The next morning, we carried each 2" x 6" up the ladder by hand, no longer having a crane and not trusting our knot tying skills. Ted and I tore through the loft construction pretty quickly. However, we did make one mistake in not realizing that the walls had bowed out a bit toward their centers. This caused us to pull out a few nails, pull the walls together using the come-along, then re-nail the loft joists. We put a few sheets of OSB down, and had a fairly complete loft.
That evening Ted took off for Colorado, and my other buddy Brent flew into town. Even though I'd lost two good workers due to real-life constraints, I suspected that Brent had more framing experience then Ted, Nate and I combined. That wasn't hard to accomplish, since Ted, Nate and myself had zero framing experience up until now.
After a late night of story telling, Brent and I started putting the rafters and the side walls up. We notched the rafters so that they'd sit on the top sills properly. I used 2" X 6" X 12' for the rafters, which gave a decent eave on the rear of the tree house, and a pretty huge eave on the front. Having a larger eave on the south facing side would help provide shade in the summer, and keep rain and moisture off of the tallest wall. Or that's the theory, anyway.
For the rear 16' wall, Brent and I had covered the 1 foot tall wall with screen. The rear wall is well covered by the eave, and it seemed like a logical place to get some ventilation.
We used hurricane clips to help keep the rafters in place. We also toe-nailed them to the top sill using 16d nails. This seemed to secure them more than enough.
We managed to also get one of the odd shaped walls into place and sided. There was a lot more toe-nailing involved then we expected, and without the nail gun at the tree house, it was slower going then we hoped. Regardless, by the end of the day things looked like they were really coming together.
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2 comments:
Hey Folks, Well you may not think that anybody is watching but I am. My name is David Neal and I am in Birmingham,Al. I have wanted to do what you are doing for many years now for my kids, I am 43 myself. I have learned a lot from reading about your tests and hopefully can get started here around Christmas break for us. Please keep the info and photos coming, I am especially interested in how the turnbuckle system is working and whether the wire is holding up as well as the chain links. Thanks a lot for sharing.
Hi David!
I'm glad to hear people are actually reading this and finding it interesting. It's been a fun project so far, unfortunately I can only make a week or so of effort a year, so it's pretty slow going.
Both the chain and the wire ropes are rated way beyond what I needed. The chain is rated at a 9,200 pound limit, and the wire rope was at around 5,000 pounds.
The problem with using all wire rope slings is that it takes a lot of flexibility out of how you'll attach to the tree, since you buy them in preset lengths. With a chain I could cut a link off here or there so that my chain/turnbuckle combination would end up exactly where I wanted it. With more planning and time, you could probably get the wire rope to work out ok for all four points.
One problem with using such large eyebolts (1" in this case), is that it forces you to up-size all the rest of the components. In order to get a shackle that would fit through the eye, I had to get a giant shackle. That in turn meant I needed a giant turnbuckle that would fit the shackle. That mean I had to go with this grossly overrated chain so that the pin of the turnbuckle would fit through the link, etc. It gets expensive quickly.
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