Have you seen our Tree Houses?

Having always thought that tree houses were a neat concept, we of course had to build a couple of them! Have you seen our two tree houses?  Our Tree Top Cabin was certainly the most challenging to build. With a live Poplar tree in the center, the structure is suspended around the live tree, with room left for the tree to grow and move. 

The building of the structure was accomplished with a lot of help from a number of our wonderful interns under the supervision of my partner, Tom. In hindsight, I can say that building a hexagon is challenging!! In typical construction, you think about the size of the lumber that you will have and factor that into what you are building. With a hexagon, there is a lot of wasted lumber, due to the cuts that have to be made. Not to mention the complexity of making something out of a bunch of triangles!! I can tell you that this was a challenge and involved a lot of math! 

We had a great bunch of international interns that summer and it was a lot of fun watching folks revert back to their native languages to calculate the cuts. 

 

As most projects go, it did take us a lot longer to complete it than we originally planned. But in the end, it really is a cozy, rustic getaway and many folks choose to stay in the Tree Top Cabin.