tiny cabin, big impact
A Man Bought A Tiny Cabin From Craigslist For $7,500. It Changed His Life
For many, owning a home is a major life goal.
It was for Patrick Hutchison, too — though for him, it was less about having his own place and more about feeling responsible for something, and homeownership seemed like a natural step toward that path.
While searching for some of the items he'd lost on Craigslist, he found himself on the cabin listings instead.
A few days after seeing the listing, he owned a 10-by-12-foot tiny cabin in Washington, set against the stunning backdrop of the Cascade Mountains.
What came next was even more unexpected. After renovating the cabin, he ditched his copywriting career, embraced carpentry full time, and wrote a memoir about the experience, "Cabin: Off the Grid Adventures with a Clueless Craftsman," which was released last year.
From making bad cuts to accidentally building his outhouse on his neighbor's property, here's how Hutchison's off-the-grid adventures changed his life — and some of the biggest mistakes and greatest lessons he learned along the way.
When he found the cabin on Craigslist, Hutchison was new to real estate.
"I had never bought a place before, so I had no idea about inspections, escrow, or title searches. I just walked in without knowing the usual process," he said.
Still, he said, his inexperience benefited him because it allowed him to make quick decisions and eventually dive into the reconstruction process without hesitation.
The 120-square-foot cabin was in a tiny hamlet called Index, about 50 miles northeast of Seattle. It was just a simple room, with no electricity or running water.
Hutchison didn't begin the cabin restoration with a rigid blueprint or detailed spreadsheets. Instead, he had a rough list of obvious fixes: an outhouse, a covered deck, and a driveway.
"I didn't know enough about what makes a building structurally sound or watertight or any of those things to know how poor of shape the place was in," he said.
So, every new detail he discovered revealed a new problem, making Hutchison feel as if he had to constantly start over despite making progress in his work.
Ultimately, the cabin took six years for him to fix up. He hadn't anticipated it would take him so long.
"I thought I'd just tidy it up a bit. I wasn't even sure if I'd use it much," he admitted, adding that "there was a chance I'd end up like the guy before me, buying it and never really doing anything with it."
Hutchison credits much of his building knowledge to a mix of traditional shows such as "This Old House," which he watched on PBS growing up, and, more recently, YouTube tutorials.
But the lack of cell service and WiFi at the cabin presented challenges. Even more frustrating, however, was the cabin's haphazard construction.
In a world that demands perfection, learning to build gave Hutchison the freedom to be himself. But more importantly, it allowed him to make and learn from mistakes.
"It felt like the building equivalent of singing in the shower," he said.
The absence of constraints also allowed him to approach each challenge with curiosity rather than stress.
To read more about Hutchison's renovations to the tiny cabin, head to Business Insider.
