More art!

Thanks to Dominic, we have a welcome face to greet us when we open the front door - from Mozambique (repurposed paint bin lid) - thanks Domo!

Treehouse Interiors

It's been fun finishing up with major projects and starting to tidy up on the inside. Installed some rustic wood chairs, chalk board, rope ladder to the loft, and more to come....


  

Windows are in

Got some old windows, rehabbed from a house in Connecticut. Paint had to be stripped, sides ripped down, since they didn't exactly fit into window slots, and then painted. Of course I ended up breaking a pane or two on these old windows, and replacing with plexiglass. They look great, I think, for the most part. The house looks much more finished and best part is, even though there's lots of daylight to the sash, the rain seems to stay out for the most part.

       

A Worthy Portal

Building the door had some tricky elements. The top and bottom needed to be rounded to fit in the space (the threshold ended up being rounded on the edges), and my original plan of sandwiching pine tongue/groove siding with a plywood core just proved too heavy. So in the end, the outside was made with the tongue/groove siding, core was cut up as a simple frame to reduce weight, and inside face was made with the ultra-thin plywood sheathing i made the rest of the walls with - light and matched with the interior decor. The outside handle was something i picked up from Amazon. I also put a lock mechanism on the inside from some salvaged parts i found in the garage - whenever possible, good to salvage - thats what treehouse are all about.






     
 

Every treehouse needs a trapdoor!

I asked the kids what one thing they wanted on the treehouse and Kai's answer was a trapdoor (Nadia wanted a swing, which i got onto the treehouse early in the process). the trapdoor needed a recessed pull handle, so i needed to get wood flooring or something built up around the pull handle. luckily lumber liquidators had a box for sale for like $18  for 30 square feet. not bad... and perfect for a treehouse.

i ended up getting a rope ladder on amazon, saving me lots of days in construction. ended up being a really nice quality product. huge hit with the kids! they love climbing up it and it's not attached on the bottom, so requires considerable core strength - challenging! and fun

 

Walled in

The walls are finally together, and stained. It's June 2017. Yep, I'm coming on 3 years of working on this thing... it's a process. Decided on a funky door trim, octagon "head" plays off the octagon window on the front wall. An octagon has 8 sides, enough for a ba gua representation of 8 trigrams - a taoist representation of the universe... in the center is a korea roof tile i picked up in Gyeongju when I was there last year... It works with the treehouse and general theme I think...

      

Spring is here, finish line in sight

As the weather warms up, I'm getting outside more to work on the treehouse. We have new neighbors with a nice view of the south wall, so I was inspired to get that finished now, so they have something "finished" to look at, versus scrap wood. The rest of the walls are mostly done too, at this point just the front wall remains to get the siding up and stained. I can't quite finish it though as I'm going to make an arched trim around the door itself and don't know yet where the curve will end up. But the finish line is in sight! I know what needs to be done at this point and just need to execute :) reducing uncertainty is a good place to be.

Work continues through the winter

We had a relatively mild Winter, average snowfall but mild enough to keep some work going though the winter months. Staining the siding was impossible as the stain needed at least 45, 50 deg F for proper flow, penetration. However, I could measure and cut the trim, then paint it indoors, let it dry, and screw it in on a sunny, warmish day. This kept me busy with forward progress through January, February...

Choosing a color was fun. The twins and Diana were in on that and we ended up with indigo - a proud color, not too blue, not too purple. offset the brown cedar stain nicely, gave the structure a nice outline. Nadia loved the paining part and helped on many of the trim pieces.



In between work sessions, the treehouse was great for snowball fights and other snow-related fun times. The snow was also a good test for the roof, and the polycarbonate panels passed the test without a hitch. I'm still not sure how water-tight and snow-tight the structure is, but hoping that most of the snow and precip i get on the floor is due to window and door openings and not something else, but time will tell. In the meantime, winter has been surprisingly productive!

Siding the walls with some bevel

With thought to overall weight, I decided to use cedar bevel siding for the exterior, stained for a nice brownish natural cedar tone. I used stainless steel siding nails, which for the most part didn't split the siding. Part way through this process, I got a new hand rotary saw - a dremel saw, which was really easy to work with and significantly improved the time-consuming task of cutting siding panels to size, even adjusting cuts once the panels were up. I previously was using a more beefy rotary saw that required two hands to operate and was much more suited to cut 2x4's... Using the right tools for the job makes a huge difference!

I wanted to stain the panels on the ground first and then put them up... but in the end, was racing against the weather, and so just cut them and nailed them up until an entire wall was finished, then stained in place. By the end, I was trying to stain in temps hovering around freezing which is not ideal - both for my hands and for the stain - which it says should be applied at temps above 50deg - oops... doesn't look too bad though...

Placement and neighbors

I specifically wanted to situate the treehouse somewhere where it wouldn't intrude too much on my neighbors' privacy. This is good for everyone involved. 

The south side of the treehouse faces our backyard neighbor's house, so I didn't put any windows on that wall (even though it was south facing). Also, the front entry wall is behind the hemlocks, whose boughs hide the treehouse from the street, even in winter. I think in the end it worked out well and hopefully is not so noticeable and obtrusive to the neighbors...

 

Gentlemen testing

Every once in a while, it's good to assemble a group of your friends, of various shapes and sizes, to test the structural fidelity of the house. This is fun for everyone involved (as long as the house doesn't collapse of course)... these guys are all grizzled veterans of the Society for Acupuncture Research who were staying with us for a board retreat... thanks guys.

Some ladders required

Ultimately, around the hemlocks and in some of the extreme corners, I needed to use a ladder to get to the panel edges and screw in the special bolts that keep the panels from flying away in a strong wind, and keep rain from entering the entry hole.

While the panels were reddish in color, for some extra light inside the treehouse I mixed in clear polycarbonate panel pieces to make kind of a skylight - this also lets you see the trees from inside the treehouse. It turned out be a nice effect. When mixing panels like this, you have to layer them the right way so that water coming down from the top panel didn't make its way under an overlay panel below it. Something to keep in mind...

For some of the specialized screws, especially up high by the ridge beam (which required a special ridge cap over the adjoining panels that met at the gable apex), I used a different technique for getting these screws in place. I placed the screw head directly into the chuck - i.e. no star drive or phillips head drive... I would tighten the chuck just enough so that once it was screwed in place I could just snap down and the drill would come off the screw. This allowed me to climb up high, hold myself steady on a tree or treehouse wall with one hand, and drive in the screw with a single hand. Worked great once I figured this out :)

Roof logistics

Getting up and around the treehouse to put up the rafters and roofing led to some "contemplation." Since the roof tilted only 40deg or so from vertical, I really didn't want to be climbing around up there unprotected. That meant that I wanted to be able to assemble the roof as much as possible from inside the treehouse. Up on a step-ladder if at all possible. With this in mind, I decided the simplest approach would be to use super light, 2-foot wide, corrugated polycarbonate panels for the roof. I was originally thinking of using sheathing with cedar shingles, but this would have required a lot of scrambling up on the roof. In contrast, the panels are fairly cheap, relatively nice looking, long-lasting, easily sourced from local big-box, and could be assembled one after the other from inside the treehouse (mostly). I had some visitors from the local squirrel family (who live in a near-by oak) come by to inspect my work (see photo).


The polycarbonate panels do require special screws that have a rubber element under the cap to keep it water-proof. Also they ideally need this plastic undulating snap-in support rail that rests on purlins (2x3's) which I had to put up orthogonally to the rafters...

 

Gable-gable... trying to get the roof going before thanksgiving

We're catching up quick to real-time here on the blog. Once the fall really set in, it felt like a race to get as much buttoned-up as I could before the snows came. Next up was the roof, and I wanted to make sure the south side got up as soon as possible, as thats the side which was slightly tilted and accumulated water with each (rare) rainstorm (we're in the middle of a drought).

Keeping to the general theme of the larger terrestrial home that the treehouse hovers around, the roof design included a gable, centered on the front (west facing) entry wall. The ridge beam at the top of the gable would go from the curved wall to the front entry wall. Alas, getting everything set-up ended up with a few inches displacement for the apex, so i needed to double-up and offset the 2x6 ridge beam. The beam itself fell into a notch created by doubling up vertical 2x4's in both the curved and entry walls, then cutting away half of the inside edge of each of the these 2x4's down about 3 inches, creating a nice 2x notch for the ridge beam to fall into. Maybe more clear with photos... The rafters were spaced based on the needs of the polycarbonate roofing I was going to use. These were bird mouth notched where I could and screwed in / backed up with hardware where the rafters had to go flush with the ridge beam. Since I knew the roofing was going to be super light (corrugated polycarbonate 2-foot wide panels), I knew these didn't need to be overdone. But still needed to support potentially heavy snow-weight.

Righting the wrong

It's never going to be perfect. The platform was level, the wall was plumb... but then the knee brace began to sink (a bit), and the wall started to tilt. While it's not a structural problem, all the angles and distances go off, and you're left trying to compensate with the siding, roof, trim, etc. What to do? The solution ended up being "racking" the wall back to near-plumb and keeping it there with a screwed in 2x4 (in the photo). Great idea by Andrei (my niece's husband), who with my brother-in-law Don, helped with the solution. Once all the walls were up and screwed together, the fix held. Now the brace is off, and the platform is still a bit dippy at the furthest corner. There's accumulated water with every rainstorm, but now I got the roof and siding up. It's manageable and in the end, you can barely tell without rolling a marble across the floor ;) With treehouse construction, you learn a little flexibility - not a bad lesson in life....