Spring Trip

Kristen and I headed to the treehouse late in April to see how it wintered.


We opened the place up, and took a look around. There wasn't any apparent water damage on the inside. It did appear that the siding on the rear of the treehouse was aging prematurely due to water running off the roof, hitting the trunk of the tree, then splashing back onto the siding. Nothing major, just some discoloration of the T-111.

The big surprise was the amount of mouse feces inside the treehouse. Being 16 feet above the ground, only attached to the tree via chains, I really didn't expect to have mouse issues. Even though there wasn't anything of interest to them in the treehouse, they appeared to have spent a lot of there spare time in there. We swept up, and unpacked our luggage.


A few small trees had fallen nearby, so we spent some time cleaning up the area. We also cut down one dead tree that looked like it could fall into the treehouse if things went badly.


One of the goals of the trip was to get a door installed. The original plan was to have it swing outwards, but without a landing near the door, it would have been difficult to hold it in place while it was being attached. Instead we installed it so swung inwards. While this was easy to do, eventually we want to flip it around. Installed the way it is now, it's difficult to reach the door handle from the ladder, and you have to keep a pretty good area clear on the inside for it to open completely.


We'd pulled all the boards off the non-windowed rough openings in preparation for installing the windows. An enterprising bird decided that the treehouse was a great place to build a nest, and snuck an amazing amount of moss, leaves, and bark in while we were off doing something else. The bird filled up one of our rain hats with the stuff, and sprinkled a fair amount around the place as well.


The remaining windows that needed to be installed did not have any casements. I'd debated hinging them some way so that they could swing inward. I couldn't figure out a good way to do it without consuming a lot of interior room, so instead I opted for a solution that would let me just remove the windows easily. The thought was that I could remove them and put screens in their place during warm weather.


To do this, we cut four trim boards sized appropriately so that they formed a lip that prevented the windows from falling outward. I temporarily used two screws to hold the top and bottom of the windows against the trip boards. I'll come up with a better long term solution down the road.


The newly installed windows looked good from the outside. I'll need to eventually paint the trim boards, they're pine, and won't last long if exposed to the elements. For that matter, the lower windows also need to be re-painted, they're in pretty bad shape.


I realized afterwards that the window solution that I chose will have issues if water runs down the window. It'll get trapped behind the trim board, and eventually leak into the interior. I might be able to solve this with an angled sill board that will cause the water to run back to the outside.

Kristen and I slept in the treehouse for 4 nights. Every night around 3 am, something would jump onto the roof, scurry around, then jump back to a tree trunk. Kristen was a little worried, especially since she was near the windowless rough openings. Luckily nothing jumped in and ate us.

We also weathered a few rainstorms and one particularly windy night. I awoke on the windy night to the treehouse swaying a lot more than I expected. It was swaying enough that the roof was colliding with one of the trunks of the tree. It wasn't anything too terrifying, but still surprising.

It was great finally getting to spend some time in the treehouse.

Strange Weather

Southern Indiana has been experiencing some interesting weather lately. A month ago or so strong winds managed to knock down a good number of pine trees on various ridges around the farm.


A few weeks later, everything got coated in a layer of ice. Luckily it appears that the treehouse is still up in the tree. Our friend Tommy swung by the place and snapped these pictures.


Now it looks like Indiana and Ohio just experienced a record snowfall. If the treehouse can survive these events, I'm confident it'll stay up in the tree for at least a few years, hopefully longer.

I'm planning on heading back to the farm in April for a long weekend. It'll be fun to see how things weathered over the winter.

No Leaves!

My sister and brother-in-law stopped by the treehouse site recently and snapped a picture. Things look a little different with no leaves on the tree!

Roofing & Closing up for the winter.

On Friday Brent and I got up early to finish the framing, and to try to get the roof on. We'd made such good progress the previous day, we were optimistic that we could get a lot done.

Framing the last wall was rough, as access was a lot more difficult. We didn't have the loft to stand on, so there was a lot of ladder manipulation and movement. Hanging on with one arm as we tried to toe-nail studs together was tiring and time consuming.


Installing the last few pieces of siding were difficult too, since we had to nail it from the outside, and we couldn't access the side of the tree house via scaffolding. We eventually got everything finished, and started thinking about getting the OSB onto the rafters.

The roof has a 21 degree slope, which is scary enough when standing on it. OSB is surprisingly slippery, and it was a long way down to the ground. Luckily Andy and my dad showed up around this time and were willing to help out. Andy had a lot of rope, a few pulleys, and a harness. He set up a rig where he could get to each corner of the roof, and be tied in securely the whole time. I settled for a climbing harness and a fixed length of rope that would prevent me from sliding off the nearest part of the roof. Unfortunately that meant I couldn't reach the corners of the roof.


We started with the lowest sheets of OSB, and started going up from there. We left a gap in the middle of the roof so that we could get on and off easily. It was also the same slot we planned on installing a skylight into, so it worked out well.


We overhung the OSB by a foot on each side, to allow for a good eave on each end of the tree house. We also added two 18' 2" x 6" caps on the high and low side of the rafters. These helped counter lever the extra rafters that weren't resting on the frame of the tree house.


After all the OSB was up we started laying and stapling the roofing felt. This made things feel a lot safer, the felt wasn't as slippery as the OSB alone. We also starting framing in the skylight opening. The skylight would have the dual purpose of letting some light in, and giving us access to the roof down the road.


By the time we got all the felt on and framed in the rough opening for the skylight, it was time to call it a day. We didn't quite get as much done as we hoped, but had one more day of the trip to get the actual roofing material installed.


We did manage to get the roll-roofing install on Saturday. We also managed to get several of the lower level windows in, although a few ended up a bit large for the rough openings. We unfortunately didn't take many pictures, but tarring and nailing the roofing material down isn't really that exciting. Hopefully we managed to get everything watertight for the most part.



Saturday night we quit a bit early and went to a friend of the family's 50th birthday / anniversary party. It was nice to get out and be a little social after 9 very full days of work.

Sunday involved a lot of clean up and further waterproofing of the structure. I was out of time to get the door or upper level windows in, so my dad and I took some discarded T-111 and shuttered up the rough openings. Since the skylight was going to require some modification, I made a temporary cover for it out of a few 2" x 4"s, T-111, and some roofing material.


I also had to cut short 2" x 6" blocks to fill up the gap between the upper portion of the rafters where they sat on the frame. Brent had gotten the lower portion of the rafters taken care of the day before. I hammered these into place, relying on a press-fit. I suspect some will fall out during the winter as the structure shifts slightly under the various stresses.



Buttoning everything up took a lot longer than I expected. I barely had time to really look at what we accomplished before I had to jump in the car and drive back to Colorado. Dad made a comment about how he was happy to see me go, so he could actually relax a bit. I could understand where he was coming from, I was truly exhausted after the long trip.

The loft , rafters, and three out of four walls.

After a full day's work, we drove into Louisville to drop Nate off at the airport. Ted and I picked up some 2" x 6" lumber for the loft and a few other supplies.

The next morning, we carried each 2" x 6" up the ladder by hand, no longer having a crane and not trusting our knot tying skills. Ted and I tore through the loft construction pretty quickly. However, we did make one mistake in not realizing that the walls had bowed out a bit toward their centers. This caused us to pull out a few nails, pull the walls together using the come-along, then re-nail the loft joists. We put a few sheets of OSB down, and had a fairly complete loft.


That evening Ted took off for Colorado, and my other buddy Brent flew into town. Even though I'd lost two good workers due to real-life constraints, I suspected that Brent had more framing experience then Ted, Nate and I combined. That wasn't hard to accomplish, since Ted, Nate and myself had zero framing experience up until now.

After a late night of story telling, Brent and I started putting the rafters and the side walls up. We notched the rafters so that they'd sit on the top sills properly. I used 2" X 6" X 12' for the rafters, which gave a decent eave on the rear of the tree house, and a pretty huge eave on the front. Having a larger eave on the south facing side would help provide shade in the summer, and keep rain and moisture off of the tallest wall. Or that's the theory, anyway.


For the rear 16' wall, Brent and I had covered the 1 foot tall wall with screen. The rear wall is well covered by the eave, and it seemed like a logical place to get some ventilation.


We used hurricane clips to help keep the rafters in place. We also toe-nailed them to the top sill using 16d nails. This seemed to secure them more than enough.


We managed to also get one of the odd shaped walls into place and sided. There was a lot more toe-nailing involved then we expected, and without the nail gun at the tree house, it was slower going then we hoped. Regardless, by the end of the day things looked like they were really coming together.

Crane!

With the siding on, we estimated that the 16' walls weighed between 300 and 400 pounds. Luckily our good friend Andy had a crane that he used for his tree service. It had just enough reach for the project, and we hoped it would really simplify getting everything up onto the platform.


We got everything down to the site, and got the crane situated as best we could. We looped a few straps through the rough openings for the windows on the farthest wall. We also tied a rope to one corner, allowing us to swing the wall around as necessary as it was lifted onto the platform. Once the wall was on the platform, we braced it with two 2" X 4"s to keep it in place.


The two 8' walls went up pretty quickly. Ted and I were wearing harnesses that were tied off to the trees, so we had to do a bit of fancy foot work to keep our ropes out of the way. In the second picture, you can see the temporary stubs we screwed into the platform to prevent the bottom of the walls from slipping off while we positioned them.


The last 16' wall was a bit tricky, since we had to lift it higher than the others in order rotate it into place. Once it was rotated, it slipped into place beautifully. We nailed each wall to the platform, and also lag-bolted each wall to it's neighboring walls. Once this was done, the platform was noticeably stiffer.



My main concern up to this point had been whether or not the lag eye bolts would pull out of the trunks of the tree. So far the bolts in the tree had held, and everything felt solid. We still had a lot of weight to add to the tree house, but so far things were looking good.

We'd made such great progress that we decided to hurry back to the shop and put the siding on the 4 foot tall wall, so we could get it up in the tree while we had access to the crane. With a full five people working at once, the siding went pretty quickly.


We also decided to crane up all the OSB we were going to use for the roof. That seemed like less work than pulling each sheet up via rope. After that, we got the 4 foot tall wall up easily enough, and tacked it into place with some handy 2" x 4"s.



After all the preparation, traveling, and building, it was great to see a good portion of the structure fall into place in one day. Andy's crane certainly made our life a lot easier, and it was great having so many helping hands during the day. Thanks guys!

First few days of the trip.

The marathon building trip is over. We survived with all our limbs and digits intact, and ended up with something in the tree that looks pretty cool.

Ted and I left Denver around 5 am on Friday morning. The trip went smoothly, although we had to rush to make it to the Louisville airport in time to pick up Nate. The timing worked out great, we showed up right as Nate was walking out the door of the airport. Not bad for 17 hours of driving.


On Saturday morning we headed to the local lumber yard. We'd estimated how much lumber we'd need, and picked through a lot of stock before we found everything. They didn't have enough T-111 siding, so we knew we'd have to pick that up elsewhere.


We also took a look at the platform, and discussed the trapdoor and additional attachments to the tree. We decided to scrap the trapdoor idea for various reasons, including placement issues, ladder access issues, and knowing we'd be pressed for time otherwise.

Sunday Nate and Ted started adding the additional attachment points to the platform. Dad hauled the scaffolding down to the site, and the three of them set that up. They attached a wire rope sling to each trunk, using a 3/4" stainless steel lag screw and some giant washers. The hope was that these would be backup support, in case one of the original attachments points pulled out. At the very least we hoped it'd give us some time to get out of the tree if things started to collapse.


Later in the day we headed over to Tommy's shop to grab some windows and a door. Tommy had generously offered up some spare windows he had, and one of many doors he had laying around. We also picked up 16 sheets of T-111 siding. Ouch, that stuff is expensive!

With the windows in hand, we laid out the final design, and started building the first wall. Ted and Nate were pretty antsy to actual build something, so we were up until 11 pm or so building that first wall.


Monday was a flurry of framing. As my dad and I put the siding on the first wall, Ted and Nate knocked out the remaining first level walls. After we put on the siding, we hauled them down to the site via wagon. Later, we managed to build the four foot wall that would raise the roof line on the south facing side of the building to 12 feet.


It's amazing how quickly one can frame when using a miter saw and a pneumatic nail gun. Putting the siding on took a bit of work, since we had to cut out seven rough openings. We worked until after dark trying to prepare for the next big day of getting the walls up into the tree.



After all that hard work, we had a few tape measure races. We eventually added stabilizers to the tape measures, and added jumps to the race course. Nate's tape measure was fundamentally faster than the others, although both Ted and I managed to squeak out a few wins due to clever engineering.