The DOs and DON'Ts of Building a Treehouse

How Will I Know The Right Way to Build a Treehouse?

When building a treehouse on your own, you want to ensure you do it right the first time. With plenty of websites and guides that offer insight into building a treehouse, it can be quite overwhelming to know what you should and shouldn’t do to help your treehouse last for years. At Treehouse Supplies, we have been in the treehouse construction business for 13 years, so we know a thing or two about what works and doesn’t when building the perfect treehouse.

What Should I Avoid?

1. Neglecting to have even a reasonably basic tree house plan
Your eye-balling methods may deceive you when building a treehouse from scratch. Multiple problems can arise, such as interference from numerous branches or trunks, inability to pass a main tree house beam, or even incorrectly sighting the tree. Even if you can sight level and your beams and spans work out, you may still try to improvise extra tree house attachment points, leading to less-than-optimal decisions.

2. Using too small or the wrong fasteners
You shouldn’t assume any lag bolt is suitable for holding up your tree house. Even a kid’s tree house will probably use a couple thousand pounds of materials. It always pays to use a suitable fastener. We recommend using screws or carriage bolts for places where the tree house is primarily subject to pullout or tension forces and nails where shear forces are primary.

3. Using too many fasteners
In our previous experiences, we recommend never placing tree house fasteners too close together in the tree. If wounds are too close together, the tree may treat them as one wound, which will cause the wood between the fasteners to decay. Instead, try using one large tree house fastener instead of multiple smaller ones.

4. Inadequate stabilization of the platform
The tree house platform should be stable because any movement will wear parts loose over time and become more dangerous. We usually see problems with knee braces not being installed tightly to reduce movement.

5. Girdling the tree with a rope or cable
It’s best if you don’t wrap anything around the tree to support the tree house. You can completely kill the limb or trunk if you do. This typically happens with zip lines and when cables or chains are used for tree house supports.

What Now?

Now that you have a better grasp of the structural methods to avoid doing, you are one step closer to building your treehouse! Ready to start your treehouse-building journey today? Visit our store for materials, tools, plans, and kits needed to help make your build a successful one!