How many years of full time tree house building experience do they have?
Beware that some builders will claim decades of experience but have spent most of their time pruning trees or remodeling houses, while building only a few tree houses each year on the side. Relevant experience is important because sometimes it can take 5-15 years before a poorly built tree house kills a tree or falls down. We have seen floors fall out of tree houses, with parts of the walls still up in the tree. We have seen trees completely strangled by tree house beams bolted directly into the trunk. We have seen tree houses sagging under their own dead weight; an indication that failure of the tree house fasteners has already occurred, a safety factor never existed, and disaster is imminent. Many kinds of root damage aren’t readily visible to the untrained eye for about 7 years. So in our book, a treehouse builder with only a few years of experience is unproven. • How much weight will my treehouse (or the proposed tree house) hold? How much does the structure itself weigh (dead load
