Sky House In Motion

By Joshua (Age 11)

We are building what some might understand as a tree house on poles.  We call it “Sky house”.  It is close to completion, yet I want to tell you a bit about it.  First of all, a missionary named Jessie is here and he is the one who made it possible.  Jessie is the Mastermind of the project and has a bit of experience with this type of thing.  The Sky house has a ladder going up about 8 feet in the air, a tin roof, wall framing, 3 windows, two pieces of bamboo wall, and a very secure floor.  

We have been working on it for about 4 months, and progress is very rapid.  We started by simply marking out where and how big it was going to be.  Then a guy dug holes 4 feet deep into the ground.  After that, we painted motor oil onto the poles and set them to dry in the sun.

The next day, we put and cemented the poles in.  When the cement dried, we made “perimeter joists” all around the structure.  These were the outer boards used to nail “joists” into it.  We then nailed the floorboards to the joists and perimeter joists.

From there we started doing the wall framing.  We did each wall at a time on the ground.  The left wall had a door which the ladder rested against it. The front wall had a window first to spy on the parents and anybody entering the house.  The left wall had another window and the back wall had the biggest window of them all. It was the viewing window for my parents.  My dad saw that the window was too high for viewing, so we had to break down the window board and lower it. Now we will have great sunset views.

From there we gave the structure support by putting diagonal boards from the perimeter joists to the wall framing. We also did slanted boards onto the wall to the other so we could nail on the bamboo raffia.  Just recently, we built on the roof.  It has zinc on it so that rain can’t get inside the sky house.  Today we put two pieces of our bamboo raffia onto the boards nailed onto the wall framing.  We have so much bamboo raffia that we are probably going to make a goat pen, if we get a goat (which I’m hoping for!). 

This sky house will hopefully be a blessing to the Lord. We will try to do Bible studies and prayer times up in the sky.  I always wanted to have a club with a tree house. It will be perfect for my sisters and me to have our meetings.  The making of this structure has been so fun, and I thank my parents and God for giving me the opportunity to do this, what an average Cameroonian wouldn’t even dream of doing.