When Herndon-area resident Daryl Madden wanted to get rid of a tree house he had constructed for his kids in his backyard about 10 years ago, he decided to place an ad on the Internet. He offered to give it away for free to whoever would come and disassemble it.
At the time, he wasn't quite sure what kind of response he would get.
Within a half hour of posting the ad on Craigslist.org's "free" listings site, Rob Sullivan, a resident of Shenandoah Junction, W. Va., about 45 miles away stumbled upon the advertisement and typed a quick e-mail to Madden.
The tree house would be perfect for Sullivan's eight kids, the e-mail read, inquiring when the best time would be to come and pick it up. It was the first of around 30 e-mails Madden would get about the tree house.
Four days later on the morning of July 22, Sullivan and his 8-year-old son, Ian, made the drive to the Madden's Dranesville neighborhood to start the deconstructing process.
"A lot of times you'll see things that you want on the site, but most of the time you're too late," said Sullivan. "This is just such great timing for me because [building a tree house] is something that has been on my to-do list for a long time."
IT WAS DURING the construction of a wooden deck in Daryl Madden's backyard 10 years ago that he first got the inspiration to build the tree house.
Snatching some excess wood and building materials from the deck and using the methods he had learned from watching the workers in his backyard and his experience as a professional engineer, Daryl Madden laid the base for what would be his children's new tree house.
"I just kind of winged it, built the base and sort of started adding things that the kids would like as it came along," said Daryl Madden, sitting on the main floor of the tree house, his feet dangling from the edge. It took nearly an entire summer to complete.
When it was done, it sat about five feet from the ground and measured about 65-square-feet, complete with a balcony, a ladder to a small makeshift "tower" and a trap door.
Daryl Madden and his wife Betsy still remember when their three children — two boys and one girl — hurried to the backyard one summer night for a camp out in the tree house.
"The first night they come out with their sleeping bags and when they climbed up they saw that a cat had left a dead mouse right in the middle of the floor," Daryl Madden said with a laugh. "They wouldn't go in there for weeks after that because they thought there were ghost mice."
Over the years, the tree house evolved with the growing ages and interests of the Madden children. At one time or another it was used in make-believe games, dramatic productions, skateboarding and even paintball wars.
But with the oldest of the Madden children, Ryan, 18, getting ready for college in the fall and the youngest, Kelly, 14, clamoring for a beach volleyball pit in the backyard, Daryl and Betsy Madden knew that it was finally time to have the tree house removed.
AS SULLIVAN'S SON climbed around the tree house, his father tried to size up how he would best take apart the tree house.
"If we can take the roof off and get the walls apart in one piece, that would be ideal," Sullivan said, pointing at the tree house with a flathead screwdriver.
Sullivan estimated that it would take two days to disassemble the house and two days to move it up to his home in West Virginia. The act of reconstructing the house on his property would probably take the rest of the summer, he said.
"I don't even want to think about putting this thing back together yet," Sullivan said.
Despite the long hours of work ahead of him, it is definitely worth the effort, he added.
"There's a lot of ways you can look at the value of something like this," Sullivan said. "Pragmatically you can look at the wood and materials and that's worth a lot in its own."
"But when it comes down to the different ways that the kids can have fun on it and use their imagination — there's the real value of the thing."
The Madden children were happier about their memories of having the tree house over the years than they were upset about its removal.
"It's going to be weird not seeing it back there, but we used it for a lot of summers and a lot of different things," said Nick Madden, 17, a senior at Herndon High School. "We don't really use it that much anymore, so it's good that someone else can get to have it."
STANDING A FEW feet from the back of the tree house, Betsy Madsen watched as the tree house that had been a big part of her children's youth was slowly disassembled.
"When you think back over the years at all the things, it's been a pirate ship, a theater — there was even a time when the kids had a skate ramp built in back here," she said. "I may shed some tears when it's all gone and carried away."
Even though she is losing a part of her children's childhood, Betsy Madden said that she is relieved to see the tree house go.
"It's pretty sentimental, and you look back and see the kids growing up and having it be a part of their lives," she said. "But they're too old for a tree house now — it's just another stage of life we're entering."