Sorry it's a bit late - we went down in September and finally here are the pics and a vid! We had a great weekend, beautiful weather and here's what we did:
First we set up a camp fire - all important! Made a tripod for the kettle and tried nettle tea....needs sugar but it's good :)
Bacon butties made onsite :)
First task was to collect hardcore for under the stilts - fortunately our land lords have an area of the garden which has been a bit of a dumping ground for the house for years. We found old bricks, pottery and breeze blocks - free hardcore and we're making the garden tidy......when does a garden become grounds?
While we were down there dug up some spuds for our land lord - the best way to pay rent!
James smashing up the hardcore. We dug little 1ft x 1ft pits and filled them with the hardcore - makes a level surface for the foot of the stilt and ensure good drainage so the foot doesn't rot.
We were able to coppice some hazel for a much needed straight stilt, just before the chainsaw ran out of fuel. Also ate my first raw hazelnut - pretty good, but I think they need roasting and pounding before you get nuttela :)
Expert joiner Heno cutting notches in the stilts. The notches were bespoke cut in order to slot into the beams at floor level.
Up in the tree working on another stilt....James smugly enjoying the view
Fav pic of the weekend, Coxy's harmonica and vintage hatchet on a pile of slats - which will one day be walls.
The first floor boards (plywood) going down - at the edges the floorboards needed to be cut to fit around the stilts poking through the floor.
Support team coming to cheer us on. Ollie enjoys wandering about the base camp putting on helmets and trying to pick up sharp stuff.
The first corner of floor!
The first cup of tea made in the tree house! Monumental!
perfect weather
'Have we got enough ply to cover the whole floor?'
Ironic - fruit tea in a coffee mug
The first few days were a lot of digging and smashing hardcore - it felt like slow progress, but now we have 8 stilts. When we had finished the foundations the plywood floor went down in a few hours.
The floor may need another layer, it's only 12mm ply, so if anyone has some going let us know! Otherwise we may use slats, glue them down and sand them....faffy but nice wood floor maybe
Last bits slotting into place. The floor space is huge - haven't even started the balcony yet!
Some last bits of tree surgery. This side of the fork is sadly a little rotten, we may have to cut more off - but it's covered and treated now to protect it through the winter
At the end of the weekend with some help from our landlords and their family - we stored all the structural timber up on the platform and the stuff on the ground was carefully sorted into types of timber and covered with old fence panels and tarp. A tidy site. We reckon there's about 5-6 tons down there now, easily enough to finish the tree house. The next weekend will be all about the roof!
A great weekend, good company and food, some games too, glad to have rolled a few big logs around the camp fire - starting to look very homely now. Still need a name for the place, any thoughts?
People have asked why we're doing this, where we got the idea and if we actually know anything about building stuff....a few years ago I picked up a copy of a Sunday supplement of a news paper whilst I was at my bosses house - we were just about to have a supervision meeting. The front page of the supplement caught my eye as it said 'living wild in the woods' or words to that effect with a picture of a young guy and an epic looking treehouse. I asked if I could borrow the supplement and copy it - my boss let me take it. It was a featured article about Nick Weston and his new book 'The Tree House Diaries'. He'd gone to live wild in the woods, build and live in his own tree house and hunt, forage and grow his own food for a time and write a book about his experiences. I bought the book and read it within a week. My wife read it and we laughed about how we'd love to live like that some day. I showed the book to almost everyone I knew and saw over the next few weeks, pretty much everyone thought it was cool and some took a real interest.
Since then, thanks to Nick's inspiring ideas about the tree house, simplicity and wild food I've started to grow an interest; I've had dandelions and herb-bennet as salad, James and I made cheese (a friend of his bet him £5 that he couldn't make cheese from scratch - we got a jam thermometer, followed Nick's recipe and £10 of ingredients later we had our own version of Feta 'Chester Gamble'!) and got my own copy of Food for Free
I also dug out my Dad's old air rifle and sighted it and learned to shoot under the expert tuition of Heno, looking forward to my first confirmed kill! On the second recce weekend to find the right tree we drove past a roadkill Pheasant, I asked him if we could eat it....it was still warm and not too badly dented so with Jame's folks permission to use their oven we had roast Pheasant (next time we'll hang it for a few days first!)
Anyway, I'm onto my 2nd copy of the Treehouse Diaries - with my first copy worn out my Mum posted a new copy out to me in Cambodia last year for a Christmas gift coz she knew how much I loved it! I'm still just as enthusiastic about the book as when I first read it and show it to anyone who comes to the house.
So many amazing glamping projects, boltholes and budget retreats - truly the opposite of grand designs - there's more episodes coming on all the time, watch it! George is really enthusiastic about some well random projects, does some himself and the series is really empowering - after watching you feel genuinely prepared to give it a bash - many of the folks have no clue about building (like me) or design or restoration but you watch them struggle, learn and achieve truly amazing spaces to chill, work or holiday in.....love it!
After watching them I contacted Heno and James and dangerous ideas began to emerge - we could do this, heno has some joinery experience, James works outdoors as a gardener and his folks - our future landlords - had some land and I....well I'd read the Treehouse Diaries a lot...we were all set up......in a way!
Here's my dubious almost scale design model
A side view
It's a work in progress as we recently discovered our simple single slope roof needs adapting - some support in the middle to hold it up would clutter the inside of the house, so we'll have to go for an a-frame roof, I'll blog a picture once I've adapted the model.
So that's how this little project began, big thanks to Nick Weston, Ben Law and George Clark! Thanks for reading. Greg
I thought scavenging bits of wood and pallets for the build would be arduous and more hassle than it was worth-wouldn't it be a better use of time to just work, earn cash and buy the wood, apparently NO!
The rewards of chatting to people about your idea are massive, it's a great conversation starter and most people are very curious and excited (some sneer but it's not for everyone). Some blokes at a timber place wouldn't give us stuff unless we promised to bring them pictures of the project. We traded £5 worth of tea and coffee stuff for their staff room - for well over £100 worth of timber, scrap wood and ply which was destined for burning
Heno is the master of pallet foraging
I however seem to have a knack for chatting to older couples who are getting extensions done and have skips full of joy to share.
timber yard donation
Heno's trailer carefully packed
First load of free wood (mostly the fruit of Heno's skip diving) stacked up on site for the first day.
If you have any scraps of wood, ply or longer timber to donate please message us, don't worry - chipped ends can be trimmed, nails can be pulled out, cement scraped off and drillholes plugged up or filled.
Taking a bit more inspiration from Mr Weston's book we decided to build a wood burner like his 'Bertha'. So a few weekends ago, Greg and I set out to find an oil barrel for the purpose. One that we could have for free naturally!
15 Minutes later having visited one garage, he had just the thing. It's amazing how people react if we get the chance to explain what we're doing. Most people seem to get it completely and help us in every way they can, maybe there's a bit of everyone that wishes they were doing something like this so it fires their imagination? I don't know, either way it makes scavenging easier when folks are receptive to the idea! The barrel we got was old and blue, so we christened it 'Old Blue', which seems like a male name so he's a him.
So we got Old Blue home and proceeded to cut his lid off:
Once this was done we needed to burn him out a bit to clear out any remaining oil or chemicals to make him safe for eventual indoor use.
We had a small fire just to clear him out.
Then I cut the door and bottom opening out, and immediately realised I'd cut them the wrong way round! D'oh! As the bottom of the barrel eventually becomes the top of the stove, my mind had not factored that in and I guess I was just a bit grinder happy. Never mind, nothing that can't be fixed with a welder. I'll simply cut out the surround of the smaller hole and weld it in to the bigger hole, thus swapping the two size holes around. It'll be good welding practice for me anyway.
Whoops!
So I then decided to have a proper burn in him to get rid of as much paint as possible to help with welding and also to make repainting him with spray on stove paint easier. Our friend Andy helped with this as got Old Blue VERY hot indeed!
Old Blue warming up nicely!
He kept us warm well into the night too.
Now I need to get my welder out and finish him off, progress will be blogged as it occurs.......
Well here it is folks, our blog about our treehouse. We are three couples, Greg and Jane, James and Hannah C and James and Sarah H. This all started after Greg read 'The Treehouse Diaries' by Nick Weston, feeling inspired he gathered together the rest of us to build what all grown men (and some women!) dream about, an adult sized treehouse to stay in. So we got together, found a lovely tree in one corner of James C's parents' garden and decided to build it!
This weekend saw the first of many building weekends. Having visited site on previous occasions to recce trees and other key features, our tree had been chosen, our design roughed out (Greg even made a model of it!), calculations done and timber ordered. The timber for the floor structure is the only timber we intend to buy, the rest we hope to recycle and scavenge from various sources. The timber was paid for (£333.46!) and delivered to site on Friday, there was no going back now!
Day One
First job was to get everything to site, happily we had use of a 4x4 to tow my trailer to within a few feet of site so that all the scavenged wood I brought could be shifted in one go, I'd hate think how long this would've taken by hand as the nearest road access to site is a bout 300 yards away. Which in the grand scheme of things isn't far, except when you have a hundred or so of pieces of wood to move by hand! This is the carefully packed trailer:
and this is what it looks like unpacked:
Believe or not this whole pile of wood cost us just a couple of boxes of tea bags, it's worth making friends with local timber yards, it's amazing what they throw out!
We then set about setting up the site with a shelter to keep the tools dry, clearing the various shrubs and small trees that would pose a danger or were just in the way and finally carrying all the structural timber onto site. These were much to big for the trailer so had to be lugged the old fashioned way.
And we're ready to go!
Saturday was a short day due to some of us having to travel quite some distance, so we concentrated on getting the first 'sleeper' bolted to the tree. This is the datum point that everything else will come from, it sets the floor height, the angle from the tree, everything. Getting it right was worth taking some time over.
Here we are cutting it from the length of 8"x3" timber that we'd bought.
We'll make another of these at some point to go on the other side of the tree to support the balcony rails. It's bolted to the tree using M10x200mm coach screws and 50mm square washers (3mm thick!). We gave the tree a little 'shave' first to ensure as flat a surface to bolt to as possible without damaging the cambium layer of the tree, then drilled and bolted it up.
It was in place by end of play Saturday which set us up well to crack on Sunday morning.
Day Two
Which we did despite the continuing rain, and when I say rain, I mean RAIN! It poured it down on and off (mostly on) all day Saturday and Sunday. Work was slow and a bit more hazardous than was comfortable at times due to the amount of mud that got churned up, but we pressed on. By there end of Sunday we had the main 'rails' up on the sleeper and a supporting leg underneath them. This was no mean feat as as quickly as we could dig holes for decent footings for the posts, they would fill with rain. Lots of hardcore later and we managed to secure the foot of the first post. The first structural element of the whole design was now standing up all on its own.
Building the 'rails':
Rails resting on the sleeper, awaiting their first supporting leg:
Rails are now horizontal! Held up by their first leg (and a bit of rope). Leg just visible on for right of pic:
James C is very pleased :-)
Side view
Day Three
Monday brought glorious and very welcome sunshine with it. Spirits were lifted and we were set for another day on the build. It definitely seemed like we'd found a rhythm in the team by this point, jobs were getting ticked off left, right and centre and progress was swift under blue skies. The first joists went on top of the rails at either end and in the centre. Once the end plates were secured to them we had our perimeter set out and the full scale of what we were building became apparent. It was BIG! 15'9"x16'1" to be exact. On paper this seemed reasonable for the accommodation required, when it was set out in real planks of wood up in the trees 10' off the ground, it looked massive! Still, better that than too small, it does potentially have to sleep 6 adults, plus we have 2 children between the 3 couples.
By the time we really had to call it a day we had all the joists on, all the 'noggins' between them (noggins help to prevent twisting of the timbers as they dry out). We also had the second leg under the rails and a stilt in too. The stilt is extra long so that it will reach and support the roof once it's on. These supports combined with fixing the joists to any passing trees meant that already the floor structure is feeling very firm. We still have 5 more stilts to add in too, one in each remaining corner and one half-way along each side. I'm not worried about this thing falling down!
So that's where we are until the next build weekend when hopefully we'll start on the roof and flooring. Watch this space folks.
