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...

Day One: The Journey in the Destination

From the tip of the peninsula where I grew up, at sunset, one can look east and live in the light of the day for some thirty seconds more as the last gold brushes up the slopes of a rise there. From this photo, the land continues left out to a point some thirty yards from my parents' perpendicular running peninsula. There's an old, time-undone dike there, evidence of what at the time must have been an immense effort to control the flow of water into the upstream marshy field. In so doing they were able, I'm told, to graze sheep there, though now, dike over-run and flowed their cloven hooves would no doubt puncture through the muddy salt marsh and into the strange crevices below just as ours did, when as kids my brothers and I would venture out into this mucky golden expanse. My older brother Philip and I, along with our wives Marsha and Ida, have just purchased this fourteen acre spit of land, a many year dream of ours come to pass in a fit of determination and financial creativity. It is here that we will build our tree houses, dwellings that we hope will inspire those who inhabit them with the creative spirit in which they were conceived.
It was a dream of ours for some years, but it really began long before that as a dream of my parents. They moved up here, (then, and perhaps to others even now, the middle of nowhere) after some years on a sailboat, a reaction to two years in Greenwhich village, New York where my father attended Columbia University in 1968 and 1969. This morning I've just read Evelyn Waugh in Brideshead Revisited describing his subjects, after sex, lying and smoking in a New York Hotel, as "not ready to sleep, for in that city there is neurosis in the air which the inhabitants mistake for energy." Some in the counter-cultural movement of the time were seeing through the facade of the urban and drugged version of peace and love, and looking to scratch through to a richer patina, one based on the timeless values of the land, of sustainability and integrity. The so called "back to the land movement," was loosely based around the philosophies of Scott and Helen Nearing in their book, Living the Good Life, published a decade earlier and gaining traction in the upheaval of the day. My parents, along with my oldest brother Ernie, were one of several families in the early seventies to choose an island, Georgetown, on the mid coast of Maine, as the base for this new experiment in wholesome living. They plowed the land, lived in tents, planted fruit trees, ground their own flour, drank warm goat's milk from the neighbors, fed us babies mushed avocados and wheat germ. Even I as a child, not brought into their world until 1980, remember taking the one step up to the throne of our off white and fading plastic, composting toilet--or, finding our small bathroom occupied by one of my parents or my three brothers, dashing out to the still usable outhouse they built back in 73,' with the styrofoam seat my dad had fashioned and painted, a non heat-(cold)conducting material for those chilly Maine mornings.
This thrity-five acre penninsula surrounded by the Back River, branching off the Kennebec as it does and emptying back into Hockomock Bay after a six mile detour between Georgetown and Arrowsic islands, was a magical world of Tarzan and indians and cowboys for us as children. More to come on these memories as this story of our tree house adventures unfold, but for now it's enough to instill that as we found ourselves in our thirties and ready to adultedly form our own adventures, it seemed a shame, on the one hand not to build upon the decades of groundwork laid here by my parents, yet on the other, it felt a small betrayal of their pioneering spirit not to go out on our own, to pry open some entirely new lid and splay out its contents. This fourteen acre spit of land--new, yet, at least at lower tides, connected to the peninsula of our youth seemed the perfect harmony of these competing hands. It's fresh, it's our own, yet it's connected literally and figuratively to what has come before, to my parents' spirit of adventure. We've named this land "Sequin," after the Indian name for a lovely light-housed island off the coast nearby, and today I'm beginning the building of the Tree Houses at Sequin.