Only a dad can make a treehouse for his son
By Deborah Taylor-Hollis
A couple of years ago, my son found several things to start irritating his parents about, and after vetoing the dog, refusing flying lessons, jettisoning the flame-thrower, and absolutely being unable to comply with the request for a baby brother, we eventually had to capitulate. He wore us down over the treehouse.
He had been reading all those comics with pictures of kids up in their hovels in the sky, and watching old Andy Griffith reruns, with Opie and his buddies all playing wholesome American kid games. So the boy looked around our yards and realized we only had one tree of any size and shape that would handle being home to a wooden platform of some kind. It just happens to be the one in the front yard, right in front of my kitchen window.
So once my son fixated on both the house and the tree, my husband tried to find ways to put off the inevitable. First he used the weather, and told my son that he would have to patiently wait out the rainy winter days before the tree was dry enough to work in.
The boy sat patiently and waited. Every day he would sit and look out the window, eyeing that tree in the dripping rain, smiling when the windy days arrived, and reminding my husband repeatedly about his "promise."
Eventually, a Saturday arrived when there was no way to put off the child with complaints about the cold and the wet, so they went outside to "evaluate" the location.
Every tree is unique for what it is, and each tree holds within its branches a possibility of greatness. I went looking on the Internet for some possible ideas about treehouses and found hundreds of wonderful plans--most of them for "adult" tree abodes.
Apparently, making a spare room, a summer cottage, or even a whole house in one or more trees suspended up off the ground is gaining popularity among the do-it-yourself crowd, which has grown tired of endless gazebos, patio arbors and garage playroom makeovers. Nowadays, suspending a fully insulated home--complete with windows and plumbing--in one to three trees is considered a fun project for Bob Villa wannabes.
Some homes have been permit-approved, and some have been built as "toy houses" so that their owners can escape local building permit fees and regulations. I had never considered how much fun it might be at my age to create a guestroom up in the arms of an oak tree before--it really does hold promise.
Right now, however, we do not have an oak tree (luckily for my dear husband), and so the two men in my life had to be content with the available drooping willow.
Rather than pull out diagrams and blueprints and schlep down to the lumber yard for hundreds of dollars worth of materials, they decided to scrounge around the lot for whatever the termites had not eaten, and eventually came up with several two-by-fours, some plywood (covered on one side with paper, from when it once did duty as porch shelving) and some scraps from the last fence project.
That afternoon, the crew set about creating the dream treehouse.
For two weekends they sawed, argued, laughed, hacked, and nailed things into my poor aged willow, making huge sawdust piles in the yard and dropping more nails than my azaleas will ever recover from.
It has no real sides yet--just railings--and there is no roof to speak of. My son keeps eyeing some old doors in the garage rafters and maintaining that they would be great for roofs and walls (of course they are way too big, but that is unimportant to his way of thinking), and every time I go to OSH he starts wandering the paint aisle, talking about painting the house to blend in with the tree.
Fat chance. The eyesore I stare at out my window is without a doubt the ugliest thing on our block that is open to public view. I truly feel like Ma and Pa Kettle have taken over my home. Tonya Harding would feel quite welcome here*and would probably be honored to sleep up in that death trap of a tree.
But, for my son, it is a thing of beauty. He and his dad built it together, and it is an ongoing project of love for him. It is proof that he can dream big and make it happen, and that his mom and dad support his creative needs.
He doesn't really understand it yet, but that ugly, dangerous, disgusting piece of trash perched up in the gangly willow tree outside my kitchen window, with its hunks of board nailed to the trunk and its portable wooden ladder leaning nearby, is tangible proof that we love him. And that we have really good health insurance.
There is no phone up in the tree, so contact Deb at DTHollis@svcn.com
Willow Glen, California Since 1992
