Designing and building an outdoor den

Ian Zuma Jonas
4 min readApr 10, 2021

Hi and welcome to my story.

This story began in summer 2020 when my son inspired me to design and build an outdoor den. We’d built indoor dens, camped indoors for his beaver scout badges and so on but with the weather good we decided to design and build the above outdoor den out of cardboard, wallpaper and 3 miles of gaffa tape.

The den had to be big enough to accommodate both of us and enable us to sleep out in it. We managed to sleep out in it for 2 consecutive nights before the weather got the better of us and we had to break it down.

Although the den achieved our aims and my son loved it, we spent quite a bit of money making it and really once it was taken down there was little we could salvage. Gaffa tape as great as it is, really does destroy cardboard.

Fast forward to April 2021 and now we are well on our way with designs for den #2.

We are making a real effort to use recycled materials where possible but also create a construction method that will allow us to breakdown and rebuild in different configurations.

It’s been a real R&D and brainstorming effort, digging through stuff we would routinely throw away and challenging ourselves to find ways to make things work together.

I’m not a natural at construction and really struggle with visualising things in 3D. What helps me though is drawing and making models which I love doing and generally doing what a designer would do day in day out.

This story will develop from here to catalogue the journey from design to completion. We’ll describe what we’re doing at each stage and share photos and videos to elaborate. It might be of interest to others and maybe even inspire others to do something similar.

For us I’m sure it will help us look back with some pride and help inspire us to do more projects in the future.

Den #2

Here’s a model of den #2. Maybe we should give it a name - Dennis?

On the surface it appears to be a simpler design than the first one but under the covers it is much different.

The photo gives an overall look at what we are aiming for. It should be roughly 2 metres front to back, 3 metres wide and nearly 2 metres in height at its highest point. It’s enough to accommodate my son and me camping over and maybe 1 guest - hopefully not a fox, muntjac, squirrel or other animal friend that we’ve had visit us from time to time.

From the photo, it looks a lot like other cardboard dens I guess and yes cardboard will form part of the overall structure. However, Dennis will be a hybrid of structural elements.

Next we’ll take a look at the internal structure.

Internal structure

Isometric design
Model of structure — note silver join is flexible as will be the completed build

I’ll clarify exactly how the structure holds together, what materials are involved and how it will stay stabilised in a later part of the story. For now you can see that it’s composed of boxes and vertical/horizontal poles.

I’ve opted not to completely design it using boxes from top to bottom because it will use up too many boxes and involve lots of connections from one box to the next.

We are not using gaffa tape or adhesives to build this except for one or two smaller elements where gaffa tape is the neatest and simplest solution. The idea is that we can take down this structure, flat pack it down and rebuild it again either in the same configuration or a different one.

We have lots of ideas for alternative configurations and we’ll post ideas later in the story.

Next we’ll describe some more about the internal structure and how this evolved. As with any evolution there is a gradual refinement of ideas, throwing out bad ideas and introducing new ones at various stages. I guess we could refine further but we’re at a stage where we have a workable design and need to draw a line in the sand.

Having been involved in many projects I know that lessons learnt will be a good idea once we have completed the project and this story I think will help go back through our ideas and seeing where we can improve in the future.

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Ian Zuma Jonas
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I'm an enthusiastic designer with a background in informatics related to healthcare and clinical research. In a past life I was a drummer and drum tutor.