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.
This story is from the August 2020 edition of go! - South Africa.
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This story is from the August 2020 edition of go! - South Africa.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.
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