How To Build A Tree House

When you were a child, you either had a tree house or you wanted one. Francois Haasbroek explains how to build one.

- Francois Haasbroek

Every child should have a tree house. A place that’s yours alone. Your mom can’t tell you to tidy your tree house – it’s not her jurisdiction. Right of admission reserved. If you want to escape kids from school, an irritating sibling or a strict parent, you simply pull up the rope ladder.

The rope ladder! It’s the tree house equivalent of a draw bridge over a moat.

I’m a bit of a tree house expert. Before I was even of school-going age, my best friend and neighbour Willie van Tonder and I built a small platform in a tree. This platform turned into a decade-long construction project, resulting in a seven-storey tree house with running water, power, a fireplace and a lift.

Here’s how you build a tree house.

Choose the right tree

The thing that gets in the way of most kids having their own tree house is not a lack of will or a lack of building materials, but the lack of a suitable tree. It can’t be any old tree, it has to be a tree house tree.

The bigger, the better. You want a tree with potential for vertical and horizontal expansion, but there are a few other factors to keep in mind…

I grew up in Ladismith in the Little Karoo. One of the benefits of growing up in the rural parts of South Africa is that you have access to a big yard. Like many other houses in Ladismith, we had a front garden with a lawn and rose bushes, and a backyard with fruit trees, a cement irrigation dam and a vegetable garden.