Category Archive

Here is a simple slideshow showing some of the construction images from Treehouse Chronicles. Just hit the View All Images button. I will add more slideshows soon.

April 13, 2007, finds us waiting for spring. We’ve already broken the all-time record for snowfall in April (we’ve had 29 inches at the treehouse since 4/1) and a huge storm is predicted for early next week. I’m sick of it. I want to hear birds and mow grass and work out in the yard. I want my wife to point and say “Right there,” so I can plunge a shovel into the ground and make a home for new flowers. I’m sick of shovelling slush. I’m sick of staring out at the treehouse and not gathering up enough energy to slog out through the snow to see how it’s holding up through the spring snows.

I went up a few weeks ago and found an ominous puddle of black goo on the second floor. My first thougth was that the roof was leaking. But wait: BLACK GOO? So I pounded on the ceiling from whence the goo dripped and there came an immediate and frantic rustling and chattering. Vinny, rogue squirrel was alive and well…and procreating. And his furry little offspring had been crapping and peeing in the same spot (obviously for some time) and the stuff had begun to leak out. Yuck.

 Vinny, thug squirrel.

I just don’t know what to do about Vinny. We’ve had this love-hate thing going on now for almost five years. I invade his territory (by putting a cute little house up in his forest canopy), and he moves in and begins chewing on woodwork (and peeing through the ceiling). Some days (okay, most days), I want to kill Vinny. But he’s from the Old Country and he has ties to the rodent mob. I’m afraid if I bump him off that I will find a decapitated horse head in my bed (remember the scene in the Godfather?). So I let him chew (and crap) on. But now things have gotten truly foul.

Maybe the Nor’easter that’s planned for next week will blow the treehouse over and take Vinny (and his kin) with it.

I recently got a hit from Google Alert telling me that my book, Treehouse Chronicles, had been mentioned somewhere on the Web. Typically, these alerts are meaningless–the web sites cited somehow mention the words “treehouse” and “chronicles” but it’s often just some oddball reference to Narnia.

But this time, the alert brought me to David Montie’s site, Treehouse By Design, and a wonderful online review he had written about the book. Before I get to the review, please let me shamelessly recommend David’s site to anyone interested in treehouses. It’s extensive, well layed out, friendly, and inspiring. He has a nice blog and extensive links (lots of books). The photos of his treehouse overlooking a lake in British Columbia are great, and make me a little jealous (all I can see from my treehouse is about 20 miles of rolling New England countryside–what a shame). Please visit David’s site.

Here’s David’s stellar review of Treehouse Chronicles:

Treehouse Chronicles is a book of self-reflection written by a man who comes to understand himself via the realization of his childhood dream: a treehouse. This is one particular path, and although other people will find their own way to manifest meaning in their life, most will regard the tale with awe and envy: a 300 square foot, 2 story, wooden structure weighing in at 6000 pounds suspended from a single tree. If this sounds amazing to you – and you’ve experienced your own “acute adult onset adolescence” – then reading about the challenges of building a tree house on this scale is an ideal way to inspire you to go out and discover what you’re really made of.

To the uninitiated, building a tree house seems like an undertaking for any average construction enthusiast – a couple of weekends worth of work, some wrangling, getting it all up in the tree, and voilá: a tree house. However, speaking from my own experience, a whole constellation of personal content comes into a project like this. Usually these issues are best described as disillusionment with the default reality (possibly triggered by a dull life in the monoculture suburbs) and a persistent, life-long, child-like enthusiasm for outlandish creations. And, incidentally, these motivations always conflict with the practical engineering requirements involved in a project like this. And that tension makes this story interesting and suspenseful.

This book can be viewed as a diagnostic manual and comprehensive how-to resource for building your dreams. Treehouse Chronicles provides excellent technical information and illustrated structural drawings that are an inspiration to behold. And, the book also contains an honest and compelling narrative about the personal factors related to such a project such as the intangible rewards that come from its completion. It is much, much more than just a book about saws, nails, and trees – it is about the balance of forces that define a person: Relationship with nature, other people, and the self-actualization of dreams. And, I’m glad to report, the book delivers in all these ways.

This would be a good time to introduce the author of the book, and the builder of the tree house, Peter Lewis. His tale starts with being disillusioned with life in suburbia, lost in the imposed structure of cookie-cutter homogeneity, and a pivotal moment that made him opt to move his family across the country for something unknown. Along the way he rediscovers the value of family, friends, a self-directed life, and the pursuit of dreams.

While reading this book I got the feeling that I was eves dropping in a dialogue between Henry David Thoreau and Norm Abram (from the New Yankee Workshop television show). The book philosophizes around some significant issues in our modern life and then anchors these abstract concepts with hard examples from the building process at hand that day. For Lewis, it seems that philosophy and woodwork are two pursuits that, when traveled in parallel, lead him to find his true self.

I like how optimism runs through the narrative as Lewis demonstrates that we are in a unique position in history, a very fortunate one actually, in our freedom to realize our dreams. Today’s world provides a wealth of tools, access to information, and the personal freedom to challenge the default assumptions about happiness and success. You and I are free to ditch the consumer model of material wealth and go out to create our own vision of it.

Granted, not everyone defines utopia as a tree house in Maine, but there are lessons and insights here that are universal: Self-empowerment, confidence to pursue a dream, improvisation around challenges, and how to deal with fear of the unknown. You could read this book and substitute any number of life goals and the basic recipe is the same: It is about the process, and the people you inspire along the way, that matter in achieving the end result. Chasing a dream requires one to learn how to enjoy the little rewards found in each moment, it’s not about the resale value of what’s left over when you’re done.

And, the nice thing about Lewis’s particular dream is that it’s possible for him to walk out into his backyard, crawl up a staircase, and retreat into it for a nap anytime he likes.

Early in January Treehouse Chronicles was honored with its 8th national book award (not bad for a book created by a publishing company so small that all its employees can easily fit in a Mini Cooper). This latest award was an Honorable Mention in Writer’s Digest’s International Self-Published Book Awards in the category of Life Stories.  Here is an excerpt from the judge’s commentary sheet, based on the question, “What did you like best about this book?”

I suppose it would be too general, and not that helpful, to respond with “everything,” so I’ll focus on the most delightful aspects. But just so you know, “everything” was my first thought. Very witty and smart project. From the subtitle, to the Table of Contents, to the “Can I visit the Treehouse?” I devoured the linguistically interesting way of expressing ideas and philosophies. The photographs and illustrations are beautiful and refreshingly placed throughout. I like the turquoise of the font in the section titles and also the attention and adoration of detail and usually-neglected perspective. Also, the varying moods of the author were appreciated. This work truly holds gems of breezy enlightenment and I hope to catch the interview on NPR’s Fresh Air… if I haven’t missed it! I wish this wasn’t one of the works I had to give back.

A critique doesn’t get much better than that! If you would like to purchase a signed copy of this book, direct from the publisher (free shipping), please click here. Or, you can go straight to Amazon.

To see the other awards the book has won, please click here.

There’s still time to give the dreamer among your family and friends a great book for the holidays. Our book, Treehouse Chronicles: One Man’s Dream of Life Aloft, has won seven national book awards and praise from reviewers everywhere.

The most recent reviewer, Cheryl Hurst, Managing Editor for the Spencer County Leader, had this to say in late November 2006:

“Wonderfully unusual and architecturally amazing pictures and illustrations of this unique hideaway are only a tad of what makes this book one of the best I have ever read. It is artistically exciting to view and articulately insatiable reading. The humorous and poetic wording author Lewis spreads throughout the 130-page, hardback bound edition are a joy to comprehend, often left this reader laughing out loud. Combined with well chosen and cropped photos, balanced with magnificent watercolor illustrations and sketches, and iced with true-storytelling sidebars, Lewis has a winner on his hands.”

If you would like to purchase a signed and personalized copy, please visit our website, tmcbooks.com. You can also purchase the book through Amazon.com, other online booksellers everywhere, or your favorite book store.

The Uppermost House, our 300 sq. ft. timberframe treehouse in the Maine woods, is full of odd things. Perhaps the oddest, is the drawbridge—it certainly gets the most comments. Cobbled together out of timbers, lumber, cables, pulleys, boulders, and plumbing supplies, it is a contraption in the finest Rube Goldberg tradition.

The theory is simple: make a set of stairs that look like the spinal column from a Stegosaurus and that can be lifted into the air with ease because they are counterweighted with big rocks yet fall gracefully to earth (unfolding their steps as they descent amidst a cacophony of creaking, grunting, and thunking sounds) when the (hidden) catch mechanism on the counterweight is tripped by a secret latch. See, simple.

The key to this whole mess, is the catch mechanism. Here is an excerpt from the book, Treehouse Chronicles: One Man’s Dream of Life Aloft, that tells the story of the discovery of the magic gadget:

Sometimes a dashed plan is like a poor draw in poker. If the title to your house is on the table and you’re dealt just a pair of twos, you either bluff well or end up living with your in-laws. Ted came back from an expedition to the local hardware stores today with dire news: we can’t use a gate latch as the catch for the drawbridge. One store didn’t have any latches. One store had cheap flimsy things that weren’t up to the task. And the last store had so much stuff lying in the aisles that Ted gave up and waded back to his truck. I had always known that a gate latch was the key to this Rube Goldberg contraption, and now I had to face the cruel fact that it wouldn’t work. I felt like the guy who swam across the English Channel until he saw the waves breaking on the beach in Calais, France. He didn’t think he had the strength to make it, so he turned around and swam back to England. Things suddenly looked so hopeless I feared we might have to start the whole treehouse over. “If we can’t make the stairs work, how are we ever going to get up into the treehouse?” I moaned.

Ted, always the optimist, yelled “Don’t give up yet,” and then bolted downstairs and out to the sprawling garages. A half an hour later he returned from what he calls “the land of archaic hardware” with his hands full. “There,” he said proudly, spilling a jumble of oddball widgets onto the table. Among the treasures was a spring-loaded door catch with no apparent way to attach it to anything, a neat little thing milled from a block of aluminum with a perpendicular pair of what appeared to be thumb screws, another door catch that had “Push” stamped boldly on the side of it but no moving parts, and, lastly, an odd, cylindrical, aluminum, ball-bearing-equipped, spring-loaded, something-or-other. This last item turned out to be the pearl. (Our other business partner, Frank, has a collection of outbuildings that are the equivalent of giant oysters. A tiny little annoyance-a metal thingy of unknown purpose-gets stuck inside one of these buildings and over time it is transformed-at least in the human mind-into something wonderful, and sometimes even useful.)

You can see where this is leading. To read the whole story, and see a detailed drawing of the catch and the drawbridge itself, please click these links:

drawbridge gizmo

And, to see the whole story of the building of this whimsical treehouse, please buy our award-winning book, Treehouse Chronicles. If you buy it from our website, TMC Books.com, we will sign the book and include a personal message (if you wish). You can also purchase the book from all online and retail booksellers.

Thanks for visiting our blog.

Last night I found my daughter staring out the kitchen window. “Oh, no,” she said, hands on her hips. “Dad, wears the snow shovel?” I looked out and saw just a dusting on the lawn. “I don’t think there is enough, Mandy,” I said. “Oh, there will be,” she said, confidently.

This morning at 5:30 I was shovelling six inches. Welcome, winter.

For the next four months, we will hibernate, coming out only to shovel off the skating pond, scrape a windshield, or go for a quiet ski across the fields. But, every once in a while, we will trudge out to the forest, climb three stories into a tree, light a fire in the stove, and just sit and watch the world go by.

If you want to find out more about the treehouse, and the award-winning book that tells its story, please visit our extensive pages, or our website, tmcbooks.com. You can order a signed copy of the book directly from our website and get it in time for the holidays!

With the holidays coming, I thought I would give you a sneak peak at our book Treehouse Chronicles: One Man’s Dream of Life Aloft. 

Please see the links to sample pages at the end of this post.

The book, published in 2005 by TMC Books (Too Many Cats), a micropublisher made up of three guys working out of an old barn in New Hampshire, has gone on to win 7 (seven!) national book awards. It will make a wonderful gift for anyone interested in treehouses, family, relationships, natural history, and dreaming big dreams.

Yes, this is shameless self-promotion, but don’t just take my word for it. Here is just a (small) sampling of the outstanding coverage this story has recieved:

1. The story of this amazing treehouse and the book that tells it’s tale has been featured in over 30 newspapers across the US including USA Today, the the Boston Globe, the Dallas Morning News, and the St. Petersburg Times.
2. The treehouse has been featured on local TV as well as on the Home & Garden cable channel, on the Hallmark channel, and on New Hampshire Public Radio.
3. The book has been praised by dozens of reviewers including the chair of the National Outdoor Book awards, Garrison Keillor (of NPR’s Prairie Home Companion and Writer’s Almanac fame), Bill McKibben, author of the classic book The End of Nature, Judson Hale, Editor-In-Chief of Yankee Magazine, and Michael Collier, the director of the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference.
4. The story has been told in magazines such as Popular Mechanics, Maine Boats Homes & Harbors, Portland Monthly, and Accent Home & Garden.
5. If you want even more, check out our endorsements and review pages.

And now for the fun part
SAMPLE PAGES FROM THE BOOK
(just click the embedded links)

Treehouse Chronicles
“The story of what happens when big people decide
to be kids again and they have tools and lumber.”

Read the introduction by Tedd Benson, renowned timberframe builder and author.
Read the opening essay.
Things didn’t always go smoothly; read about a couple of close calls.
This book is all about family; read about the author’s Mom.
Full of natural history essays; read about a brush with hurricane.
Read about a touching father and son moment (sort of).
A three-year lesson in problem-solving; read about a clever solution.

Hooked? If you would like to buy a signed copy of the book (personalized by the author), please visit tmcbooks.com. Alternately, you can visit your favorite online bookseller, such as Amazon or Barnes & Noble.

It was 11 degrees this morning. The earth is setting up like concrete and I sleep a little better each night—with each new inch of frost the treehouse is tied more firmly to the ground.  I met a friend at a coffee shop this morning at 6:15 and as we walked out together he pulled up his collar and shuddered. “I haven’t hardened off yet,” he said. I like that.

This time of year each night gets darker and colder and the frost seeps deeper into the earth. In a few short weeks the ground will be clamped solid four feet down. I can’t wait.

In the meantime, I worry. November was wet, very wet, we nearly set a record for rain. Walking in my yard was like walking on a gigantic sponge. You could dig for clams in my yard, it was so wet. When the ground is this saturated, it has no strength, no holding power; the trees of my forest just stand there–floating more or less. And November means wind; usually the first big blows (50 mph+) of the year. And that means that I worry about the treehouse. Soggy ground, huge tree floating, enormous treehouse to catch the wind–a recipe for apprehension.

I hope it goes below zero and stays there for a week.

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.

Wind gusting to close to 60 mph, and driving three inches of rain ahead of it, rocked the treehouse and our old farmhouse all weekend. Our deck furniture blew across the yard (it can’t blow out of the yard because of the stone walls) and a section of metal roofing ripped loose from the garage. I fixed the roofing from a ladder, pounding in galvanized nails between gusts. In the early afternoon, I went out to the barn to look for a tool and when I rumbled the big door open one of the barn cats shot out between my legs and was immediately caught by a fierce blast from the northwest. Rolling head over tail in a big cloud of dust, sand, and woodchips, the gust bowled my furry friend back into the barn where he found his legs again and bolted up a ladder and into the hayloft. I didn’t see him the rest of the day.

Wind is a common theme around here from November through April and my attempts to work around it have often proved futile. The following excerpt is from , Treehouse Chronicles near the end of 2003:

In the last days of November, I wrapped the building in plastic, hoping to protect it from the onslaught of winter. But, on December 8, a big storm blew in from the northeast loaded with birdshot and blasted most of the plastic off. When it was over, the building was forlorn, like a wrecked 15th century galleon with shredded sails. And that was just the beginning….

Here is a photo from the book of my beleaguered treehouse from that gusty November:

Each year, on or about October 15, the weather patterns change here in Maine and we start to get strong storms coming down from Canada. They come in as charging gales from the northwest, sometimes with wind gusts over 60 mph. Last night was the first of what will be many gales that will blow through here this winter, and they make me nervous. The treehouse creates a huge sail area and with all that square footage facing Quebec I worry that a big enough gust may blow the tree over. I wrote about this in an essay in Treehouse Chronicles titled: I Hate Wind. Here is an excerpt:

On a cold bleak morning near the end of January, I was sipping tea anxiously as gusts wrenched the crown of my tree back and forth. These were plain declarative gusts and I hated them. After one excruciating bellow that seemed to move the house, I heard the unmistakable sound of sheet metal roofing creaking, rending, and flapping. I stared hard at the treehouse roof but saw nothing. The hideous sound continued. I cocked my head and stepped to the left and this small shift changed the acoustics just enough for me to identify where the wounded metallic sound was coming from. I was relieved. Karen came into the room just then. “What’s that awful screech?” she asked. “Oh everything’s fine,” I said cheerfully. “I was afraid the treehouse roofing was coming apart but luckily some roofing on the garage has blown loose.”

It began snowing this morning at half past nine. Big, fat, lazy flakes. Even though they melted when they hit the ground, I still hated them. I’m just not ready for winter. I still have a window to replace at the back of the house and a horse stall to finish in the barn. I was hoping I would get a couple more weeks to work on these projects without blowing on my fingers.

The treehouse, however, is ready for the cold and wind. The only big job to do this fall was to clean up the coal stove and replace the chimney. I did this a week ago on a warm day in the sun. I wire brushed the stove, gave it a new coat of stove polish, and fired it up to bake the polish on. Then I tore out the old stove-pipe (easy since it fell apart in my hands) and tossed it down two stories to the ground. The new stove-pipe went in easily (with the help of friends–it’s the type of job you need more than two hands for) and now I’m all set. I didn’t spend as much time as I hoped in the treehouse this summer, but that always seems to be the way it goes.  At least now, when those big flakes come back and the blowing cold comes down from the north, I’l be able to climb up into my house in the sky, build a warming fire, and read a good book while the storm rages.

This blog is all about one of the most unusual treehouses in the world and the award-winning book that tells the story of its creation: TREEHOUSE CHRONICLES: One Man’s Dream of Life Aloft. The photograph above shows the treehouse as it looked when completed in the fall of 2004 (click it to see a full-size image). Orignally designed to be my office (I ‘m a writer), the photo in the blog header shows me, um… “working” in the main room of the treehouse (I never should have put in that futon).

As we develop this blog, we will include excerpts from the book along with photos, diagrams, and watercolors that will help you see how the treehouse was built. We’ll also keep you up-to-date on news about the treehouse (winter storms are on the way), and the success of the book. 

If you are interested in finding out more about TREEHOUSE CHRONICLES, or would like to purchase a book, please visit our website: tmcbooks.com, or go to Amazon, or check out the results on Google.