to do with and a great selection of manufacturer images available in a simple Google Images search, bazinga, I devoured all of the inspiration I could. Here’s where we landed:

• Upper left: That’s a photo I found on Pinterest. We’re skeptical if it actually exists or not, because that ladder is totally insufficient and… did they finish the inside walls to hide the studs? Or, photoshop. In any case, the big round window, the height, very idillic. If you photographed this treehouse or built it, please let me know so I can give you credit.
• Upper right: That’s a building that we took a picture of at Caldeira Velha on Sao Miguel. When we saw its stained vertical boards, I actually said, “that’s the perfect inspiration for the exterior of our playhouse.”
• Lower left: Let there be swings. You can’t really see the a-frame support for these swings because of the angle of this photo that I found on Retro Renovation, but we’ll take a similar approach. Also, the front porch is adorable.
• Lower Right: I like a lot about this design – the staircase(s), the clean look of those railings, and like the other photos, I dig the slanted roof.

It took us a long time to decide upon the right inspiration, and longer to get a jump start on the actual build. Scale and the overall design were something that we played with for a few weeks, taking what’s admittedly a very informal approach to the whole thing, poking gardening fence posts to mark off where we wanted walls and posts implanted.

Somewhere in the planning process, we increased the size of the platform from 4’x6′ to 4’x8′ to 8’x12. Bigger’s better? Go big or go home? There are probably at least 5 other cliches that describe what happened here. I know what you’re looking for is some drawing or sketch that we’re using for reference during the big build of 2014, but we don’t have that, of course not, because it’s mostly in the brain we (fortunately) share. No, really, we have a single piece of printer paper with about 8 different ideas on it (somewhere, I don’t actually know where it is at the moment), all slight derivations of each other, and a shared notebook, used for materials lists and keeping track of measurements. Side note: A gel mani is the only type of mani to have if you’re doing heavy projects. This sweet one held up through two days of construction and still looked perfectionistic at a meeting the following Tuesday.

I hadn’t even been blogging back when we built my deck on the old house, but I did gloss over the process we went through to construct it. What we did there was rent a gas-powered auger to create the deep post holes to meet the mandates of local code, a code that requires us to sink posts below the frost line. The auger, I still remember very vividly, was one of the most trying tools I’ve ever worked with and I never hope to encounter one again, but fortunately the soil in our current yard is much different than the clay/rock of our old house. This soil here, it’s as close to sand as you can imagine, and all 6 post holes were cleared using a manual hole digger in less than 15 minutes. And with that said, we officially own a manual post hole digger, a mid-quality model for about $30.

There’s something wonderful about being able to carry mass amounts of lumber home in your own vehicle, and utility is probably the only reason we’ve kept the Jeep; it gets a good workout when we do projects like this. And in this yard, we can pull the Jeep right into the backyard to deposit all materials right at the build site… a nice perk that we haven’t had before.

For the posts, we could have gotten away with 4x4s, but I upgraded us to 4×6 beams because I liked the chunkier look; the structure atop the posts would eventually be substantial, and I didn’t want it to look like it had toothpicks for legs in scale. We sunk all of the posts as a family on Father’s Day.

Four of the posts are 4x6x8′ boards, but two that sit on the southern end of the playhouse are 12′ in height, and will eventually support the beams for our swing set, which we expect will cantilever over to the side and will be supported by an A-frame setup for stability; again, no architectural drawings or glamourous plan for you to download here, we’re kind of making it up as we go, keeping in mind that while it’s structurally sound, it’s still just a playhouse, and there will probably never be 30 adults jumping up and down on it at the same time, or the resulting Youtube sensation of it crumbling down underfoot.

We expect to be able to chip away at this project a little bit every weekend. Last weekend, we were able to build the whole floor platform in just one morning. This weekend is a little slower.

In general, what we have done to date happened fast because we tag teamed planning and cutting wood, and are making much use out of our framing nailer fit with special hot-dipped galvanized nails, versus opting for super heavy-duty lag and carriage bolts (again, it’s a playhouse, there are appropriate places to “cut corners”).

You guys know my love of nail guns, right? Wa-pow.

We maximized our working efforts during nap time, and fortunately for us there are still 2 (occasionally 3) of those each day. Other times we figured out how to get things done single-handedly, hence Pete’s self-made tool that pries the floorboards into place. Some people like to leave gaps in the floorboards, but the boards are going to shrink up a little bit over the next few months, so there will be natural spacing at that time. If you leave a 1/8″ gap and then the boards shrink, you might find yourself with gaps of 1/2″+, and your kids will be forever losing their colored pencils down the spaces.

We tag teamed the wall construction and had all four installed in one day. I planned all of the measurements and cut the boards, and then organized them on the platform for Pete to nail together. So no, we didn’t have to perform some superhuman feat and hoist them assembled 5-feet into the air.

The walls, I should note, are intentionally tall enough so that both me and Pete can at least walk through the entryway without crouching. These things are important for family play time. And also, though we thought we pruned enough back on the trees overhead, we’ll still have to take a little more off to clear space for what ended up being a tall structure. Dude, very tall.

I haven’t checked to see if the wi-fi reaches out there from the house, but if it does, you’re looking at our new office. I’ve been totally holding back on my Instagram and Facebook feeds until I got this post published–it took so long, y’all–so follow me on those places for more regular updates!