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!