Fantastic Forts and Terrific Tree Houses

By Nancy Humphrey Case
Issue 126, September/October 2004

I'd seen plenty of extravagance in the marketing of toys, but this magazine ad made my eyes pop. It featured playhouses so elaborate that the cheapest one cost $4,000. Besides shingled roofs, shuttered windows, glass doors, and scalloped trim, they came with options ranging from flying bridges and flagpoles to trapdoors and sliding peepholes. Little was left to the imagination. The Climbing Castle even had 16 hand-carved fleur-de-lis shields. If this wasn't enough, you could go for one of the more expensive custom play structures (up to $159,000) with electricity and indoor plumbing. "The ultimate children's toy," the ad declared. But the next line revealed that it was big kids these play structures really appealed to. "Popular among Hollywood stars," it boasted.

Aside from the extravagance, there's something wrong with this picture when you put kids into it. I speak from experience.

When our older kids were eight and five, my husband and I began thinking about building a tree house for them. My dad had built me a simple tree house"ha wooden box with an upside-down sandbox on posts for a roof. I told my kids how much fun I'd had perched in my own special spot behind a leafy screen. They listened with big eyes, and began to envision their own tree house. We picked out a spot in the woods behind our house: four straight ash trees growing six to eight feet apart.

The first issue was how high to build the tree house. I was concerned about safety, but my husband wanted its floor to be at least ten feet off the ground. "It won't be very exciting if it's any lower than that," he said, "especially when the kids get older." Did he really mean that it wouldn't be very exciting for him?

Christa and Ian stood by in silence as we hammered out this decision. We cut the beams and bolted them into the trees"hten feet off the ground. The work was too dangerous for the kids to take much part in, but they sported their tool bags and watched cheerfully. They couldn't wait to have a tree house.

By the end of that afternoon, I think we had all of two beams bolted in place. A few weeks later we finally had a plywood platform. Christa and Ian were delighted. They climbed up the ladder and through the trap opening as I held their hands and told them to be very careful. There was nothing to keep them from falling off. A simple railing would have sufficed, but my husband had a grander scheme in mind.

When we were in college, a bunch of guys who had tired of studying and itched to do something creative with their hands built a tree house at the edge of the college golf course. Word got around, and my then boyfriend (now my husband) and I walked out one spring evening to see it. I was amazed. It had full walls with glass windows, and stairs inside to connect its three levels. There was a west-facing deck off the back, from which we sat and watched the sun set through buds of pale green.

I don't know if my husband was remembering that magical place or not, but the tree house he wanted to build for our kids went way beyond anything I'd had in mind. It was to be fully enclosed, with a trap door for entry and a regular door to a deck, complete with full railing. It would be solidly built and of generous proportions"htall enough for my husband and me to stand up in.

For a while we spent a little time each weekend adding a few more boards to our tree house. But other activities interfered, and soon our New Hampshire fall turned to winter. We put the tree house project on hold until spring. By then, the idea had lost its initial zest. Although we did make progress on the tree house for a couple of years, the project dragged on until the kids were too old to care. When we moved several years later, I gave the buyers of our house the piece of corrugated Plexiglas that was to have been the roof of our tree house, but their son was already in high school.

The most fun anyone ever had in that tree house was a couple of years ago, when our college-age son decided he wanted to show his new girlfriend where he'd grown up. They drove up from Boston one winter night, arriving after midnight. While the family slept in the house that had once been ours, Ian and his girlfriend sneaked through the snowy woods and climbed up into the old tree house. It still had no roof, but it was as sturdy as heck"hstrong enough and tall enough to hold two fun-loving adults.