Tree house

By w176 · Sep 13, 2010 · 10.6K · 6
  1. The kids on my block is building a tree house. I can see it from my window and its just a few steps away from our backyard. It came into creation in the beginning of the summer, and all summer long I had the privilege of watching the children build it.

    Their parents help them build a platform around two big pine trees. The kids on the block is young, between 4 and 10 so the tree house was set really low. Just 120cm/4 feet of the ground.
    That was in the beginning of June, after that the parents just keep and watchful eye and let the kids do the building.

    I'm amazed at how it has grown. There result is nothing like the rough little box you imagine when someone mentions a tree house. It is chaotic, organic and intriguing.

    At one place the kids raised a 8 foot wall, 3 feet across, reaching towards the sky. Then between the two trees they placed a plank, just to nail up an old carpet there, dividing the platform with a wall and letting the mat occupationally function as a tent against the rain.

    On one place on the platform they added a inclined plane of planks meeting the floor, I have no idea why they done this. I can only guess. My guess at the moment is as some sort of pillow perhaps?

    The original platform is slowly expanding, with planks just put on top of the original platform, with end poking out out further into the air, and then nailed into place. At five different places, on top of the platform an beneath it there random pieces of railing around the structure, or the original structure.

    Each day this random growth continue, one strange piece at the time, while the children work hard, laugh, cry and play.
    This little piece, cooperation, random creativity and a total lack of respect for how thing should be done is fantastic. It's a complex mess I just can imagine how they interned and came up with.

    I love this sort of unbound creativity and learning by doing for children. I love the fact they are lest to play in the own, with hammers, saws and nails and play and run even id they get a splinter ever now and then or hurt their thumb. For obviously this don't discourage them.

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  1. Eunoia
    Lucky children. Tree houses are awesome, I want one. :(
    Eunoia, Sep 13, 2010
  2. Taylee91
    That sounds really cool!

    My brothers and sister and I never had a tree house, but we did have a "fort." It was nothing more than a small area of thick Sumac Trees in our back yard. But what we did is we cleared away a few of the saplings and made rooms. One for us girls, one for the boys, and to make it more accommodating, we cleared a path between the two rooms. We also made pathways to the field beyond our back yard.

    My sister tells me we called it, "Golden Leaves" because the Sumac leaves turned from green to orange, then to dark maroon in the Autumn. Yes, I remember now :D

    The best thing about having the field behind us was that we took the extra hay that had been mowed down during the Spring and Autumn day and layered it on the ground in the rooms. That was the best part about it. We could sit down, play games, and talk for hours.

    T
    Taylee91, Sep 13, 2010
  3. w176
    Oh. Where I grew us there was a big hill covered in bushes, in it was a 5 minutes walk away from the school yard.

    There generations of children had created a huge labyrinth of tunnels, all over the hill, interconnecting and sprawling in an awesome fascinating patten.

    I still remember the smell of fresh earth and crawling through those tunnels immersed in play.
    w176, Sep 13, 2010
  4. Taylee91
    The weeds used to grow five feet high in our back yard too. We used to crawl through them and make tunnels as well. *sigh* Those good old days when you were a kid, eh?
    Taylee91, Sep 14, 2010
  5. w176
    I think life is growing my awesome by the years, not less.
    w176, Sep 14, 2010
  6. Taylee91
    Oh, yeah. Life is getting better. I just miss that innocence I experienced when I was young. Not having to worry about college, a car, an apartment. Being completely shut out from that part of life. The peace. *sigh*
    Taylee91, Sep 15, 2010
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