Pete Builds A Treehouse In This Gorgeous Nature Preserve! | Treehouse Masters

Hello! Hi! How are you? Good to see you! Yes! Wow! Thank you! Wow! How fun is this? I started to walk towards the Nature Center, and then these two burst out of the doors and almost blew me over. We are so excited! So excited! I'm Nicole Ferguson, and I'm the Lead Park Naturalist here at Formar Nature Preserve and Arboretum. I'm so thrilled. You guys are so excited, and that makes me excited. Thank you so much for coming. I'm Amy McMillan. I'm the Director of the Genesee County Parks. This is so beautiful here. I mean, this is where you work. Every day. It's an arboretum, right? It's a Nature Preserve and Arboretum. It is one of the jewels and the crown of the Genesee County Parks. 383 acres of beauty. The reason the Genesee County Parks exist is to provide quality recreational experiences for everybody. But it's also a place for education and for community connections. Beautiful! We're flying along on our nature superhero headquarters. The platform's finished. And with a growing crew answering the Nature Preserver's call... Alex, way to go. We're installing the walling. Right this way, lads. We're bringing in 12 sections of framed walls. Hottie mama, look at those walls! The heaviest of which will contain two windows and a door to the back deck. It may not look like it, but this is one of the biggest walls Nelson Treehouse and Supply has ever tried to get up in a treehouse. 537 pounds worth of treehouse load. Nice, guys! Nice! Nice. Well, in this case, we determined it's sort of a three-season house, so we were not going to do insulation and interior wall paneling. Nailed it. Which means that the framing had to be extra perfect, and we also had to put a skin on that was a little more presentable than normal plywood. Do you guys all have superpowers? Yeah. What's yours? What's mine? I can fly. What do you mean? Yeah, that's a pretty good one. What's your superpower, Alex? I can build treehouses in three weeks. Yeah. Whoa! That's a good one. That's way better than flying. What is wrong with you? These are the beams going up to hold up the second story walls. Let's go lift it. You're good. And now comes our clear story walls. A clear story is a raised section of a wall. I can't see. An architectural style often used in churches. Oh, yeah. You in? Oh, yeah. Cool. All right, guys. Last wall. Let's get the rafters up here. Really heavy. These two-by-12 rafters are what they call SPF, stands for spruce, pine, or fir. And they're set 24 inches apart, a gap we fill in with pieces of wood called bird blocking. Nice. All right. So our roof framing here looks like a Tic-Tac-Toe board, and that's because we have a couple skylights and a couple trees going through the roof. It's really hard to waterproof, but we're going to do our best. The good thing is it lets all kinds of bugs crawl up and down the tree, which will be a good learning experience for the kids. Way to go, Patrick. Let's get the roof on then. So the centerpiece of the ceiling is where we have the raised roof. This wood is old two-by-eight car decking. Beautiful. It's got a tongue and a groove on it, and it came out of the docks of Oakland, California. Sexy. All the darkness of it is oxidation, where oxygen hits the wood and it transforms it into a darker color. Nice. We are putting on the roof. This time it's a tongue and groove roof, but it's refurbished, reclaimed, old, beautiful fir that's going to be super stout and be able to take quite a load if it snows or anything. Look at that. For the rest of the roof, we're using spruce car decking, and that's a contrasting color I think that goes really well with the recycled stuff. Keep it going. There's a gap in the roof boards between the stems of the tree and the roof itself so that the tree can grow a little bit and, more importantly, move in the wind. Nice job, Charlie. Oh, yeah. Eyes down, but you can walk. Do this. Do this. Nicole and Amy are so excited about this treehouse, but they haven't been there in weeks now. I think it's going to blow them away. Don't look through your hand. Amy, I'm not speaking. I haven't thought about it even once. No. Not just like every single waking moment of every day. Yes. On three. Yeah. One, two, three. Oh, my gosh. There it is. Oh. When they lifted their heads, I mean, they were just, whoa. You're right. It's perfect. The treehouse, the ramp, the stairs. To see what was once just sketches in his notebook come to life in a way that was bigger and better than we could have even imagined. It's a place of dreams. We're going to go to the beginning of the ramp. Okay. This is really one of my favorite trees. This cherry tree. How's it feeling? Oh, I love the trees coming up through the ramp. It just starts off perfect. I can't wait to get out there. Okay. We can keep going. You know, we've talked about the ramp. There will be moms and dads who are pushing strollers up, grandmothers and grandfathers that can go with their grandkids. And there will be kids that are in their wheelchairs that will be able to take their wheelchair and go all the way up. It's universally accessible. Yeah. It's going to be for everyone. Now, it's time to go inside. Yeah. Are you ready for this? Yes. Okay, here we go. Ready? Come in. Oh, my gosh. Brandi's going to lose it. Where does… You would think that when you first walked in, you're going to be like looking at the tree house. But those amazing masks. I couldn't get my eyes off from them and how you brought our superheroes to life. This is Miss Sunflower. And Queen Bee. Queen Bee. The Frog. They're all here. They're incredible works of art. And they were so unexpected. I had no clue of any sort that that was going to happen. Oh, the benches are so beautiful. This is all beetle kill wood that came from Montana. All this staining is actually from the beetles themselves. It's a kind of cool education that we can do with that, too. Yeah. The beetle board is just so cool. How lovingly they were sanded. There was attention to every single detail. Now, come on over here. Meet your new friends. Can I get a hug with you in the tree? Yeah, of course. Oh, here's something. Oh, my gosh. Right here in the middle of it all. It was amazing. The kids will be able to hug trees while they're in the tree house. Here we go. You ready for this? This is fun. Oh, my gosh. Come out. Is this amazing? From all the world and all the 11,000 acres of the Genesee County Parks, this is the perfect spot. Now, Axwell just gives you the height that makes you really feel so far up in the trees. There's this whole sense of just peace on leaning on that rail and looking out and just standing there in the air with the trees and the leaves and the sky. Thank you. It was everything I could have ever imagined it to be.