With all the rain lately, it’s a good thing thing this is just a treehouse, since I haven’t had time to put a roof on it. You can see the ladder Emma built all by herself, and the decorative window at right really is symmetrical (I haven’t screwed in the side pieces yet). The whole thing is made of scrap lumber I got from a lady at work, except for the floor:

The floor is a 4′ x 5′ x 1.125″ slab o’plywood left over from neighbor Tim’s house construction. Here I’m trying to screw it down using a 16″ screw left over from our house construciton. Those big screws were used to fasten the thick roof panels to the beams, but the screw guns kept slipping out of their Philips heads so these were set aside. In this shot I’m finding out that my screw gun keeps slipping out as well; they don’t even have enough grip to get into rotten birch trunks. After this I managed to get some fasteners to stay in long enough to build the walls.

Now they’ve ripped out again. Never build a treehouse on rotten birch trunks! I’ll try something different this Saturday, when I’ll have more time to look at it.

Here’s Katie standing on the platform once I got it screwed down. You can clearly see the four birch trunks I lopped off last winter (the one in the middle is the butt end of one that broke when it fell). Katie’s pulling a goofy face because the ladder was wobbly and she’s over seven feet off the ground. But it’s a dad’s job to encourage their children to do things that they’re a little scared of doing.