The Tree House
 

I know its a fuzzy pic - I took it with my cell phone. I does give a sorta dream like state though.

Here is our son and a friend in a tree house they made. In a few years this tree and wooded area will be paved over and a 6 lane divided road will be there instead. In the mean time, the adventures never end.

Agh to be a kid again!

http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1208797500.jpg

Cryin' shame...but as long as sex is more popular than death, what are you going to do? The woods I played in as a kid is now tract houses...

Kids still climb trees? Who would have thunk.

Yeah, to be a kid again.

"They paved paradise and put in a parking lot"

That's lots of time, build something bigger.:D

This Thread just goes to show you that we all evolved from monkeys.

Genealogy

A little girl asked her mother, 'How did the human race appear?'

The mother answered, 'God made Adam and Eve and they had children and so was
all mankind made.'

Two days later the girl asked her father the same question.

The father answered, 'Many years ago there were monkeys from which the Human
race evolved.'

The confused girl returned to her mother and said, 'Mom, how is it possible
that you told me the human race was created by God, and Dad said they
developed from monkeys?'

The mother answered, 'Well, dear, it is very simple. I told you about my
side of the family and your father told you about his.'

My son and some of his buddies built a 3 story tree house when he was 8 or 9. They used strictly scrap wood and it looked like it. It was about 30 feet up at the top level. They had a heck of a time with it for 2 or 3 years. They also put a zip line from the top to our fence about 80 feet away and lived through that. They did destroy the trampoline jumping from about 20 feet up. There are still remnants in the tree. I wish I had some pictures. Southern engineering at its finest.

Les, we had a similar one in our neighborhood. The zipline had a rope you had to hang onto as you traveled down. My best friend somehow managed to get the zipline swinging as he went downwards and wrapped around his neck. I wasn't there, and have no idea how it happened. When he reached the bottom, he was wrapped well enough that his feet didn't touch the ground, effectively making a noose. Had a parent not been nearby and heard the kids screaming, he would have died on that rope. Afterwards he had the absolute nastiest friction burn on his neck that I've ever seen.

Built this one for my kids about 10 years ago. They're grown up and don't use it any more. 8' x 12' with a deck and it's made with light weight steel studs. It's ship-lap like the house, and painted to match. Has a rolled asphalt roof. http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1208823008.jpg

Hugh,
Sweet! I bet you could rent that out to a writer.

Naw put it up for sale for 500K....fixer upper with a view.

My wife and I happened to be out in the back yard watching our son and his crew doing the zip line. Son and I had gone to the hardware store and purchased a sweet little pulley and rigged it on the zip line. My son went first and because they'd been using a looped rope and hanging on for dear life they'd make it about 2/3rd of the way and bail off. So first time with the pulley my son goes first and heading to a headlong with the fence we yelled bail, bail now. He did and no problem. Next victim launches and because the speeds were so much faster than before his feet swing way over his head and in a panic he bails about 15 feet above ground landing flat on his back. My son runs up and proceeds to tell him he'll live he's only had the breath knocked out of himself. Never having had that happened he thought he was dead.

How they lived through all that I'll never know.

We have some great big ol' trees that would be good for a treehouse/fort but I'm not sure I should build one.
My son is 4 and my daughter is 2.
What do you think the "right" age is?

As soon as they can climb a tree and figuer out how to get back down with out any help.

The boards leading up to the first deck have 10-15 nails each. Hammered at every angle imaginable. The tree has grown into them and I'm not sure I'll even try to remove them because it might kill the tree. A big old nasty cottonwood. One of the loser kind that puts out cotton by the bale full in about a month from now.

I built mine as a "floating" tree house. By that I mean I have a piece of 2"x4" lagged into each tree branch and the floor frame sits on top of the 2"x4" with a long lag into it rather than the tree. Trees for the most part grow from the top, not the bottom. The California Live Oak that I put it in has a total of three lags into the three branch trunks. 10 years later, the tree house is still perfectly level. It's the "Eco" way to go, and it works well. The steel studs (wall and roof joists) must have shaved several hundred pounds of the weight. They're cheaper too. I spend $750 on that puppy ten years ago. It's hard to see, but it has screens on the windows, and the area under the gables, front and rear, are also screened.

I had some pretty cool tree forts.

The most elaborate was the "stilt fort". There were no trees where we wanted one, so we built it up on 4 x 4 "stilts", with a trap door in the floor, and a ladder we could pull up to keep others out. We had a tar paper roof, and paneling left over from my friend's house on the inside of the walls. We even sized the windows to fit a couple of screens we found. Patchwork carpet on the floor. It had a great view over a cliff. That's why it was imperative to have a tree house there, even if there were no trees.

Another one in a madrona tree was three stories. The higher up we built, the tougher to make a solid structure, as the tree branches sway in the breeze.

The third one of honorable mention was built under the lower branches of a big fir tree, so that it was pretty well hidden.

Since my dad was in construction, I had a big advantage over other kids who went asking for bent nails to straighten out from construction sites- I'd grab handfulls of new nails from boxes in our garage.

Lots of fun for a few neighborhood boys searching for adventure.

Those were the days. Sigh. Happy, careless and free of responsibilities. Time an abstract phenomena. Summers lasting for ever. Sigh..

We kept girlie mags in my friend's tree house.

Best,

Kurt