Did you ever wish for a tree house as a kid? Who didn’t! Well, wish granted: Here’s what you need to know to get started building one yourself.
Is there anyone among us who didn’t dream of having a tree house as a child? Even for adults these delightful structures are a symbol of freedom and a refuge from ordinary everyday life. Here experts explain how to build the perfect tree house…
Many people reach a point in their lives when they start to question what life is all about, when everything begins to seem rather empty and pointless. Dave Herrle had already reached that point by the time he turned 27. So he quit his desk job to follow his dreams, setting out to hike all 2,189.2 miles of the Appalachian Trail. “My time in the woods gave me a perspective on the benefits of simplicity. I’m lucky that it happened when I was 27 and not 67,” he says. When Herrle returned to his home in Westbrook, Connecticut, a few months later, he decided to make simplicity and the love of being near nature his profession. He completed a carpentry apprenticeship and then proceeded to become one of the best tree house builders in the U.S.
$5,000 FOR A NEW HOME
On New Year’s Eve of 2012, Herrle had promised Ina, his fiancée at the time, that he’d build a tree house on their plot of land in the woods. He finished the two- story house in six weeks at a cost of $4,000. “Back to the basics” is his motto, whether in construction specifically or life in general. Thus for more than five years to date, Herrle, his now-wife Ina, and their dog have been living happily in the woods. With living space of only about 300 square feet, they’ve had to reduce their lives to the bare minimum. “We had to ask ourselves: What do we really need in order to live a fairly comfortable life,” says Herrle. “Certainly a nice bed that feels good is important, but we don’t need to fill up our space with a bunch of fancy furniture. When we put our heads together to figure out what we considered comfort to be—and what is really important to us—we realized that it takes only the bare minimum in the way of consumption to maintain true comfort.”
Since adapting to an arboreal life, Dave has started his own business called Herrle Custom Carpentry. Now he is always busy taking orders from customers who want a custom-built tree house or cabin out in the woods. Made entirely by hand, the structures cost around $ 5,000. “More and more people are yearning for and seeking out the peace and stillness of nature,” says Herrle. “That doesn’t mean total silence; it means unobtrusive natural background noises such as rustling, splashing, whispering, bubbling, and chirping—the kind that do not drown out the sound of regular breathing.” Herrle looks forward to each new day in the woods and never lets a day go by without sitting out on the porch with his wife and dog to revel in the magic of nature. “When a man hears the song of the thrush, he is young, and Nature is in her spring. Wherever he hears it, it is a new world and a free country, and the gates of heaven are not shut against him.” Here Herrle is quoting one of his favorite authors, philosopher Henry David Thoreau.
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