Who doesn’t love tree houses? Who doesn’t love forts?
(Okay, if you answered “me” to any of these questions you can follow this link to something more suited to your liking. If you didn’t then you’re a normal human and I encourage you to read on.)
I’ve wanted to build a cool treehouse ever since I was a kid. At one point some of the neighborhood kids wedged a few pieces of splintery scrap wood HIGH in a willow tree in a field near my house. The only way up was to climb an old cracked garden hose which was nailed to the platform with no fewer than 8 mismatched, bent, rusty old nails. It was always a thrill to go up there but as I’ve grown older I have realized just how incredibly dangerous it truly was. A fall from that 15 foot platform into the branches and rocks below could have easily been fatal if done wrong.
I inevitably grew up, got married, bought a house, and eventually decided to start a family. The tallest tree we had was no more than 7′ tall. By the time these trees would be big enough for even a small treehouse my soon-to-be kids would be graduating from college! This is when I decided to build the tree and the treehouse.
I sketched out a “plan” to build a tree stump about 6 feet tall then build a treehouse on top of the stump. There would be a door in the stump that lead to a hatch in the floor of the house. I will cover the build process of the treehouse in another post but I will share some of the more interesting details here.
The house and the stump is built with almost 100% free/found materials. The only things I bought are the paint, about 10% of the screws/hardware, three of the windows, and some of the siding material (I had originally planned to make my own siding and had material to do so but my in-laws gave me some money to help with the treehouse so we decided to “upgrade”). It’s about 7 feet to the deck, the peak of the house is 16′ tall (this caused a HUGE problem in which the city of Reno got involved and will eventually lead to the removal of the entire treehouse. More on that in a later post). The house itself is just under 120 square feet. It has three wood-framed windows (2 on the South, 1 on the North) and a port-hole on the deck. The only entrance is via a staircase in the trunk.
That little shack attached to the trunk is actually a secret entrance to a huge underground room I built. I will post about that in the future as well!
