Comments on: I have one in my pillow fort.

I have one in my pillow fort.

goodnewsfortheinsane — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 09:22:14 -0800

Build a treehouse

By: Senator

Senator — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 09:33:07 -0800

Why is this so appealing? I would love to have all of these peppered through a forest.

By: Forktine

Forktine — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 09:39:49 -0800

Not loading for me. I'll just imagine the most awesomest treehouse ever and hope I'm close.

By: gman

gman — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 09:43:45 -0800

I'll just imagine the most awesomest treehouse ever and hope I'm close. More like a stoned woman and her happy kid.

By: The Whelk

The Whelk — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 09:46:35 -0800

Why is this so appealing? I would love to have all of these peppered through a forest. We're still wondering if that "leaving the trees" plan was a good idea or not.

By: Malice

Malice — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 09:48:47 -0800

I'll just imagine the most awesomest treehouse ever Like most kids in the world whose parents don't have a backyard in which to build a treehouse.

By: Combustible Edison Lighthouse

Combustible Edison Lighthouse — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 09:51:30 -0800

Like most kids in the world whose parents don't have a backyard in which to build a treehouse. Won't someone think of the Central Park West penthouse children.

By: explosion

explosion — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 09:55:12 -0800

Won't someone think of the Central Park West penthouse children. Yes, every person who lives in a city, apartment building, or housing development is a multi-millionaire.

By: Combustible Edison Lighthouse

Combustible Edison Lighthouse — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 09:57:33 -0800

Oh good grief. It's a post about treehouses. Can't you all play Debbie Downer somewhere else?

By: HuronBob

HuronBob — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 10:02:55 -0800

Myst

By: The Whelk

The Whelk — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 10:03:07 -0800

We're busy playing Debbie Downer everywhere else, so lets all talk about treehouses. So many of youse where totally gonna spend ALL NIGHT in Alan's treehouse and got comic books and blankets and cookies and even a little TV that his dad let your borror if you promised to be very careful with it but then you went inside after like 2 hours cause the mosquitoes nearly bled you dry?

By: DU

DU — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 10:12:49 -0800

A link to a flash page telling me a book has been published is the best of the web?

By: Malice

Malice — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 10:12:52 -0800

Oh good grief. It's a post about treehouses. Can't you all play Debbie Downer somewhere else? I'm bitter. I never had a treehouse. I had to dig a pit on land I don't own, and then I got into trouble for it. =( Damn kids and their treehouses.

By: PhoBWanKenobi

PhoBWanKenobi — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 10:14:28 -0800

I love treehouses. When I was a kid, I had one that my pop-pop built for me. If someday I have my own home with a nice tree and ever work from there, I'd love to make a tree-embedded writing space. That being said, I don't really understand this webpage.

By: docpops

docpops — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 10:18:00 -0800

The baumraum group thanks you for your patronage. I clicked on all the links looking for something that actually spoke to the amateur treehouse enthusiast in me but all I kept finding were lures for a consult or pictures of tree dwellings nicer than most of the houses in my town.

By: netbros

netbros — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 10:18:24 -0800

Or, you could build a triple-zero house that produces more energy than it uses.

By: stupidsexyFlanders

stupidsexyFlanders — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 10:21:28 -0800

I have several questions. Is this a single link post to the website of a company that makes treehouses? And does that website further contain a variety of photos of treehouse designs, which, when clicked on, brings you to a larger photo of that treehouse design, also conveniently offering you a link to download that selfsame photo? Because I was hoping to see, you know, a blueprint or something. And does this website go on to offer a list of media mentions, which seem to include the title of an article, a link to the front page of that publication's website, and also a handy print button, which enables the user to print a page containing that selfsame link? Because I was hoping to see, you know, a PDF or transcript or something. Those are my questions.

By: boo_radley

boo_radley — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 10:29:54 -0800

Their opening blurb made me think of this: A new life awaits you in treehouses! A chance to begin again in a golden land of opportunity and adventure! Seeing that they're designing Real Houses and rooms in trees rather than treehouses qua children's playthings made me a sad.

By: Nanukthedog

Nanukthedog — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 10:58:39 -0800

Why are the squirrels protesting the construction of these? They prefer if if the nuts stay on the ground. (rimshot)

By: Shepherd

Shepherd — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 11:04:07 -0800

I grew up in a small town in the middle of farm country, which meant* an inexhaustible supply of worn fencing, old plywood, broken 2x4s and enough baler twine to stretch to the moon, or so it seemed. And we built treehouses. We built the shit out of treehouses, with three-story constructions that ran 20' up old maples, ladders from chunks of wood nailed to the trunk, old tarp roofs held on by twine, kids scrambling up and down the thing to add bits and tear bits off. I was around 12-13 at the time, and then one day I went down to the place and nobody was around and I looked up at one of our treehouses and I realized that we were all going to die. Some switch had been thrown in my brain where I'd finally accrued enough instinctive knowledge of physics and engineering that I saw very clearly that what we had built should not support a chipmunk, let alone five or six rampaging tweenagers. So I sort of stopped hanging out with the treehousers after a while, and then over the next few weeks we all sort of stopped... treehousing. I think it was kind of a mass maturity onset thing. Point being, I'm still kind of convinced that the laws of physics just don't apply when you're doing stuff like building treehouses out of string and rotten cardboard. Kids with purity of intent have some sort of reality-defying aura around them, letting them do things that any adult with a lick of sense would realize should result in instant death. And then one day you get up and you realize that you can't build treehouses any more. You've hit some sort of mental point where you're like Wile E. Coyote ten feet past the cliff edge, just now feeling the first pluck of gravity. It kinda sucked. I know it's a trade-off, and now I can drive cars and stay up late reading comics and have sexings with a lady, but I miss the treehouses. All that to say that I don't think these are treehouses. Real treehouses stink of plywood glue and baler twine and have a stolen Penthouse buried in the wet leaves around the trunk. Real treehouses are built by kids that can barely swing the hammer. These are... something else. Adult Me respects the design and is glad that yuppies can provide their helicoptered children with hermetically sealed IKEA-furnished little domiciles, but Kid Me utterly rejects "treehouse" being applied to this stuff. *I'm not sure how that worked, but there seems to be a weird farm alchemy where in addition to milk, meat and vegetables, they produce scrap lumber and baler twine.

By: stupidsexyFlanders

stupidsexyFlanders — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 11:16:49 -0800

Shepherd, nice.

By: bondcliff

bondcliff — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 11:23:20 -0800

I love this. This is my brain.

By: Kirth Gerson

Kirth Gerson — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 11:54:00 -0800

I already did build a treehouse, for my daughter. I did a bunch of research, which helped me come up with a good design. Maybe when this post is gone, I will make a new post using some of those links.

By: HuronBob

HuronBob — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 11:55:59 -0800

and, with Shephard's comment... please close this thread...

By: Kabanos

Kabanos — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 12:05:59 -0800

Myst Below the Root.

By: digsrus

digsrus — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 12:10:09 -0800

When I was a kid I built a treehouse; actually a clubhouse nailed to a tree. I cherish the memory of its construction except for the rusty nails, tetanus shots and the huge spider I had to have my father come and kill.

By: pianomover

pianomover — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 12:20:36 -0800

A house built of wood is a tree house. Kung-fu

By: mrgrimm

mrgrimm — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 12:51:32 -0800

Richard Louv has a lot to say about tree houses in his book Last Child in the Woods. According to Louv, a lot of communities have made tree houses illegal for liability reasons (some of which Shepherd noted). Is that really true? "Adults have appropriated the tree-house building, just as they have Halloween." Uh, yep.

By: Turtles all the way down

Turtles all the way down — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 14:19:37 -0800

A keeper indeed, Shepherd. Nice.

By: bad grammar

bad grammar — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 15:20:13 -0800

I lived through the first phase of treehouse faddism (1970's) when I was still small enough to climb the trees. Unfortunately my parents' house had no suitable trees for building treehouses. There were pine trees, which have thin branches at regular intervals, enough for a light kid to climb like a ladder but not strong enough for construction. A maple tree was too close to power lines; an oak tree's branches started 20 feet off the ground. I learned that treehouses are bad for trees (if any hardware is fastened to the tree). You're better off building a house on stilts and persuading wisteria, ivy and other vigorous vines to grow around it.

By: Spatch

Spatch — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 04:17:51 -0800

When I was about 9 or so, my dad built a tree swing for my brothers and I. Having some scrap lumber lying around after a job, he nailed a beam between two nearby trees and hung a tire swing from it. It took the better part of a lunchtime to accomplish and when we saw what he'd done, we wanted to add to the swing. Dad let us have the rest of the scrap and off we went, unsupervised, and created our beloved Deadly Tree Fort. It was a true kid's paradise, built in complete freedom and unfettered by boring adult concepts such as structural integrity. That meant it was dangerous as all hell. All we did was put up a second beam, roughly as high as the first, and laid down three mismatched planks for the floor. It was barely wide enough to fit two kids but that was all right because the planks could only hold one. The plank floor tilted precariously because we'd nailed the second beam higher than the swing beam, and it sagged since there was no central support. One of the planks had a rusty nailhead sticking out of it, something we noticed only after we'd nailed everything up there. Trying to remove the nail twenty feet up proved too difficult, so my brother got a magic marker, drew a circle around the nail and wrote "DANGER! DONOT STEP HERE!" next to it. Problem solved, man. We ran out of scrap wood while making the rickety ladder (barely nailed to the wobbly beam) so we had no railings or, well, anything else. Instead, we just lashed a rope around the trees for a handhold. It was a good twenty feet up and after a rain the rope would sag just as much as the planks did. A real adventure. It was a deathtrap, all right, but it was our deathtrap and my brothers and I loved it because we made it. Actually, as a deathtrap it was a downright failure since nobody was ever seriously injured on it. I think the biggest thing my brothers and I learned from our project was why you don't see many third graders working as general contractors.