October Trip

We spent a long weekend at the tree house a week ago.  The goal was to finish installing the wood burning stove, as we plan on spending Christmas in the tree house.

We arrived late at night, made it up into the tree house, and noticed something was wrong.  Everything was dirtier than we expected, there were a lot of squirrel droppings around, and there was an alarming amount of splintered wood.  Unfortunately we only had a tiny flashlight, and couldn't really  figure out where the splintered wood came from, or how a squirrel could get in.  My main concern was that the trunks of the trees were crushing the tree house.

The next morning in the light of day, we could see that a large limb had landed on the roof, punching a good sized hole through the roof.  Luckily the hole was on an overhung portion of the roof, so no rain had gotten into the tree house.  The force of the impact had popped some of the siding off by a few inches, which explained how the squirrels got in.  A little bit of hammering got everything back together.

We also patched the hole in the roof, cut a new hole in the roof for the chimney, and installed the chimney box.  It took a good full day to get this all done, but it was awfully satisfying firing up the stove for the first time.  The Jotul pumps out the heat, I think we'll stay warm in December.

The large grape vine growing on the tree had come to rest in between one corner of the tree house and the nearby tree trunk.  After the initial fear that the tree house was being crushed, we decided to cut it down.  Originally we liked the look of the vine, but decided it was time for it to go.  Once the vine was down, the tree house returned to its earlier swaying state, which took some getting use to.

Southern Indiana has had a very wet fall.  The area beneath the tree house flooded several times, which completely demolished our original firewood stash.  We cut a lot more firewood, and restacked everything.  Hopefully we'll have more than enough.

The pulley system got a pretty good work out.  We used it to pull up a lot of luggage, and did a few loads of firewood as well.  We're either getting more used to using it, or the rope has lost some of its kinks, we had very few problems with the rope getting jammed in the pulleys.