Seventh build (long) weekend - May 2016

So this weekend was all about walls and windows.  We set up to camp in the gorgeous spring weather, just the lads this weekend, fires, rabbit stew, drills, cider and a quick dip in the river.  These video's are coming thick and fast thanks to Heno - please look back at previous posts as some have the clips amalgamated into one video and others now have videos that didn't previously.

So this is one of the most exciting weekends so far I reckon, when I imagined building a treehouse this is what I had in mind - using all our recycled/skip dived odds and ends to form walls and windows and see it taking shape.  Previously I've been surprised by the amount of digging required and the structural frame seemed to take FOR-ever. 

I may have brought a tent without poles (special) so we just strung up the inner sleeping pod under the trees and stretched a tarp above it, no problems with rain anyway as it was a glorious weekend :)

The first window is the dinning room window, using 3 of these 6 pane windows we want to make a huge, opening window to capture the view across the fields of welsh long horns and hills, situated just above the fold down dinning table.  The table will form an window shutter when in the up position.

So here's the finished product!  Gorgeous old wood frames which Heno's connected together into one big new frame, he loves his electric wood plane he does.

Then we were onto a smaller window and kiddie window by the front door, we the kiddie window is a tumble dryer door - boom! 

Here you can see the almost complete wall, salvaged sauna panels used to good effect, providing excellent insulation,  The blue around the kiddie window is foam and foil insulation sheet from a skip, cut to fit.

As most of the wall was done we moved onto the outside, here's a good shot of the feather boarding on the outside, again a massive thank you to Reynolds Timber in Birkenhead for donating scrap feather boards to us, they maybe cracked or odd sizes but they'll do us!  We have a few tonnes still to use for the other walls, it looks so cool!

 Full wall, a view of the yard arm (static) which is yet to be used, and a big open window, so happy

You can see the two smaller windows here and we love the tree's camouflaging the treehouse although they are a bit hard to work around when your up a ladder trying to nail down feather boards.

We had a site visit from an onsite safety troll courtesy of Dial-a-Dean Inc, who mostly laughed at our general lack of safety, smoked and drank tinnies whilst telling us how we could have done it better!  He did a lot of filming for us and it was ace having 4 sets of hands.  After he arrived we started to tackle the balcony structure.  A large haul of timber from a friends recently deceased lean-too gave us a lot of long sections of solid 3" x 4", balcony structure tick!  So in the next pic you can see Heno precariously balanced on 2 sections of sleeper sat on the main rails.  It's gonna be huge!  On the last day we set about creating a lot of diagonal bracing to support the balcony but more will be needed.

Hope you enjoyed this epic video and post, we found this weekend very invigorating and are chuffed with the progress, next time more walls and a working balcony!

6th Build Weekend - November 2015

I have a white Russian on hand, Heno's uploaded the video to youtube, lets do this!

So here's the video of the 6th build weekend,

November 2015, seriously cold, we didn't brave camping this time, seriously windy, fart jokes aside on the first night we headed up onto the roof to check the ply.  We were missing 1 and a half sheets of coroline roofing (black plastic corrugated stuff)  and we hoped that over a month in the rain and freezing weather hadn't killed the corner of our roof....it hadn't!  All solid and dry and ready to go.  So first job that night was to put the last sheets up, it was going dark, gale force winds, kneeling on loose ply sheets (so we didn't break the coroline by kneeling on it)...I don't love heights anyway....yea safest thing I've ever done!  

The next day showed us that wind had made a right mess of the wood piles we'd stored down by the tree, we did our best to tidy up then realising how treacherous the stair were with no hand rail and slippery steps we set to work on those.  The plan was simple, our kind landlords provided left over chicken wire which we wrapped around each step and nailed and stapled down, this made them less deadly to use - but the twist in the stairs and differing depth of each step means they are hard to climb, it's fairly steep so we'll need hand rails.

The rest of the weekend was dedicated to windows and door.  The first window was an aluminium framed double glazed unit.  It needed a trim-cutting down from 4 panes to 3 - still leaving us with a 6ft window and the top pane opens, boom!  The first corner of the walls has gone up, shed panels but they're just structural, they'll need feather boarding on the outside and insulation and cladding on the outside.  

our last joy was to fit the front door, a bit weird considering we had almost no walls.....but it felt important to do!  It's a lovely old solid wood door from a pub beer garden.  Two posts, two hinges and a bit of fiddling later and we had a working door, with a slightly dubious natural wood carved handle, but now we have a opening door and window, boss!