I'm SO glad I was able to get the railings and ladder finished before the family returned from Houston. This allowed them to start playing on it right away. It took me several more hours to get the slide attached and handrails built for that.
This is how it looked when I started out Saturday morning. It was a bit chilly but still a nice way to start the final day of the project.
Prepping ground for the ladder
With some debate and advice from others, I finally decided to run the ladder up through the floor of the treehouse. While unfortunately taking a little floorspace, this is a notably safer design. Since the ladder runs up higher than the floor, it provides a handhold throughout the whole process. It also partially blocks that hole to help prevent someone falling back through. I also placed some extra bracing along side the ladder on the way up to hold it more securely and provide extra surfaces to hold in case you lose your balance. I measured and measured and measured again before cutting a hole in my beautiful decking. As you can see, some of the finer details of certain jobs just can't be accomplished by power tools!
LUNCH! -- Man cannot live on nachos alone...unless there's still cheese and chips left in the house and the bride has been gone for a week. In that case, who really gets tired of homemade nachos!? A nod to my wife --> she did an amazing job of grocery shopping for me before she left. I appreciated it immensely. She even went through the trouble of making a list of meal options for me and hung it on the fridge. I never saw it though because I probably wasn't listening very well when she told me about it. Why would she do this? You may remember the whole 'food retarded' thing from an earlier post.
The slide posed a bit more of a structural challenge in that I had to be able to support 200lbs or more hanging outside the base structure of the main frame. I decided to but two sets of 2x4's in tension, two in compression, and two to work as a pivot. Each are held in place by eight 3-inch screws. As you can see, I still need to round some corners since I guarantee other skulls besides my own will meet up with one of these corners. I still have a major knot and sore spot on top of my head from an impacting union betwixt the two. This was the second time I raised up before I should have and in this case I hit my head so hard it made me a little dizzy. Here are a pic and video:
The final step was adding handrails on the step down to the slide.
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