Ever Build One of These When You Were a kid?

M.D. Holloway · 11-25-2005, 08:00 PM

For Thanksgiving break, Max (in the John Deere shirt) and his toe headed buddy Casey decided to build a "fort" in the woods. They actually did all the work them selves. I monitored the progress from a safe distance and gave limited instruction. They did pretty good for a couple 6 yr olds.
Few rules:
1) Can't bring anything into the woods or out of the woods.
2) Only tools you can use are the ones you make in the woods (actually they caught on quick to the power of the lever!)
3) Can't cut down any trees
4) Can't bring anything alive out of the woods (including ticks, chiggers, snakes or turtles)

Here it is before the "camo" of leaves was applied (camera bats gave out for the final pic, hopefully it will survive another few days).

livi · 11-26-2005, 01:23 AM

You bet Mike ! Pic brings back memories. Grew up right next to the woods. Built hundreds of them with my brothers.

Thing is, when you are old and experienced enough to build the perfect hide out, you are too old to be interested in playing in it anymore.

wilke3169 · 11-26-2005, 04:25 AM

We built one with a fire place, or so we thought. Quickly discovered you can't fry duck eggs in grease over an open flame. But, we did make some great forts also. Many stories were told in them, some were actually true.

Livi, A perfect hide out sounds like a great idea, even today... We now call them garages.

red-beard · red-beard's Garage

Nice lean too!

djmcmath · 11-26-2005, 06:13 AM

I used to build all kinds of forts with the friends. We used a slightly different set of rules for tree forts, though -- hammer, nails, and junk-wood from whatever project Dad was working on were ok, as long as we brought the hammer back when we were done. More than a couple of trees are nicely adorned with little-bitty platforms 50 feet off the ground now.

Quote:

Originally posted by wilke3169 Livi, A perfect hide out sounds like a great idea, even today... We now call them garages.

Like so many things in life, we laugh because it's funny, and we laugh because it's true.

cstreit · cstreit's Garage

We had so many loose, rickety "forts" dotting the woods around our house it's amazing it wasn't raining kids all summer.

Dantilla · 11-26-2005, 08:57 AM

Ah, yes. Lots of forts. With my dad being in construction, while most kids were looking for bent nails around houses being built, I was able to use handfuls of shiny new nails from our garage.

The best two were the three story tree house, and the one we built where there were no trees, so we built it up on 4x4 stilts. We paneled the interior walls on the stilt fort, found screens for the windows, tar paper on the roof, and a trap door in the floor. No help from adults, and we spent several nights sleeping in it.

oldE · 11-26-2005, 09:01 AM

And then there was the summer we were going to build a platform in the big pine on the hill. Trouble was, the yellow jackets living in the hollow limb about 12 feet up really objected to Clem's presence.
It was a long run to the brook for mud.
Thanks for the memories.
Les

djmcmath · 11-26-2005, 09:47 AM

We didn't so much sleep in our tree-forts as we used them for artillery fire. A friend and I built a slingshot that stood as tall as we did out of the fork of a tree pulled off the firewood pile. We used triple-braided surgical tubing for the power, and fashioned a leather bucket to hold pine cones. I remember firing pine cones a thousand yards from those forts, but my memory could be clouded by the years.

Good times, good times.