Monthly Archive

More than 50 people visited the treehouse over the Thanksgiving break and for an hour or so on Saturday there were 18 adults in the treehouse at the same time. This set the all-time record, at least in terms of sheer human tonnage (approaching 3000 pounds). Nothing moved, nothing creaked, the cables just hung there, taught as always. The decibel level was astonishing. At one point I stood up on a bench and began counting people on the first-floor deck (pointing dramatically and calling out the numbers). When I finished I made a terrified face and shouted, “quick, I need at least two people to move to this side of the tree!” A lady in the back shrieked. Several people rushed forward and panic seemed imminent. Then people began laughing and a guy threw a pine cone at me.

Two days later 15 junior high students and their chaperones showed up. The total weight was lower than the record day, but the number of questions (some of them very clever) was way up. The smart-aleck remark of the day came from one young man who, after hearing me rant about how much of a hassle it had been to work up in the air hanging from ropes, raised his hand and said, “Wouldn’t it have been much easier if you just built this thing on the ground?”

Later, another boy took me aside. “I had a treehouse once,” he said quietly. “Now it’s a ground house. “

“Wind?” I asked.

“Wind,” he said.

And we just stood there with our hands in our pockets, nodding together, commiserating; two guys sharing a common trajedy: one that had already occurred, one that was inevitable.

Sales of the award-winning book that tells the tale of this treehouse have been creeping upward lately–no doubt from people discovering that this is by far one of the best holiday gifts ideas ever. If you would like to learn more or buy an autographed copy, please visit TMCBooks.com, or Amazon.com.

In November 2005 we spent a long and frantic day with the film crew of the HGTV show “Look What I Did!” After hours under the hot lights and endless re-takes (”Now, this time, put more emphasis on the word ’screwdriver’ and don’t pick your nose), lousy take-out food for lunch, and countless trips up and down the drawbridge, the crew finally pulled out of the driveway with a promise to make us famous.

And now their handiwork will be shown for all to see. To find out more about the HGTV spot, click this link: See the treehouse on HGTV, or tune in to HGTV on Sunday, November 19, at 6:30 (EST) for a virtual tour of the Uppermost House!

And don’t forget to check out the award-winning book we wrote about this crazy building: Treehouse Chronicles: One Man’s Dream of Life Aloft.

Hundreds of people have visited the treehouse over the last few years. Many of them are people I don’t know; just folks passing through our quiet part of Maine who glance over, see this amazing little house in the sky, and slam on their brakes. They get out, point, take pictures, and I usually come out and chat with them. This invariably leads to a trip across the yard and up the drawbridge to the treehouse where they “ooh” and “ahh” and wander around with their mouths open.

Not long ago a nice couple on vacation from far away stopped by and we weren’t in the treehouse for five seconds before the woman said, “Curtains.”

“Pardon?” I said.

“You have all these windows,” she said, “but no curtains. What’s up with that?”

“Funny, I never noticed,” I said, a bit sheepishly. Then I went into long-winded (and poorly developed) rationalization that talked about wanting to let in lots of light, and I have squirrels (who claw and chew on everything: see Nov. 2 post), and, and….

She held up her hand to stop me. “It must be a guy thing,” she said.

Then she looked around like she’d lost track of a toddler. “Where’s your guestbook?” she asked.

“Um…I don’t have one,” I said.

“No curtains, no guestbook, I really have to talk to your wife,” she said, shaking her head.

An hour after the couple left, they were back. They had gone into the village to visit the trinket and antique shops.

“Here,” the woman said with a wide smile, holding out a small package. “Now you have a guest book.”

Now, whenever folks visit the treehouse, I always say, “Oh, won’t you please sign my guestbook?”

It’s a guy thing.

The treehouse, and the book that tells its story, Treehouse Chronicles: One Man’s Dream of Life Aloft, have just been featured on the Unites States Chess Federation website. A chess problem was set up in the treehouse (the second floor was designed just to play chess) and members of the USCF were asked to try to solve it. The distraction of having the problem set up on a chess set that looks like something out of the Lord of the Rings, didn’t seem to bother anyone, as several people solved the problem quickly. If you would like to try your hand, here’s the link to the USCF site.

http://beta.uschess.org/frontend/section_7.php

Our thanks to Jennifer Shahade, two-time American women’s chess champion, for working with us on this cool idea. We met Jennifer earlier this year at Book Expo America in Washington DC, (where we went to pick up two national book awards for Treehouse Chronicles–see the awards page in the sidebar), and we immediately hit it off. If you are interested in chess, please check out her book, Chess Bitch: Women in the Ultimate Intellectual Sport. 

The simplest solutions are often the most elegant. Designing a system to keep the Uppermost House (the 300 sq. ft. timberframe treehouse described in the award-winning book, Treehouse Chronicles), up in the air, we had two goals in mind:

1. Make it simple.
2. Do no harm to the tree (put no holes or fasteners in the trunk)

After tossing many ideas around, the solution we implemented met both goals beautifully. We used a combination of three simple components:

1. a hexagonal steel collar
2. suspended by a set of cables
3. which support a series of wooden trusses

This Collar-Cable-Truss (CCT) system provides great strength and stability and is about as simple as engineering ever gets.

The structure of our tree, in part, dictated this solution. The tree is a 200 year-old white pine, nearly four feet in diameter at breast height and 105 feet tall, divides into two trunks 37 feet above the ground. At the point where the tree divides, the trunk swells to over four feet in diameter and each fork is about two feet in diameter, giving us a massive and strong anchor point for our suspension system.

So here’s how it looks:

 This schematic shows the CCT components in relation to each other.

And here’s how we put it together:

1. The hexagonal steel collar (made from 1/4-inch angle iron segments) is assembled around the tree and bolted together at each corner with welded eye-bolts (safe working load over 2 tons each)
2. A cable (3/8 inch) is attached to an eye-bolt (with triple cable clamps) and then run up and through the fork in the tree and down to the eye-bolt at the opposite corner of the collar. (At the fork, we ran each cable section through PVC pipe to protect the tree and spread out the load.) Three such cable segments are used, connecting all six collar corners.
3. A second set of cables (5/8 inch) is connected between the centers of three of the collar segments and run up and down through the fork of the tree, just like the first cable segments. (The cummulative strength of all the collar segments gives us a safe working load of something over 15 tons.) 
4. Six, triangular timberframe truss segments are bolted to the center of each collar segment.
5. A set of wedges is driven between the end of each truss and the trunk of the tree (this snugs the whole thing up and provides stability).
    
6. Large horizontal wooden timbers are bolted to the vertical section of each truss and braced against the trunk (stabilizing the system and allowing us to get the trusses perfectly level).
7. A wooden collar connects the lower ends of each of the trusses, mirroring the steel collar above, and tying the entire system together.

 Here is the the system in place in the tree.

Although simple (in principle), getting all this stuff up in the tree required over six weeks of effort. In the end, we had a strong and stable 23-foot hexagon hanging in the sky and ready for its floor joists. The rest of the treehouse was easy (yeah, right).

For those of you contemplating building your own dream house in the sky, if your situation is similar to mine, you may consider using a system such as this.  BUT, PLEASE BE AWARE: I am not a structural engineer and I make no claims that this system is safe. I took the advice of experts while building my treehouse. Please consult professional arborists, engineers, and builders before you try anything like this yourself.

If you have any questions, send them along. Good Luck!

Of all the hundreds of people who have visited my treehouse, only one has been a problem. His name is Vinny and he is a thug. He is also a squirrel, a red squirrel to be precise, Tamiasciurus hudsonicus, and he is a heavy smoker.

Vinny showed up early in the first year of treehouse construction. I noticed him out of the corner of my eye one day while I was leveling one of the main trusses. He was sitting on the flat top of a 4×4 wall post. He leered at me while puffing madly on a Marlborough, then flipped me off and ran away leaving a tiny pile of steaming poop. Our relationship has been tense ever since: Vinny believes the treehouse is his to live in (and destroy) as he sees fit; after all, I did encrouch on his turf. I see him as a malevolent tennant who I cannot evict.

Here is the description of Vinny in the book Treehouse Chronicles:

Vinny: Thug squirrel. Distributor of turds, stealer of insulation, scolder of visitors, chewer of fine woodwork. Even with his many faults, I grew to love him; he’s like a favorite uncle who visits too often, leaves the refrigerator door open, burns holes in the couch with his cigars, but tells great stories.

I only put in that last nice bit because Vinny scares me. His family is from Sicily and he has connections to the Rodent Mafia.

When I built the treehouse, the second floor was dedicated entirely to playing chess. My business partner, Ted Walsh, a master craftsman, built a custom chess set for me out of twigs and sticks and bits of copper and aluminum. It’s very cool. The chess board rests on a shelf above a branch that passes right through the treehouse, and the pieces live on shelves next to the door that leads out to the second floor deck.

I went up into the treehouse yesterday to get something and discovered that the door on the second floor had blown open during the very high winds we had over the past weekend (gusts to 60), and that the room was now full of pine needles. Oddly, not a single chess piece had been blown off the shelves, even though they were right next to the open door. How these little men and women, made from twigs and resting on felt-covered bases, withstood the big blasts from the northwest is a mystery to me. But then, the treehouse is always a mysterious place, even in calm weather.