Treehouses Are a Memory Making Gift

Treehouses Are a Ritual Of Growing Up

Treehouses are what build incredible childhood memories! But most of us would admit that we’re also building the treehouse we never had as kids. Treehouses appeal to kids for many reasons. A treehouse provides a great escape for kids from their house, homework, and day-to-day living. A treehouse is a ritual of growing up as much as your first bike. A treehouse is a cool place to hang out with friends, use your imagination, create a club, or balloon bomb your younger sister from a treetop perch!

Involve Your Kids In the Planning Process

First, it’s important to involve your kids in the planning process. This is not only good for family bonding time, but it’s their treehouse and you want to ensure it meets their needs and wishes. Get out some paper and engage them in listing the possible components that they would like for their treehouse. We throw out some ideas to discuss with your kids below:

• How many people do you want to be able to have in your treehouse?
• Do you want to be able to sleep in your treehouse?
• If you want to sleep in your treehouse do you want to use sleeping bags, a cot, or a couple of handmade bunk beds?
• Do you want a climbing wall?
• Do you want steps, a ladder, or a ramp to access your treehouse?
• Do you want a zip line, rope swing, rope bridge, cargo net climb, or a treehouse slide for your treehouse?
• Do you want your treehouse to be used year-round?
• Is it important that your treehouse is weather-proof and water-proof? Some treehouses in temperate climates are open-air.
• Do you want a bungee jump?
• How many windows do you want in your treehouse or no windows?
• Do you want a loft in your treehouse?
• Wood floors, tile, or carpet for floor coverings?
• Do want to be able to play video games or watch a movie in your treehouse?
• If you need electricity this is the time to figure that out, because lighting needs to be incorporated early in the process.
• Do you want to have a min-refrigerator in the treehouse?
• What is the best tree in your yard for your treehouse?
• Do you want window coverings for your treehouse?

These are just some ideas to get your creative juices working for both you and your kids in planning your kid’s treehouse build. Planning is part of the fun over a bucket of popcorn. We had fun with a big piece of butcher paper on the living room floor and erasable markers that we used to draw out the treehouse of our kid’s dreams, with tons of input from them, and lots of laughs that were part of the memory-making process.

Choosing the Best Tree House Tree

The tips and other information we offer here are not intended as a comprehensive guide to building a tree house, but as a guide on how to choose the best tree for your tree house. It does, however, address the most common concerns of anyone contemplating or planning to build a tree house and how to choose the best tree for building your tree house.

Tree houses have been around for a long, long time. Many of us have memories of almost magical times spent in tree houses while growing up. Later in our lives, some of us have even lived in them.

Trees grow and move throughout their lives. Like humans, trees can be healthy or riddled with disease. And, also like humans, it is not always easy to know if a tree is healthy or ill. Never forget that they are alive. Almost any tree that is healthy, mature, and sturdy is fine to build a tree house in, but there are some things to look for in particular when you’re assessing one and thinking about building on and in one.

 Here are some tips on how to go about picking a suitable tree:

How do you know if a tree is healthy or not?
Some signs of disease are: the spotty presence of leaves on branches especially near the ends of branches, faded or discolored leaves on branches, sap, or other liquid coming from gaps in tree bark or through tree bark itself.

When you should call in a professional arborist?
When you are deciding whether or not a tree would be a good one to build a house on, keep in mind that signs of disease or damage to a tree do not necessarily mean the tree is not capable of supporting a structure. You should have such signs in a tree assessed by a professional arborist before you build on such a tree. A professional arborist’s assessment could save you a lot of time and money, and even protect you and your family from injury.

What species of trees are good to use?
Some particularly popular, durable, and abundant species used for tree houses are oak, maple, ash, cedar, and Douglas Fir. Deciduous, leaf-bearing trees generally have denser wood, denser is better than conifers, with cones and needles. Deciduous trees are able to support heavier loads, both wind loads and the load from the tree house itself.

Assessing the tree’s environment
Don’t forget to assess the environment of a tree you would like to build on. As stationary as trees are, and as invisible as many trees are, we often forget that a tree’s good health depends on the quality and consistency of the tree’s environment, including its underground environment. Trees are, in some respects, very responsive and even highly vulnerable to changes, which we humans are often little concerned about and hardly ever notice in trees.

A tree’s underground environment is especially important
A large part of your concern regarding a tree’s environment should be addressed to what is underground. Not many people realize just how far the roots of trees extend. Tree roots often extend as much as three times as far from the tree’s trunk as the tree’s branches do! Digging around a tree, or even daily foot traffic, can severely damage a tree’s roots and compromise the entire tree along with the safety of the tree house built on it. Paths should not be constructed near trees and especially not surrounding trees. The presence of any paths in proximity to the tree’s trunk should be kept to the minimum possible.

What size tree do you need?
The size of the tree or trees you need depends on the size and weight of the tree house to be built, as well as on the planned position of the tree house on the tree, or trees.

What kind of fasteners you should use
Using bolts, nails, and screws to build a tree house can cause problems for your trees if such fasteners are not correctly fastened in them. Bolts should be used as fasteners in preference to nails and screws whenever possible. Nails, especially, and even screws tend to loosen easily in living trees due to the almost constant movement of trees. Remember, trees are alive, and although they move very slowly, they are always moving.

The photos you see in our blog today are some of the beautiful and imaginative treehouses our customers have built over the years. Get inspired and sit down with your kids and make an evening of planning their treehouse. Then the real fun begins, take them to the building supply store and let them help with picking out lumber, and then look through our website for the best selection of treehouse windows, hardware, flower boxes, skylights, and shutters for your treehouse design.

The next step is the building of your kid’s treehouse and depending on their age they can help with many of the tasks in the building process. This is a great way to incorporate math skills and so much more into the building process. What kids participate in they seem to value that much more because they see firsthand the hours and skills that go into building their dream treehouse. A treehouse makes an incredible Christmas gift for your kids that helps your children and family make memories that last a lifetime! Be sure to share your finished treehouse project with us at Shed Windows and More by emailing your photos to: info@shedwindowsandmore.com.