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!