Our Tree House

The kids helped my husband design a tree house for the back yard because I plan on having a very dangerous back yard. A couple of weeks ago my husband started working on it. He screwed the base together. We lifted it and knew very quickly there was no way that the two of us could get that in the tree. We tried attaching just a corner. That didn’t work either; but when it fell my husband caught the boards with his head so everything worked out. The biggest problem is that I want a zip line from the tree house to the tree across the yard; so the tree house needs to be up ten feet in the trees. And I’m neither tall nor strong enough to hold it while my husband attaches boards to a tree.

We corralled some help. Merrill (or Mike as Will calls him) and Marcy’s husband Tom came over on Saturday to help us get part of it done. Tom showed up first. He looked at the ingeniously designed project, sighed, asked me to watch Pete and left. My husband had already bolted one of the boards to two trees. He’d attached hinges to the board in the tree and the other half of the hinges were on the platform. The idea being, we’d hold up one side of the platform, put the pins in the hinges then swing up the other side, and put the supports under the other two corners. Then go back and screw the whole thing together. (I say we meaning him of course.)

Merrill couldn’t fit his ladder in his car. I said, “No problem.” My neighbor told me anytime I wanted to borrow his ladder I could. I went over and rang his doorbell. He wasn’t home. I walked around his house – no ladder. I called Tom. “Can you bring a ladder?”

“Yes,” he said. “That was one of the things I was getting.”

It worked really well. And the rope Tom also brought came in handy securing the platform while “we” got the supports in place. The most pathetic part you ask? Oh that would be when Marcy called and asked if she needed to send one of her dinner guests over to help.