skip to main  |skip to sidebarDashe NW ContingentSunday, June 29, 2008Raise high the roofbeams -- eventually.I've finally gotten around to working on a treehouse in an area of our property that was overrun with blackberry brambles. Our neighbours generously helped pay for clearing the area, and with some recent nice weather I went into a treehouse-building frenzy.First, of course, I needed to plan the thing out. For dimensions, I measured the tree trunk dimensions: one was 2' in diameter, the other 2.5'.  They were around 10' from center to center.  For a couple of feet of walking-around-space on either side of the trunks, I randomly picked a length of 16', width of 6'.Note: 16'x6' is kind of huge for a treehouse.  16 feet is bigger than the deck of my house.  Oh, well... I guess we'll just have to have parties up there or something.Our neighbour suggested that she'd like to see a slide off of the treehouse, so after Googling for slides, it looked like many of the ones you can purchase for mounting on play structures expect to be mounted at 7'.  So that's how high I planned to put the floor of the treehouse.Sketchy behaviorBeing of the geekish persuasion, I had to use a 3d modeling program rather than, say, paper and a pencil to visualize the plan. Why spend 10 minutes sketching when you can drain hours and hours into trying to master the basics of a cool bit o' freeware?The freeware in question is a Google offering called sketchup.  S'neat.  Here's my first attempt at using the thing:
I spent hours tweaking the image, if not the design. The tweaking took hours, mostly b/c I kept accidentally telling sketchup to create odd shapes, like 2x6x8x16x6's.  It's not easy to manipulate 5-dimensional lumber; it has a tendency to bend time and space, and isn't recommended for use in structures intended for children -- the little ones get sucked into alternate universes.
Bookery
Anywho, after coming up with a suspect design for the platform, I started reading the books that Lissa checked out at our local library for safety and construction guidelines: the excellent  , and .  The former gives a nice variety of ideas and advice about types of treehouses, and the latter is a nice complement to it.  Looking on Amazon, there are a bunch of other highly-rated ones.
Considering the suggestions from the books, I updated the design to use 2x8's as the main supports, and have a floor frame of 2x6's resting atop them, also bolted to the trees.  The books went into some detail about how to attach the beams to the trees, namely by using lag screws (lag screws! Snrk!).
There's no such thing as a dumb question. Except for the ones I come up with.
After learning how not to giggle so much when saying "lag screw," I went to the local Lumberman's and got down to the serious business of meandering around for 2 hours, asking dumb questions of the patient old guys behind the counter.  I say "old guys," but they're probably just in their 50's, driven grey by newbies like myself a