My friends and I didn’t build the treehouse, we just found it.
It had been sitting empty for so long it was almost entirely covered in thick green vines.
At the time I estimated it as being at least 20 years old, a hand-made treehouse fifteen feet off the ground. For being that old it was still remarkably sturdy, and there were only a few small changes we needed to make. At the time I was 15, and for all my friends this was the holy grail of hang out spots. We could chill here, completely hidden, and do whatever we wanted. In the summer that was a problem, because we really needed air conditioning to fight off the oppressive and dangerous heat waves. A kid named Paul found an old window-mounted style of air conditioner in his dad’s garage, and said we could use it. This was the perfect size for our treehouse, and would provide all the cooling we would ever need… if we could get it to run. The air conditioner was still in the original box, so it would definitely work if we could plug it in. This did not occur to us until we had lugged that heavy A/C unit all the way out into the woods and lifted it up into the tree house. Of course there was no power source up here, so how the heck could we use the air conditioner? We started stealing every extension cord we could find, and ran 200 yards worth of cords from my house up to the A/C in the tree house.