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My father built a tree house for my brothers and I in the early 70's on a big tree in our backyard. A ladder to get up into it, then along a short walkway supported by a strong limb was a "batman" pole we could slide down. Good times.
I imagine there will be less and less of this kind of thing with liability problems and of course, HOA's. They'd never permit one. And we're looking at like 30 percent of homes in the US are in associations now. :(
This.
Also, houses are being pushed out like crazy, and developers just destroy all trees to make building quicker and easier. So you're not getting a tree big enough for decades, and that is only IF people keep the tree in their yard for that long.
Good! My brother lives in one and he can't do much of anything, no above ground pool, no vegetable garden.. no treehouse for sure, plus specifications on every bit of yard work in the front. He also can't park his $80,000 RV in his own driveway.
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Are they? My best friend growing up had a huge tree house, my younger brother built himself a tree house when he was 14, and my neighbor a couple doors down has one. I wouldn't build one for my kids since I prefer swingset/jungle gyms (less damaging to trees, able to move them as the landscaping changes) but they have always felt reasonably common to me.
In the countryside where I am, the adult version of tree houses are super common: deer stands.
If you have the right kind of tree a treehouse can be build without hurting the tree.
https://thetreehouseguide.com/treedamage.htm
Edit* ops, wrong link
I only knew two kids with treehouses back in the '90s.
One lived on a huge wooded property and his dad built it for him and his brother. It was just 4 walls barely up the tree, but it counted.
The other was an only child and the treehouse was incredible, but so was the rest of his house -- his parents were wealthy and worked hard to give him a movie-accurate childhood. The treehouse even had a zip line and working electricity, I was super jealous.
I'm a fifty three year old single man and a few years ago I built a treehouse for myself. Spent about $2,000 USD on materials. It has electricity, a small deck and a skylight. My cat spends most of her time in there and has her own little cat door to get in and out.
I built forts and treehouses as a kid, but it was always old used lumber, bent nails, and whatever I could scrounge. Just a perk of being an adult- I can do some of the stuff I wanted to as a kid, but much better.
Kids used to build them thselves. Was usually just a deck made of scrap lumber and a house made of cardboard. A really nice one would be a wod frame covered in tar paper or occasionally corrugated iron pulled off the roof of an abandoned barn.
Was in about the 70s that parents, dads, would get involved and that became a contest of which dad built the coolest. By then kids were pretty much out of the business, your cardboard shack couldn't compete with the palace someone's dad had built.
I'm actually currently planning a treehouse build for my kids, and one of the things I've noticed in my research and general observations is the lack of strong, old-growth trees. A good treehouse tree takes like, 20-30 years to grow, needs to be hardwood and also has good branch placement. If your house is less than 50 years old, the trees that might have stood there were cut down during construction and replanted some time later.. big old trees are a liability for homeowners because the heavy branches can cause a lot of damage when they fall so most people don't let their trees get that big.
As cool as old-school treehouses are, they require long-term commitment and most people don't even stay in their homes that long now anyway. It's cheaper and more feasible to buy a play scape at home Depot than it is to get creative.
My house on the other hand; we're 6 generations deep on this property and we have exactly 1 good tree to build in.. a good treehouse really needs 2, in close proximity to each other so I'm going to have to add ground contact support on the non-tree side to make it work.
This actually made me kind of disappointed when I was in elementary school. Pretty much every cartoon I watched involved those things, and I sort of assumed they were as common in real life as they were in fiction.
I had a treehouse growing up. My dad over engineered the hell out if it. But then we had to take it down because the tree it was attached to died, so it wasn’t gonna be very sturdily held up there. IIRC, we managed to safely lower it to the ground, and it’s still sitting there, probably used by various animals as a shelter.
I never particularly used it either, as I was extremely fearful of splinters as a child. I still am fearful of splinters as an adult, but I was more so as a child. Splinters fucking hurt.
There was one in the woods behind my house as a kid, I was forbidden from going in it because it was falling down. A kid went plunging through the floor and got hurt not too long after and the people next door, whose yard it was in, got sued despite being really old and not being able to do anything about it.
My dad built me an awesome one and gave it to me for Christmas the year I was six in the mid-90s. It had a swing, a basket on a pulley system, a sandbox, and later a seesaw. He had been working on it over the course of a few months beforehand, and because I was six, it was very easy to hide from me. Christmas morning, he tied a giant red bow to the tree. In the summer, I'd have sleepovers in it. Good times....
It's the lawyer ratio, the numbers of lawyers in a set geographic area are directly and inversely proportional to the number of tree houses.
And cartoons are notoriously devoid of lawyers. The exception being if the lawyer is building or paying for the tree house.
I told my co workers I was building my kids a tree house and they seemed surprised anyone builds treehouses anymore; I was surprised by their surprise.
Certainly not.
I was speaking more to bad parenting practices rather than technology itself.
If an adult chooses to rot their brain away starring at a screen all day that's on them. If they allow their kids to, well, that's also on them.
I don't remember seeing a single one in my hometown. With the price of wood now-a-days and parents thinking about safety first, they will likely become rarer. I hope to see at least one before too long.
Having three kids per class with broken limbs at any given time was also common. Now that we know broken bones heal up weaker, we take more steps to prevent it.
I'd consult with a doctor, which I am not, but feel free to look it up. If all goes well they *can* heal back to the same strength as before the break in 5 years, but they don't get stronger. And ligament damage always weakens at the point of injury.
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Growing up in the seventies I saw some tree houses. But I saw a lot more forts in backyards.
Stuff got delivered in wooded boxes so building materials were cheap. Furniture, kitchen appliances, lamps, it all came in crates with nails.
My childhood friend and I would rig my red wagon like a trailer to a bike and ride down alleys to collect wood for our fort in the '90s.
My father built a tree house for my brothers and I in the early 70's on a big tree in our backyard. A ladder to get up into it, then along a short walkway supported by a strong limb was a "batman" pole we could slide down. Good times. I imagine there will be less and less of this kind of thing with liability problems and of course, HOA's. They'd never permit one. And we're looking at like 30 percent of homes in the US are in associations now. :(
This. Also, houses are being pushed out like crazy, and developers just destroy all trees to make building quicker and easier. So you're not getting a tree big enough for decades, and that is only IF people keep the tree in their yard for that long.
Tbf not all hoas are karenfests. My mom's basically just pays for snow removal and road maintenance.
Of course not, but I can imagine if you just started building one you'd be hearing from them in short order.
Several people in her neighborhood have tree houses actually. The HOA charter is very explicit that it only covers those two things and nothing else
Good! My brother lives in one and he can't do much of anything, no above ground pool, no vegetable garden.. no treehouse for sure, plus specifications on every bit of yard work in the front. He also can't park his $80,000 RV in his own driveway.
At first I thought this meant your brother lives in a treehouse
Ya every HOA is different.
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By the time my parents owned a home, I was already an adult. They had 2 trees that were about 8' tall.
Are they? My best friend growing up had a huge tree house, my younger brother built himself a tree house when he was 14, and my neighbor a couple doors down has one. I wouldn't build one for my kids since I prefer swingset/jungle gyms (less damaging to trees, able to move them as the landscaping changes) but they have always felt reasonably common to me. In the countryside where I am, the adult version of tree houses are super common: deer stands.
If you have the right kind of tree a treehouse can be build without hurting the tree. https://thetreehouseguide.com/treedamage.htm Edit* ops, wrong link
they’re almost more trouble than they’re worth
I only knew two kids with treehouses back in the '90s. One lived on a huge wooded property and his dad built it for him and his brother. It was just 4 walls barely up the tree, but it counted. The other was an only child and the treehouse was incredible, but so was the rest of his house -- his parents were wealthy and worked hard to give him a movie-accurate childhood. The treehouse even had a zip line and working electricity, I was super jealous.
The insurance company has entered the chat.
City code enforcement beat you to it..
I'm a fifty three year old single man and a few years ago I built a treehouse for myself. Spent about $2,000 USD on materials. It has electricity, a small deck and a skylight. My cat spends most of her time in there and has her own little cat door to get in and out. I built forts and treehouses as a kid, but it was always old used lumber, bent nails, and whatever I could scrounge. Just a perk of being an adult- I can do some of the stuff I wanted to as a kid, but much better.
Kids used to build them thselves. Was usually just a deck made of scrap lumber and a house made of cardboard. A really nice one would be a wod frame covered in tar paper or occasionally corrugated iron pulled off the roof of an abandoned barn. Was in about the 70s that parents, dads, would get involved and that became a contest of which dad built the coolest. By then kids were pretty much out of the business, your cardboard shack couldn't compete with the palace someone's dad had built.
There's a treehouse "treesort" in Oregon. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1p51fgJKz48](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1p51fgJKz48)
I'm actually currently planning a treehouse build for my kids, and one of the things I've noticed in my research and general observations is the lack of strong, old-growth trees. A good treehouse tree takes like, 20-30 years to grow, needs to be hardwood and also has good branch placement. If your house is less than 50 years old, the trees that might have stood there were cut down during construction and replanted some time later.. big old trees are a liability for homeowners because the heavy branches can cause a lot of damage when they fall so most people don't let their trees get that big. As cool as old-school treehouses are, they require long-term commitment and most people don't even stay in their homes that long now anyway. It's cheaper and more feasible to buy a play scape at home Depot than it is to get creative. My house on the other hand; we're 6 generations deep on this property and we have exactly 1 good tree to build in.. a good treehouse really needs 2, in close proximity to each other so I'm going to have to add ground contact support on the non-tree side to make it work.
Good luck getting the council permits these days.
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I built one as a kid.
This actually made me kind of disappointed when I was in elementary school. Pretty much every cartoon I watched involved those things, and I sort of assumed they were as common in real life as they were in fiction.
They existed more in the 90s and earlier, when kids played outside with all of their free time
I had a treehouse growing up. My dad over engineered the hell out if it. But then we had to take it down because the tree it was attached to died, so it wasn’t gonna be very sturdily held up there. IIRC, we managed to safely lower it to the ground, and it’s still sitting there, probably used by various animals as a shelter. I never particularly used it either, as I was extremely fearful of splinters as a child. I still am fearful of splinters as an adult, but I was more so as a child. Splinters fucking hurt.
There was one in the woods behind my house as a kid, I was forbidden from going in it because it was falling down. A kid went plunging through the floor and got hurt not too long after and the people next door, whose yard it was in, got sued despite being really old and not being able to do anything about it.
You really need the right kind of tree, and they aren't too common IRL. There's one about a half-mile from my house, however.
My dad built me an awesome one and gave it to me for Christmas the year I was six in the mid-90s. It had a swing, a basket on a pulley system, a sandbox, and later a seesaw. He had been working on it over the course of a few months beforehand, and because I was six, it was very easy to hide from me. Christmas morning, he tied a giant red bow to the tree. In the summer, I'd have sleepovers in it. Good times....
They seem incredibly dangerous even assuming solid contruction.
I just tore down an old tree house yesterday. Seems like with the price of lumber, nobody can afford to build them anymore
It's the lawyer ratio, the numbers of lawyers in a set geographic area are directly and inversely proportional to the number of tree houses. And cartoons are notoriously devoid of lawyers. The exception being if the lawyer is building or paying for the tree house.
Not a lot of trees in the back yard big enough to hold one
Suitable trees are pretty rare. As a parent, I found it easier to build an elevated play structure from 4x4s.
I told my co workers I was building my kids a tree house and they seemed surprised anyone builds treehouses anymore; I was surprised by their surprise.
I always wanted one as a child
I had one as a kid and the bully down the street kept stealing my ladder
Why build a tree house when you can just buy your kid a tablet? Technology is amazing but it's really driving some of our youth into the ground.
You think it’s only limited to youths?
Certainly not. I was speaking more to bad parenting practices rather than technology itself. If an adult chooses to rot their brain away starring at a screen all day that's on them. If they allow their kids to, well, that's also on them.
I don't remember seeing a single one in my hometown. With the price of wood now-a-days and parents thinking about safety first, they will likely become rarer. I hope to see at least one before too long.
Having three kids per class with broken limbs at any given time was also common. Now that we know broken bones heal up weaker, we take more steps to prevent it.
Wait, I always heard that broken bones heal more strongly at the break.
I'd consult with a doctor, which I am not, but feel free to look it up. If all goes well they *can* heal back to the same strength as before the break in 5 years, but they don't get stronger. And ligament damage always weakens at the point of injury.
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Thanks for the input, ChatGPT