Up and Away

Well, too much has been happening of late to even blog about. I can feel the funnel constricting and the centripetal force strengthening as we move into the last month before Matawaska (as we've named the first site, after the local Native American name for 'where two rivers meet') is rented.

Here's my best, photo-centered cursory recap:
Above is the kitchen bath unit ready to be whisked over to the site. Friday morning, the lift day, Stig and I took off at 6:20 to beat any morning traffic. It went smoothly, minus a few scrapes and bangs on a leaning birch on our road.

Here are the platforms we built for the tree houses to sit on: 6 by 6 pressure treated lumber down to ledge and attached with 3/4" pins drilled 12" into the posts and 8" into the ledge. Strong! Of course, there will also be significant bracing coming off of the tree themselves added later.

The view from atop the tree houses when we were rigging it up for liftoff. Herbie Freeman, the man of the hour, brought down his crane truck, a four by four beauty just strong enough for the task.

It was a six hours blitz, a continual game of inches, as this and that always seemed to be just in the way, or barely manageable. But Friday's evening cigar tasted sweet, as we kicked back and let the tension melt away at the warmth of accomplishment.

Here's the connecting porch with some fun carpentry, tree cut outs.

And the railings and screened in porch taking shape.
More to come.

Placement

Progress happens, at varying rates somehow, though the twelve hour days don't change. A big point of forward momentum came when the building permits were issued and we could drop off the tree house close to its final resting place. We used jack stands from my father's boatyard to take it off the trailer. Notice Ida lying on the ground taking promo photos for the website.

The kitchen bath unit is coming along nicely as well. Here my brother Stig and our bro Matt are sealing up the roof with Grace 'felt' paper and architectural shingles.  Nice smile.

The most exciting happening of the week was breaking out the old climbing gear, clipping the chainsaw on the harness and climbing a huge white oak to nip off a branch.

The dream is taking shape! I have to remind myself that I'm living the dream during these long working days--that I'm not (as I often act like) on my way to something else; that this is it. Warming Spring days help.

Next week: laying power and water lines, delivering the second unit, and hopefully lifting them up into the trees!

Fast and Slow

I've tried time and again to capture the double-sidedness with which time presents itself to me, with sayings like: "life is short, but life is wide--" feeble attempts to get into communicable form the speed with which events links arms and fly by (just like this project is). And yet, looking back over the whirlwind it seems as if so much has happened. This year has been that for me: renovating a boat yard shop, restoring a vintage camper, getting married, buying a piece of land, and now the tree houses...oh yeah, and creating a baby. It's mid April. To keep myself centered and present I try to think of a flamboyant new york barista saying, "Jeees, steep it don't boil it."

Here are a few of the whirling events in photo form, the modern way of capturing moments--so we don't have to pay attention to them as they happen.

The Clear

 

I love that my wife Ida showed up to life in Maine with her own fluorescent hunter's cap. Whether or not she realized the ubiquity or the sincerity of it's employment here is another matter, but it sure helps her fit in and get along with the neighbors. Here she is sighting down the swath that running power to our land unfortunately necessitated. Luckily most of the trees were inconsequential, and by some maneuvering and re-planning we were able to save two gorgeous, large white oaks. We also found a beautiful Chaga growth at the base of one of the birches we had to drop, and were able to see its inner workings as we cut it up. It'll be tea in my cup in a matter of days.

By the end of yesterday day, the power poles were installed, three of them drilled five feet into ledge, and spaced at 250'.

 

Lyndon Babkirk, our new neighbor, has been a saint to work with, not raising a stink about us clearing for power access, and quick to loan us one of his many tools. Here he is with his new hobby: carving replicas of Maine's fresh water fish. They're beautiful.

Stig and I back at the Boat Yard were prepping out for the kitchen bath unit. I did all the framing calculations on Sketchup, a wonderful free program that's easy enough for this non-millennial to use. Thanks to Philip and Marsha, we were alerted that we'd have to install the 36" shower as we built, otherwise it wouldn't fit. And Stig was smelling particularly ripe that day anyway, so he tested it out at lunch break.

 

 This is a great example of how simple things can get complicated, of the three-quarters and inch and a halves that bounce around in my head on a given day in the shop.

To close out with a bang, here's a Time Lapse of us rafting the tree house:

The Move

I can tell you now from experience that it is challenging and strange driving a 12' wide, 13.5' tall house around behind you. It being Sunday, I normally relax in the tradition of the world's religions (like the secularist Sweden which has more religious work holidays than any country, I take the best and leave the rest:)). But noticing how there were so few cars passing by on our way to yoga in the morning I thought this might be the day to go for the move.

I hatched a plan whereby my mother was stationed one mile to the east and Ida my wife was stationed one mile to the west. On a three way call we were able to determine when the coast was clear enough on both sides for me to pull out on to the main road for the quarter mile, nervous jaunt. Ida and mom, at the time of the 'go for it' moment, pulled out of their perches and started towards the destination, slowly. That way if any cars came up behind them they could delay them with granny driving, or, if I had some unexpected trouble, stop their cars and pop on the flashers to alert approaching drivers. No troubles though!...at least on the main road. What a relief. Getting in our 500' driveway was another matter. I had to stop and reverse course several times to wind the eaves between bending birches. The big hold up ended up being a 100' birch I had to cut down, but who's will towards upward growth and sunlight was so innately stubborn that she mingled limbs with another birch and refused to fall, even under the persuadings of two come-alongs and all my willfulness, not an inconsiderable force.

But in the end, a few felled trees later, we got her more or less into place, a triumphant end to the beginning of a week, one that called for pizza, like a weekend well-lived should. One more step along the way to a dream realized, and a big one! Of course, I still have to do this three more times, but knowing that it's possible makes all the difference, and gives confidence moving into the next phase. I had deliberately been slow to start building the next unit before I was sure the delivery would work. Check.

Of course, the biggest challenge still lies ahead, that of hoisting them into their final places among the trees, but like a good challenge, this one unfolds incrementally, each upward step preparing one for the next.

From here on out the world is a big green antique pain-in-the-ass to hang open door

To The Earth

In Michael Pollan's second book, A Place of My Own, he talks about two different schools of architecture in the 20th century, and their opposing thoughts on groundedness, foundations: the Le Corbusier school, with their elaborate and light foundations, defying the need, seemingly, for strong attachment to the earth, elevating their designs in Babel delicateness; and the Frank Loyd Wright camp, where pinning, planting and posting the structure into the earth was the key to a design's success.

I've been thinking about these schools in terms of our tree house project. Ours will be on posts of course, rather delicate at 6 by 6, and of course, floating 8' off the ground, but these posts will be pinned with re bar to ledge that's endlessly thick, and our dwellings will be built around the trees, massive, with roots that crack that ledge and spread vastly through the dark earth. Maybe these tree houses are a nice blend of the Le Corbusier and Wright camps.

Above is my father getting the spring docks out. That time of year!

 While the shop was empty we cut and organized every single piece of wood needed to build the next three tree houses, which just makes me want to say "booyeah!". Above are the studs. There's also forty something rafters and forty something joists around the corner.

Every self respecting shop needs a bench dog and a re-purposed set of Ikea drawers

The Practice Lift

Things are much heavier when you're underneath them; it's best to be on top of it, mastering and owning, rather than cowering and hawing below.
There are three challenging phases to my plan of building a structure of this size inside of our boat shop. First is to get it onto a trailer and out of the shop. Check. The second is to get it over and dropped off on site. The thrid is to actually lift it into place. I'm nervous about this second one, and seem to keep delaying it as long as possible. The structure is technically too large to be legally driven over the road by me, and I have nightmare scenarios of power lines and trees and clogged traffic...or a tree house turned roadhouse, mangled on the pavement.

In the meantime then, our good friend Herbie Freeman brought over his new crane truck to have some fun. The structure adds up to about 4000lbs, not crazy heavy but none too light...and chunky! The truck lifted it though, and seems capable of the full 8' lift needed to get it in place among the trees.

 There is something surreal and unsettling about seeing a building teetering in the air like this.

The other progress building-wise, was to hang and install the antique door. Hanging doors is the biggest pain in the ass, and, as a word of warning, an exterior door slab on it's own, almost no matter how cool the door, is worth zero dollars. The work needed to hang and install an exterior door with seals, mortised hinges etc, outweighs the costs of new ones. I have eight hours in this door and it's not sealing perfectly as it is. I could nearly frame this whole building in that same time span.

And yesterday was the well drilling. Around here, being hemmed in on all sides by marsh and brackish water, getting the good stuff out of your well can be a real, and expensive, challenge. But we struck gold, thanks to my beginners luck divining and dousing skills. The well guy said it was one of his top ten wells in his fifty years of drilling: more than 100 gallons per minute of fresh water, enough to run twenty houses! the ladies offered some nice puns in our group texts exchanges: "Well done!"
"We're really pumped about this."

Avocation and Vocation

Most of our lives we spend working, and in a bit a of a sad sense, it's worth admitting it and facing it instead of deluding oneself through the journey on your way to some elusive destination. Most of us buy nice shoes that we wear in the 10% or less of the time available after work, commute, and too-tired-from-work hours. What we really should do is buy the best shoes (or work boots) for when we work. I'm reminded of a poem by Robert Frost "Two tramps in Mud Time," and the line: "making your avocation your vocation--" a synthesizing of life, repose and work, hobby and money-maker. This whole plan is an attempt at something like that. It'd be much easier and safer financially to build a traditional cabin rental by the water, something my folks have done successfully over the last fifteen years, but we wanted to make the process itself satisfying, and not just the outcome. SO here it is, an here we are, enjoying the blossoming, not just flowering.

The interior will be sheetrocked and clean, with rustic blended in, a balance my sister-in-law Marsha, as the lead designer, is trying to find. The back wall of this bedroom unit will be painted pine shiplap boards, locally harvested and milled.

The exterior is the same material, but stained and vertically sheathed. Here;s the first window going in permanently. Five are fixed and one will be, through some ingenuity and persistence, openable to create a cross current in conjunction with the screen door.

Tada! Notice the thumbs up reflection and the beautiful view...almost like it's not work.

The Bones

I recently blogged about my vintage camper restoration, and given the specificity of the model, and the popularity of the genre, I was able to let the process of restoring guide my blogging, with more or less step by step photos and explanations of my techniques for tackling the challenges that arose. IN the case of these tree houses, the actual building of it is not particularly interesting, but rather more the concept, the surrounding vision and the ideas that meld with the construction, the building process in the biggest sense of the phrase. That being said, the building technique has become a bit interesting, and we've ended up driving our design forward with the use of reclaimed materials and antique doors etc, especially this set of thirty (three foot wide by four foot high, two inch thick, nine light) antique windows that I bought from a local, and which came out of the "Plant Home--" a monstrous mansion on the shores of the Kennebec built in 1908. Plant was the same guy who built the "Castle in the Clouds" in New Hampshire, died bankrupt, I believe.

 Six of these beauties will constitute nearly the entire front wall of the bedrooms, for what we hope is a striking effect.

Here they are temporarily pinned up for builder motivation. :) Otherwise, the uniqueness of the build comes from the vertical shiplap siding. I framed the building 24" on center and then wrapped the entire thing with a nine foot roll of tyvek to create a vapor barrier. Then we strapped the whole thing horizontally at 24" on center, adding in lots of angled strapping for rigidity, as seen in the pics. This was Stig's idea, and did wonders for strength, especially in the front where the gaps for the windows necessitated a little something extra. Basically, it's built with the idea that moisture will get through some of the shiplap joints and knot holes etc and be stopped by the tyvek and dry out in the cavity left between the sheathing and the tyvek. Sounds good on paper.

 Here's Elida, Phil (my brother and partner in this dream) and Marsha's (my sister in law, and the designer for these buildings) daughter, scoping out the plumb of my work.

Climbing the Trees

Here's the view, or something close to it, from "Site B," We will give each of the tree houses local Native American names eventually, like Mattawaska, which means where two rivers meet. In the distance of this photo, just beyond the speck of Crow Island, the Kennebec and the Back River come together and head off towards Popham Beach and the blue ocean world beyond. Climbing theses trees to snap this shot was an expansive and welcome diversion from my shop space across the river. If you could pan this photo a few (at arm's length) inches to the right, you could see my father's boat yard at the tip of the peninsula pinning the south westerly bend of the Back River. Here the tide rips through the ledgy narrows at five knots and the water rises or falls between ten and fifteen feet every six hours and eighteen minutes. And here, in the middle bay of the boat shop my father constructed here some forty years ago, with a foundation dug by hand (and ledge blasted with dynamite you could buy down the road), the boots-on-the-ground practical side of our dream began.

In January, my wife Ida and I started into a five weeks journey of discarding and organizing the junk that seems to cling to some invisible magnet around this and every boat shop. We pitched and hemmed, exhaled and hawed, tossing, lifting, stacking. We insulated and lit, and powered up, and tore and pieced, bitched and laughed and jammed to good tune the whole while, and ended up with a massive usable shop space, heatable and loveable. Our first project was a six weeks sprint of renovating our vintage camper that we'll live in thie summer, a 1958ish Spartan Royal Manor. You can read about that here: spartanrebuild.blogspot.com  Here she is rolling out to make space for the tree house operation:

And, it's a shop with a view, at least with the doors open.

It's amazing how fast a structure can come together in an enclosed space with all the right tools, especially one that's only 12 by 12.

An honorable mention to our younger brother Stig and his ballerina nail gun moves.

More to come. For now, the sun is creeping down the trees towards the horses in the pasture to the west. If you look west in the morning, the sun comes down, not up, and today it hits the pasture at 6:35 am. I've been here writing, if you can believe it, more than a half hour now, and will have just the right twenty minutes or so to make some Scottish oatmeal on the stove, fill my belly with its warmth and sustenance, and be in the shop by seven, living and working out my visions.

The Wobbly Arrow of Time

Time does seem to move in a straight shot forward, with perhaps a hiccup or two along the way, but I'm always amazed at how things approach from the future and suddenly become present. Today, for example, I started the framing of the tree house; a month ago it was simply a drawing on a piece of paper; ten years ago this land across the marsh inspired impossible dreams; two years ago I remember telling a wealthy business man friend in Stockholm about my new idea to create a space where people could come, stay for inspiration--a creative environment: renovated vintage campers, maybe even tree houses. Then this January, after a push of six months to figure out how we could pull it off financially, we made an offer, it was accepted, and the closing date set. That date moved like a sign down the bending road, from far to near, and suddenly the opaque vision-at-a-distance took on the crispness of proximity.

And now we're in it, in the midst of that thing that was so far away. William James said something about experience being like finding yourself on a stairway, and looking up or down to see more stairways. Things are more clear when they're still off in the future distance, I guess; when you enter them it's more like swimming through them, and perspective is muddled. One thing we are sure of is that we're glad we're not building a traditional three bedroom rental cottage on the coast of Maine. It's takes creativity to create creative spaces, and that's what we're in this for.

Here's what we're calling "site a" and "site b," bare and beautiful trees, for now...