A step-by-step guide to building a backyard play fort

You, too, can be a hero with little know-how, a few basic tools and only a Prius V

Early in our family’s COVID-19 confinement, I made a rookie parenting mistake: I casually promised my five-year-old son that I would build him a treehouse.

This was a reckless promise for someone whose carpentry experience was limited to a few Cub Scout bird feeders of suspect quality. But it was March, it was a weird time and “this summer” seemed like a long time away. I mean, what were the odds he would remember anyway?

HA!

Fast-forward to June, and my son had not — it turns out— forgotten.

My thin woodworking resume wasn’t even the biggest obstacle. A closer inspection of our backyard revealed that every theoretically viable tree was a) rotten or b) had power lines running through it. And that’s how the “treehouse” became a platform fort among the trees. Which is basically the same thing, kid. Get off my case.

This is how I designed and built the fort. I share it in hopes that it might be useful for someone else who wants to attempt this kind of project but isn’t convinced they can pull it off. I’ll try to be as explicit as possible, and where I made mistakes or would do things…