As promised, some photos of the finished products of the past 2-3 weeks of work. As the Mississippi State students are working at the house on Fridays, we’re continuing to make progress with trim, and we’re working on choosing materials for the floors, cabinets, stairs, etc. The finished railing! The finished mosaic! Emily working on trimming out the ceiling. Patty chose a rusty orange color for the beams. Very striking now but it will look great with the cabinets (which may also become orange) and the slate floors.

The past two and a half weeks have seen Patty’s treehouse come much closer to looking like a finished house. This post is an attempt to document the process; I will get some more finished photos soon. The key to our progress was the serendipitous arrival of Fran Halperin and Eric Christ, partner architects from San Anselmo, California, who have been traveling the country in Hank, their VW van, over the past four or five months. Fran and Eric originally planned to stay for a week or so, but — upon seeing, I think, the extent to which we could …

The inside of Patty’s house is starting to take its finished form, as the first wall and ceiling materials were installed over the holidays. Brian Stewart somehow coordinated up to 30-40 volunteers at a time to make great progress on installing the tongue-and-groove pine board that we chose for the ceilings, walls, and most of the floor. Although the material is nothing fancy — standard No.2 Southern Yellow Pine — it gives the room a very warm look, especially when the sun shines on it, and it should look great when finished: By itself, it looks a little overwhelmingly uniform. …