A door way

This weekend saw as little bit of progress on the front structure. The door frame is in place along with the wall frame and upper roof space area that will be accessible from inside the tree house.

Tree house in a Storm

Weathering the Storm

Sunday the 5th of October saw the first of the winter storms arrive. The tree house in its unfinished state thankfully weathered it which is testament to the construction so far. 

I picked up the 2x4's which will complete the roof beans and add extra structural strength. Hopefully some progress will be made this weekend. 

I will hopefully have some constructive updates after this weekend with some progress. It would certainly be a good idea to get it weather tight as soon as possible before more bad weather sets in.

4 Walls!

The walls were fabricated on the ground making it easier to ensure that they were perfectly square. 2x2 used for the wall frames should be strong and light enough for what we want.

6mm external grade ply used for the walls. No requirement for anything heavier than this!

Rab stops by to run an engineers eye over the whole thing. I hope DFR is not a term he uses everyday when he is in work. (Rab works in the aerospace industry and DFR stands for Do Fucking Rightly!)

Front balcony section in place. Handrail height set to 1m which should be sufficient to stop anyone falling out. Bringing along Tom to the builders merchants to get discount on materials proved a good idea. There were a couple of lengths of handrail that were less favourable for the majority of peoples jobs but when Tom asked could he get special discount for the tree house the supplier couldn't say no!

Bunter not doing as he is told!

The side walls also include a balcony section

The walls are bolted to the uprights that were put in place during the previous phase

After the third wall was installed the trap door had to be cut prior to the fourth wall being bolted into place.

Logging

Treehousing was put on tempory hold for a day and a half, with a couple of dry days forcast it was time to run through the 20 tonnes of fresh logs that will be going indoors to season for firewood.

 A few images below show some of the equipment we use on the farm for the task.
 

JCB 2CX 4 wheel drive, 4 wheel steer.

MF 240 seen in the background, MF390 in the foreground.

MF390 Driving the firewood processor. Although not a great deal of horse power required to run the processor the machine itself is heavy so the larger tractor if required to lift it.

SMC engineering (not a trademark by any means!) log deck, bit of an agricultural design but it does the job. Sometime I may get round do making some improvements to it.

Tree house phase 2

The next step of the tree house build is to put in place the supports for the platform.

I required four knee braces for this but found it difficult to source them so I made my own.

Simple design of channel iron with flat bar to box off the bottom and then two wings which will hold the timber to the brace.

A couple of joists were fixed temporarily to hold the whole platform level

George designed a measuring stick which had our 45% angle so we could get a good idea of the length of support we needed and where the knee brace would fit to the tree. I'm not sure if the patent application has been approved yet so feel free to copy the design if your attempting a similar project!

 The knee brace was fitted to the tree using 160mmx16mm Coach/lag bolts. These are going nowhere!

A few joists used to set the levels.

A joist hanger used as a corner brace. I plan to make up steel braces for the corners to add a bit more strength.

Sonia weather proofing everything.

First coat of weather proofing finished!

Framing out for the mandatory tree house trap door!

Tom checking out the view from the balcony.

Work begins on the Treehouse

Thursday the 14th of August saw the green peace protesters removed from the oak tree and work was allowed to start on the treehouse. 

The first order of the day was to prepare the tree. This involed removing any branches that would be in the way of the base of the treehouse. 

All branches trimmed and the tree is ready.

The oak tree had a large offshoot from the base going up. This will provide good structural strength to the platform which will rest on the now flat surface.

Mum and Tom doing much of the JCB work while I was in the cherry picker basket

The platform will be supported by 4 main joists. These are lag bolted into the tree. I used 200mm bolts, these should be sufficient, they were the biggest I could find!

Once the four main joists around the tree were in place, the next task was to fit the outer most joists at each end and then the perimeter joists following this. 

Tom happy with how things are progressing. 

George making sure my levels are correct. He says if they are not "A good railing should stop children rolling out!"

The base of the treehouse is now complete. All joists in place.