I was recently asked why I am so focused on this treehouse project of mine. Especially given my well-established discomfort with heights (acrophobia), and its undeniable costs in money and energy.
I think I do it simply because it’s difficult, but not too difficult. It’s a challenge, but one with a good chance of success, especially if I learn to accept imperfections in its implementation – which is one of the lessons life keeps wanting to teach me, anyway.
It’s also a kind of architectural “folly,” such as suits my eccentricities.
And perhaps it’s a weirdly quite literal interpretation of certain vague late-middle-age nesting instincts I have.
I have plenty of projects that are similar. The online world of the opengeofiction.net – its servers, its coding work, its maintenence – is really just the same thing as the treehouse but in a different domain. In summary, it’s another hobby-type-project that challenges me enough to be hard, but not impossible.
My life has been full of these types of things. Sometimes they’ve ended with failure (my sojourn in the military, my efforts to start my own IT consulting business). Sometimes they’ve ended with success (my work as a database administrator, my teaching career in South Korea).
The treehouse or the geofiction webserver project are exactly the same kind of thing. The fact that they aren’t remunerated is just an accident of what’s available to be done up here in rural Alaska. The options are limited, so I had to find “jobs” even if they weren’t the paid kind of jobs.
I finished the treehouse’s roof today – more or less. There are some screws missing, because I ran out of screws. I engineered a trapdoor type thing in the middle of one section of roof panel, to enable me to reach and attach the last roof panel. I’ll want to create some kind of more permanent and water-proofed arrangement for this “hole-in-the-roof” at a later point in time. Maybe I’ll make a skylight?
Here is the roof trapdoor, ready to be pulled down over my head.
Here is a view of the south side, now with the roof complete.
I’ll want to put some plastic across the south windows, as I did across the north windows. Then the next project will be to fill in the non-load-bearing east and west walls. These walls will be inset at each end, since the trees go up through the floor at the east and west ends.
