Monkey bars for the bedroom
Monkey bars fixed into the joists and tested by the whole family before the kids got near them.
My kids used to have a climbing frame in the garden and loved it, but we had to get rid of it, and they were left with nothing to climb. My daughter has always been happiest on the monkey bars at the playground, so when they asked if they could have some in their bedroom, it was an easy yes.
A colleague whose dad had built him a climbing frame gave me one piece of advice: put a pin through each bar so it locks in place. I took that on board. The rungs are metal tubes, pinned into a frame made from standard size timber.
The real design work was in the fixings. I made a custom bracket that bolts to the wall and the frame locks into it, and the rest is fixed up into the ceiling joists. Finding those joists and getting the fixings right was the part that mattered. Once that was done, the build itself was simple.
The kids climb up from the windowsill and swing straight across. Before they got near it I hung off it myself, then had the whole family hang off it together. It didn't move. The first time they saw it, they couldn't get on it fast enough.
Got a space like this one?
Send me a couple of photos and rough measurements of the space that isn't working, and we can talk it through on a short video call.