We quit our jobs to build a cabin
outsideonline.com
outsideonline.com
Also, shoutout to the Methow! The North Cascades is such a beautiful area in general.
And on the plus side, I've found out how easy it is to fix taps and replace door handles and all the simple stuff!
Maybe the article overstated their woes, but it sounds like they were very under prepared. And winging the technical parts. Like software the easy part is the build. The harder part is research and planning.
I have notions of retiring someday and run a wood shop. But I'm working on learning the basics and doing small projects.
My plan to build a custom shelf unit for our kitchen went over-time and over-budget (in the small). Reason: once it was made it became apparent that it lacked strength against skewing deformations, which would not happen ‘laterally’ given where it was sitting but would happen ‘dorsoventrally.’ (Apologies for the anatomical language—it could wiggle side-to-side along its width and who cares because there are walls on either side, but if it wiggles back and forth away from the wall behind it then maybe things start falling off of it or maybe it just collapses some day.)
This sort of problem is of course solved with crossbeams, but like then I had to buy a bunch of wood that was the right width, calculate an approximate length and miter angle for four pieces, of course I did not have the tools to make pocket holes properly (woodworking co-ops closed, thanks COVID) so I just did it roughly (you predrill the screw hole backwards from the flush surface back to the side of the lumber, then you use that hole to guide drilling the pocket) and of course I screwed up one of these four by drilling the pocket too deep because I didn’t have a drill press (thanks again COVID) and so I start low-teching that by just masking-taping the drill bit out to the appropriate depth so that I don't go over. Finally a pair of crossbeams goes in and... it's not symmetric. I think “eh you only see those edge-on so who cares” and install the other beams but the lack of symmetry in installation actually really matters because it means that the crossbeams are pushing the posts off-level, which means the shelves are off-level. Whoops. So this “it is finally ready!” moment turns into a “no it’s not!”
Then, a clever idea: pre-join the cross-beams together at the center of the X (they were not joined initially) before installing them, so they have to be symmetrical. Slight problem: the predrilled holes from attempt #1 in the side beams are now still pulling the crossbars in weird ways and attempting to mess with the level of the shelves. Solution is to just unfasten the X and swap which beam is proximal and which one is distal, then I can pre-drill the holes again, but I'd better just get the thing wood-glued in place first, even without appropriate clamps, so that I am 100% sure it is not going to take the shelves off level when I put those screws in. Finally everything works.
Irrationally undeterred from this success, I am now building a California King bed frame. It is almost exactly 50% complete—there is a facade which is stained but not finished and the center consists of two free-standing “pallets” (not actual pallets, but they look similar) which get bolted together, one pallet is finished and the other is not.
Delays so far have mostly been due to other life circumstances coming up, too much to do on weekends and hot weather baking my garage into unsafe temperatures... but there have already been a few overruns. I realized for example that at the outer corners of the bed frame my screws were going to be taking a heck of a lot of torque (the middle should have two posts side-by-side when the two pallets get bolted together, they can be a little lighter-weight) and revised my design to use some metal corner-ties. But those had a different geometry and so the 2x4s on the sides needed to be cut even shorter. Then I realized that I had calculated this ad-hoc cut assuming that it needed to be shorter by a 2x4's width on both sides but I had forgotten that I wasn't doing the same corner ties for the middle posts of the bed that get bolted together, so I bought a new 2x4 and while I was there I bought some tie plates to try to strengthen those middle posts a little more anyways. So we've only overrun the initial cost by 4 tie corners and 4 tie plates and one 2x4 which is not so bad, but still.
I do not recommend doing your own woodworking in order to save on cost, it costs a lot of time. I do recommend it if you feel like carpentry connects you to Jesus or if you have a really specific idea about what you want in a space and nobody anywhere seems to be offering that exact thing.
I built a small balcony garden off a few pine planks. Many mistakes were made along the way, some were corrected (how do you cut in straight lines with a jigsaw ? Use a maconnery ruler and a few clips), some were compensated by the overall overbuild. It took me a few months but I always expected it to take more time and money than buying it from Amazon. One nice thing is that it matches perfectly the width of the balcony! With this small success and many more, I will - maybe - have enough knowledge to build my own cabin in 40 years.
I feel personally attacked. Really though, I wonder how many things are on my 'Someday Maybe' list, that really I should just make more money to accomplish and/or find a youtube subscription that satisfies the urge to tinker on a particular topic.
When you look back on your summer/year, what will you have accomplished? What skills will you have developed?
If you don't really value a process/skill, but just want the material result (i.e. a cabin), pay a pro for it. If you just have an itch that needs to be scratched, watch someone else do it on Youtube. If you want it to be a part of who you are, pruning your list by moving items to the former two strategies should leave you enough time to develop it yourself.
I know quite a few very senior people who are proper old, and when I mentioned this to one of them, his response was, "at this point I'm glad to be alive, and no one glad to be alive has time for that stuff." This was just before he retired.
I think my life got measurably better when I pivoted from "I want to do this myself" towards "It's just as satisfying to watch someone else do this".
Downhill extreme mountain biking is really cool. And fun to watch. And expensive. And requires much more physical fitness than I've got. And dangerous (esp. given my physical fitness :). )
So true! Works for a lot of things. It's why I stopped playing dota.
It did make me a way better street rider though!
Also glad to have read this article. Was thinking (more like daydreaming) of building a Korean Hanok one day but it seems unrealistic without a lot of professional help.
If mountain biking is your dream buy a Trek with electric motor in it. They can give you extra lift till you accelerate to 75 km/hour with a dongle of $120. Instant pro biking experience without much practicing.
You are too young to accept any physical limitations of your body. Navy Seals talk about that being tired is just an emotion like feeling happy. Its all about your mindset.
We're building a shop. I've contracted most of the build out, but found that I could save $20,000+ by DIY'ing the radiant heat portion myself. Took about a days worth of planning and research, another to lay down the pipe before the floor was poured, and another to hook everything up.
Honestly, the cost-differential was enough to make me think that I should start a company that installs radiant heating. I can't think of many other professions where I could clear $20,000 for 3-days of work.
I'm planning to DIY the solar-install on the same shop here in a couple of months, we'll see if that's as much of success story.
Another benefit of going solo on my solar project was learning that I could legally install panels on a part of my roof that everyone else thought I couldn't use because of old setback rules. I was able to fit eight additional panels on my roof after discussing the issue with the city inspector.
Most of my prep time was spent writing my permit application. If you want to use mine as a reference or template, file an issue on my github repo for the project [1] and I'll upload it later. I'd also be happy to chat about the gear I chose, where I bought it, and share a list of materials.
[1] https://github.com/hamikm/solar-report (side note: I wrote this to help analyze my surprisingly complex electrical bill because custom date ranges were buggy in the Enphase app at the time)
My wife went to school with a guy who didn’t like college. He took a summer job on a road crew, learned how to use an excavator and got hooked. Dropped out, saved up, and bought a used dump truck, which basically made him.
Started out hauling stuff and then got into water/sewer work and excavation.
He’s up to about 20 trucks a decade later, and pays the bills with the sewer work. He leveraged the assets he had (trucks, diggers) and won demolition contracts — they make money on demolition. Like $75-200k for an emergency demolition if they can get there in 90m.
Some jobs benefit so much from equipment and skill that it won't ever make sense to DIY. Some jobs are just a bunch of labor that you could do, and probably do better because you care to do it right.
DIY solar seems like a ROI for a DIY project. Just stay safe on that roof!
And I don't mean that in a demeaning way at all. If anything, such folks have found a middle path in life. At opposite extremes, you have folks who actually have to go do all those things versus those who can squelch their own interest in nearly anything by merely thinking about it for a few moments...
I think some people fail to understand how hard it is to be a good contractor. Just like software engineering it requires a lot of education and a lot of experience.
You won't get it right your first few tries no matter how smart you are. Just like no software developer ever got things right when they were first learning to code.
Building many structures (or any given sub-specialty, e.g. plumbing) on a predetermined schedule and budget and making money doing it without charging so much money that you get undercut out of business is what requires skill.
For N=1 you rarely have to be a pro to do it right.
I've saved myself hundreds of thousands of dollars over the years by doing my own work, but now I can only see defects everywhere because that's what I've trained myself to look for.
There are a million jobs I still need to get to, but at least I know that once they’re done I’ll be happy with the result. Having only just started down the home diy route, there’s a load to learn and I still make a lot of mistakes, but I’m improving, and it’s satisfying to know that next time I’ll get it right, faster and cheaper than before.
But I think that the schmo vs pro divide is real when you get to electrical, plumbing etc. HE’S the pro, and I’m the Schmo. As my favorite interviewer says.
IMHO, this is backwards. Electrical work is twisting wires and screwing them down. Plumbing is gluing or clamping stuff together (unless you're sweating copper). The actual mechanics of doing it takes little skill and pros aren't going to be that much better/faster than you. The real difference is the amount of knowledge the pro has of codes and how things need to be. However, the concepts for residential are pretty straight forward though and relatively easy to learn. You can pick them up starting with simple stuff.
Compare that to something like drywall. Your drywall finish work is going to suck compared to a pro and they're going to do it way faster than you could.
Often these pros are also the ones that are easiest to find because the ones that know what they are doing are in high enough demand that they go mainly off word of mouth and friend-of-a-friend type business.
We bought a house three years ago that was built in 2006. The number of things I've found that were done just blatantly wrong has soured my opinion of general contract labor quite considerably.
I hired someone to fix some water damage by a door about three months after we moved in. The next spring when it rained we had a literal waterfall coming in from the top of the door frame.
Never again.
I've since torn that entire wall down to the studs, cleaned everything up, put it back together correctly, and rebuilt the attached deck.
I don't know how much that would have cost to get fixed by a professional (supposing I could have found one that actually knew what they were doing), but I'm guessing it was easily $10-$20k of work if labor was factored in.
Differentiating and correctly selecting the true pro out of a lineup of estimates is a skill in and of itself. For most construction tasks, I'm better at the task itself than I am at finding someone who can do it better than I can.
High skill labor usually involves lots of expensive one time costs. I don't see how there is an opportunity to save money.
This is every job ever. Wait until you see the quality of code that runs big backend systems...
I wonder what I'm not finding because it isn't listed on Zillow
People who've owned empty, vacant land for decades tend to have either inherited it or are long term real estate investors. Frequently they will have tried to sell it in the past and not gotten enough interest.
Obviously, doesn't work everywhere. Higher demand areas are going to be completely different.
But it worked for us when we decided to move to the boonies.
On one hand is taking pride in doing something yourself.
On the other hand is paying the expert to do it.
I know my limitations. In-bounds, I'll do it. Out-of-bounds, I pay the expert. I've learned my lessons and I have no regrets.
I say this from a family known for "inherited" stubbornness, cheapness, and generational Great Depression learning.
I still do things myself, but I'm more and more looking to just hire the bigger things done. I know how to do it, and probably would do it better. But I don't have the time.
I would bet that most people that try to build a cabin do it more as a passion (with bad calculation on timing and cost estimates) than as a way to save money.
There's bad outcomes and then really bad.
The Methow is a hard place to visit because you'll need to leave again.
I admire a meaningful and quick fix more than a professionalistscwork, adhering to piles of regulations for no appearing reason but let many others profit from my money.
I also understand that amateur is from latin and actually means to love what you are doing.
So get out of your comfort chair, put the gaming controler aside and re-learn some basic skills. With every project it becomes more and more rewarding.
I have little experience with handiwork but I'm imagining if an amateur developer said this in regards to building a maintainable and scalable application (as I imagine a house to be) from scratch, and scoffing at tedious time-wasters like writing tests and hiring QAs.
As an experienced developer I know the tradeoffs of cutting corners and various quick fixes and so can apply them judiciously, but I know if I ended up working on or taking over that codebase, I'd most likely end up having to tear out a lot of that developer's work and redo it, or else have a headache trying to build and improve around it.
YouTube has upped its recommendations for this kind of stuff in the last few months. Everything is van life, off-grid, travel, tiny home building, etc. It's really curious and I'm not sure what to think about it. Everything is about being a creator and getting an audience for your YouTube, Substack, Patreon, etc. I'm pretty conflicted over this.
I presume this also removes them as a factor in your recommendations.
For one recent example, there was an article about Elon Musk and his girlfriend who releases music as Grimes. I clicked play on one of the embedded music videos and watched about half of it. Ever since then youtube has recommended tons of Grimes videos to me.
I've also noticed that videos my wife or kids watch get recommended to me sometimes.
My work and home gmail accounts get completely different videos because of how I use them. At work it's all background music and albums and at home it's more fun stuff.
I took up with some TechShop stuff -- before it folded -- and enjoyed my work on laser engravers, and the CNC machines, and the lathes, and whatnot. My educational background and IT experience were certainly a help, and I thought, "Dang, it sure is nice to construct a physical object at the end of the day instead of an arrangement of magnetic fields that will simply be blown away when some high muckety-muck notices whatever fad has changed."
I jumped ship for something adjacent where I use my IT skill constantly. Programming wasn't in the job description, but my ability to program brings a certain level of power. All of my decades of IT experience is very helpful here and I still feel like I am doing something with an actual concrete output and utility.
So, I sympathize with the urge to pull the ripcord on some kind of jetpack and blast far away into the sky, but there are plenty of places that are not what HackerNews thinks of when they think IT that need all of your skills. Perhaps I like being a medium-sized fish in a smaller pond, it could be that, but it does feel fairly nice.
I am in my thirties, and a career shift seems more and more inevitable. I seem to have swallowed several blackpills about various industrial complexes and see no bright future of the internet/tech in general, rather the opposite.
What's your age and what is you plan? I am actively looking for some kind of path at the moment for ex-tech people..
If anyone has any input i am all ears!
I have no plan for making money, and I doubt I have enough stored wealth to last more than a decade. Health care in the US being what it is, probably not even that long. These are so far the only reasons I haven't already done it.
seriously though, i’m glad they were able to tie their profession in by sharing their story, i really enjoyed it. if i were to embark on this kind of thing i’d probably end up writing some software to help with the effort.
The major caveat: prior to my generation, the entire family was involved at some level in construction; from owning and operating to general labour.
It's _not_ a simple task, and the level of skill and intelligence required is something I think is often misunderstood or wholly overlooked by my peers in the tech industry. There's a kind of snobbish belief expressed by _some_ that because they can grok a complex software system they should be able to build a house; but that's a bit like believing that because you are able to write you should be able to easily be a sculptor. There may be shared core concepts, like the story being told and the ideas being conveyed, but the skills and knowledge involved and shared are few.
Now I write software and I work with a lot of people who dream of going off in the woods and building a cabin, as though it's the same as building software. I have to remind them that "there is no undo". "Measure twice, cut once" is a phrase for a reason. You can't refactor your cabin half way through building. Surprisingly many of them never even considered these things, let alone the tricks or techniques needed to do a good job.
I think a lot of white collar workers see what blue collar workers do as perhaps difficult physically, but not mentally. But that couldn't be further from the truth. And this is especially true when you're trying to piece together an entire cabin by yourself.
Agree completely. I have a project car and have a particular buddy who's a great mechanic. His understanding of the various systems on a wide range of cars is quite deep, and he was incredibly helpful when I got stuck with things. If it was just the physical effort, i would've been finished with the project years before I did, but the mental challenge of figuring out how one system worked and how that system needed to properly integrate with all the other system was far beyond what I thought it was.
As a counterpoint, my buddy didn't get why I might be tired at the end of a long day of work. He didn't seem to get the connection that the high level of mental effort that software development could be physically tiring as well.
There's a lot that white collar workers and blue collar workers can learn from each other, but you don't have to build a whole cabin or a project car or a whole application in order to see what things are like when the shoe is on the other foot.
What I find curious is that this viewpoint, while widely shared in trades, is not a universally shared value in tech. Many in our industry will prefer to write something themselves, or rewrite an existing project, rather than farm that work out to an expert or adapt to what they already have.
Particularly in my segment, video games: it's all well and good to write a game engine for fun, but _so many_ indie studios spend enormous amounts of their time, effort and cash on developing new engines afresh.
I can only imagine what the housing industry would be like if sub-contracting weren't as popular as it is.
> I think a lot of white collar workers see what blue collar workers do as perhaps difficult physically, but not mentally.
Aye, this is what I was alluding to as snobbish.
Actually you can. And with the similar ramifications to the project budget and timeline.
2. I sanded outside on my small balcony and wipe the dust with a rag. Cutting the wood was tricky. I put the cats in the bathroom, wore a mask and did it while running my HEPA filter at full speed. Then I vacuumed any dust on the floor with the Roomba. I cut the wood by placing it on a couple sheets of foam insulation, with the blade depth set so that it would not contact the floor.
After cutting, I moved the HEPA filter around my apartment a bit until the air quality sensor went from red (bad air) to blue (good air), and opened the windows. I know this isn't perfect, but I haven't had any coughing fits thus far.
3. I used an oil based finish (OSMO) that is low VOC, pet, food, and human (children) safe. It's not gloopy or wet once applied, just slightly damp. Cats jumped on it a bunch before it had fully cured without any apparent ill effects, on the cats or the desk.
Definitely an "if will, there's a way" kind of endeavor. The desk is perfect for me though. Just the right size, height, and appearance. Trying to build a stool with the scrap wood leftover, but the wood is quite hard to cut with a jigsaw and pretty heavy.
I think part of what I learned is that it's worth it for me to pay a professional.
And this is peanuts in the construction industry, this kind of stuff is built every day all over the world. Nowadays when I walk around I'm constantly in awe of everything that people have constructed. I can't even fathom constructing a skyscraper in NYC.
I would say though that people with an engineering mindset should be able to find some success in building things. You just have the respect the process and the skills and accumulated knowledge involved, it's gonna take a few years and a bunch of projects and mistakes before you get a sense of what you're doing.
That's one reason you see more planning, training, apprenticeships, and established guidance in construction than in software. Iteration isn't a great technique.
After a bear gets into your bird feeder, you build an enclosure for the outside trash cans and the chicken feed. It takes well under half the time and you cut the rafters right the first time. All the while, you marvel at how little overlap there is between furniture making (your day job), and carpentry.
Then you start thinking about more fully featured structures. Hypothetically speaking.
There's a word for this: Type II Fun. Type I Fun is when you're having fun and you know you're having fun while you're doing it. Type II Fun is when you're absolutely fucking miserable the whole time, but afterwards you and any of your friends that were with you say it was the best time ever.
Lots of outdoor activities that are supposed to be Type I Fun end up being Type II Fun. Lots of activities that aren't supposed to be fun at all end up being Type II Fun. (basic training is a common example) I've heard Dwarf Fortress is Type II Fun, but I could never get into it.
This whole process of building the cabin sounds like a class example of Type II Fun to me.
It's the most fun I've had in a decade .. my joints are swollen, I've got bruises and scrapes on my hands and feet, skin on my hand is actually rough.
I work from home nine-to-five, software. I can't wait to finish work to actually go outside and work on the shed.
I've actually considered quitting my job and doing this full time .. but it won't pay nearly enough as I'm making in software and my financial commitments won't let me.
He had a constant inventory of what he called "Divorce Cabins". They were half-finished DIY cabin builds or renovations that turned out to be way more stress and work than the couples expected. This tended to lead to divorce, which lead to a forced sale of the property.
Experienced contractors would pick them up at a discount, finish the work with their crews, and sell them off.
These things are doable if you have infinite time and money to spend on renting the right equipment and hiring help for jobs that require experience and/or multiple people. However, it's virtually impossible for someone to do on weekends alone.
I think that if you have to build a cabin that conforms to certain building guidelines, bank standards, codes, mainstream retail expectations.... then for sure you are going to encounter expenses and risk.
But I really hate this notion of "just pay someone to do it correctly", because this proposition also has a ton of risk and expense associated with it as well. Not every contractor who takes a job is Bob the Builder.
For me, if I was serious about building a home for myself so that it's customized to my taste and an extremely good value, I would throw all of the rules out of the window and build it exactly like the real cabins out there in Alaska and Siberia whose style has been perfected over hundreds of years.
After 3 months of advance planning, I finally realized the gravity of my mistake when the delivery truck lifted half a ton of wood onto the sidewalk and drove away. For me, it was just enough of a project to seriously endanger our relationship and get me to my mental and physical limits, but hell, it turned out great.
There's really something to physical work and woodworking in particular that is haptic and makes you proud inside which you don't get at all in software engineering.
Would I do it again? Absolutely not, that was nuts. But I'm still glad I did and I enjoy doing some woodworking from time to time (like that bottle rocket launch pad for my daughter lately).
In the end I'm also pretty glad I'm in a job without breaking my back before I'm 60.
You're forgetting time. Not sure if you've seen "Dick Proenneke in Alone in the Wilderness" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jG3fUIoXQ5A).
It's a great watch, and a good example of what I think you're referring to overall...that said it looked like an extremely hard way to build and from personal experience helping my sister build their holiday home, also not an approach I would recommend to anyone that doesn't have a very strong conviction and/or passion to see a self build through.
For almost any task you'd consider hiring a professional, there is less risk and less cost, which is why professional exist. They are the best option for a wide range of cost/risk tradeoffs.
>Not every contractor who takes a job is Bob the Builder
But the majority are a lot better than the average person thinking they can build. Experience is a useful thing, in software dev and in building.
If you have the time and desire to do things carefully, truly, then you will do things carefully. You'll find that tradesmen have plenty of expertise and money-- the only thing they don't have is time, and it really shows.
With my current home, I've brought in contractors half a dozen times. Half of those were terrible, terrible experiences. The other half saved me vast amounts of time. However, even with the solid contractors, for them it is a balance of time and money leading to some cut corners that, as the home owner, I would never cut on. But time, time is the thing I don't have enough of, else I would figure out most things.
I realized I would be spending at least 4 hours in traffic every weekend to double my house work.
Instead why not just put all that time in making my home in the city as habitable as possible?
Maybe some day but it would have to be a permanent and only residence.
I have my condo in a mountain town with fiber. HOA dues and tourists are issues; I'd love property I was willing to invest in and reasonably accessible time-wise but Nevada is expensive when it comes to real trees and I'm done investing in CA. Been here awhile before the exodus.
He killed three people, one of which was arguably unintentional. Further, he has continued writing[1] and appears perfectly lucid, even into his 70's. You may disagrees with his ends and means (I do), but I find it curious that out of the hundreds of political revolutionaries who used terror and murder over the centuries, Kaczynski is viewed especially through the framing of insanity.
[1] https://fitchmadison.com/product/anti-tech-revolution-2020/
How precisely will letter bombs to universities and airports in one country lead to the collapse of global industrial society? The "best case" rationally would be an end to all physical package mail as an unacceptable hazard. Even if somehow achieved how the hell will that stop the inevitable reindustrialization as hunter-gatherers seek a greater edge over nature and rivals? They would eventually reach the top again and curse that goddamned idiot ancestor for the millenia of needless suffering.
Not to mention the ideas of "freedom" are laughably naive and historically illiterate. He is just yet another small rigid mind who demands that the world become something simple enough to understand instead of trying to understand all of its complexities.
I don’t think his ideas are as laughably naive as you think. He was an accomplished mathematician who was disgusted with the societal rat race and thought many aspects of technology were making life worse, and I actually tend to agree with that. But he was also a nut job who killed innocent people
For other people to consider you a political revolutionary it helps to have a political ideology. And more than one adherent to it.
Historically, people don’t weep over And usually don’t consider the suffering of others while enjoying the fruits of labor of people who sweated blood and died in the process of building something (spiritually or physically) great.
I feel dirty thinking like this, yet I’m fascinated by imagining what it’s like to walk in another persons shoes
At some point I got married and eventually had kids after which these kinds of romanticized ad-hoc adventures became impractical. Sometimes I wish I'd been more focused when I was young. I feel like I probably wasted a lot of time pursuing ideas that had a high risk of not being sustainable for the long-term.
I find myself giving younger people advice that I would have balked at at their age. They don't listen to me of course, just like I didn't listen to more experienced adults when I was in their place. No one wants to be told, "Don't follow your dreams. Weigh the risks and the potential return on investment first". I guess part of being young is taking those risks and learning from your failures. And sometimes, chasing an impractical dream pays off. Sometimes they pay off big.
But now days when I get the wanderlust or some feeling of discontentment and find myself wondering, "there must be more to life than this?", I just try changing something small in my routine, like, "you know what? I think I'm going to start taking walks during lunch every day.", or, "I think I'll study this new language for an hour every night after the kids go to bed.", or, "I think I'll build a garden enclosure in the backyard". I often find that by changing something small in my routine, I can break out of the monotony and feel some sense of accomplishment I hadn't noticed was missing.
But even then, there is still some voice in the back of my mind that says, "someday, when the kids are old enough and out of the house, I think I'll take one last big risk and embark on some kind of unlikely adventure."
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/499400-when-a-man-rides-a-l...
https://slate.com/human-interest/2005/12/my-coffeehouse-nigh...
Anyone who has worked in food service in any way knows that it's brutal. Liking a thing, coffee, coffee shops, or anything ... very much does not mean you'd like making it / running something making that thing.
Personally I like video games ... I code web boring apps... for reasons.
> More than 60% of restaurants featured on the show "Kitchen Nightmares" are now closed, according to Grub Street New York, which did the math. Approximately 30% of those kitchens closed within one year of their episode's air date.
[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/many-restaurants-on-kitchen-...
I live in a big house out in the country on top of a hill. Pretty much everyone who walks in the front door for the first time and looks out the living room window exclaims about the view.
What they don't see that we're so exposed that the wind can come howling out of the North so loudly that you can't sleep.
My wife is a horse trainer. People, women mostly, are envious of the lifestyle: being out in Nature, working with horses in the fresh air. No one asks about her broken bones and the titanium pins holding her ankles and wrists together. Doesn't occur to them that whether it's 100F and humid as hell or -25F and the wind's been screaming nonstop for days that you still have to trudge out there and feed and water them.
It used to bug me. Now I barely notice. I just smile and say, "yeah, we like living out here."
Form validation though, after 20 years ... urgh
https://edition.cnn.com/travel/article/i-bought-a-hotel-by-m...
Take away quote: “But the high summer honeymoon soon give way to an autumnal realization that the list of skills required to really make the business work was topped by secretarial and bookkeeping efficiency, home improvement handiness and a nose for where to source the cheapest toilet paper.“
Now wouldn't be the time to do it, though, most of the coffee business is commuters and office workers on break, which... yeah.
(I write operations software for food-service businesses, so I'm fairly familiar with the market dynamics.)
My estimate is: you could start a towed coffee trailer for 10-12K, about 8K of that on the trailer, the rest on some basic equipment and decoration.
Rent the espresso machine & grinder for 150 / month (including maintenance & repair) instead of buying for 8K. Food & drinks wholesale: croissants are 0.2, donuts 0.5, fancy Italian water 0.6 and they sell for at least 3x as much
As the article says, even the most deluxe coffee is cheap. I calculated a cost of 1.09EUR for a latte, including 10g of coffee, 300ml of fair trade milk, a bio degradable cup + lid + sleeve and takes 3 min to prepare.
The hard part is learning to operate a professional espresso machine and dealing with the local laws about food trucks.
But yeah, best not during a pandemic.
If you don't need to account for narrow streets in a big city, and congested parking, then short buses are often a steal in the US. Plus lots of room. That said, there is a coffee van owner who lives near me and they can easily park the vehicle in their double driveway.
> Sometimes, during those months of toil, our anger burned so intensely that we thought the boards we threw into the woods might never land.
To paraphrase Gandalf, next time throw yourself into the woods and save us all a deal of trouble.
I don’t know who needs to hear this, but Wherever you go, there you are. Few people get the Eat, Pray, Love ending. Usually you come back finding that you shouldn’t have had to leave in the first place. If you feel like chucking it in, live an austere life and save up first. That lowers your cost of living, and focuses you. If you can’t take that, then you won’t handle the next phase. If you can handle that, you may find you don’t even need to go. Evaluate before following through on the rest of your plan out of some sense of completionism.
https://battlepenguin.com/philosophy/perspective/minimalism/
https://battlepenguin.com/philosophy/perspective/a-tale-of-t...
I lived out of two bags the first time and a car the second. I learned a lot about myself and the world. I had a good amount saved up, but I've met people who've done similar trips and haven't. I got the idea from a guy I met in a hostel who saved up $10k in a year from his job waiting tables, and traveled for a year off of it. My best friend lived in Germany for years off of <500 euro a month teaching English.
It's not an easy life for sure. Eventually that server went back to work at his restaurant, my friend teaching English returned to Ohio and I got a job in software engineering. I still wouldn't trade the experience for anything.
A quarter acre isn't big enough to throw for distance. But the fact that he describes the land as a fern meadow (sic) pretty much sinks it. He was tossing onto the neighbor's land.
You could be right about them cleaning up, but the overlap between "throws tantrums" and "good forest steward" is far from perfect. I bet there's still bits of wood out there, next to broken plants.
Youtube channel Wild Wonderful Offgrid [1] built a much bigger absolutely gorgous house...but on flat terrain and over two years.
The other thing I've noticed is that many successful projects have pretty permanent "temporary" accomodation on site that take the pressure off needing to complete it asap.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/c/WildWonderfulOffGrid/videos?view=0...
And then sometimes the house is also sheet-metal-clad and looks pretty barn-like—it's just better sealed and insulated and has a few more windows :-)
Also, I suspect that if you're building a smaller cabin-type house in the woods, you don't also want a barn. Maaaybe a shed.
My dream house would have some interior unfinished space that opens to the outside for use as a shed/workshop. Basically think of a large unfinished mudroom with storage for tools, a lawnmower, shelving, a workbench, and maybe some larger stationary power tools like a band saw and drill press.
The reason I say this most of the costs in rural homes have little to do with house size. My septic, well, electricity, tractor + attachments, mower, etc. and the piles of tools I need are all fixed costs that have little to nothing to do with my house size. Likewise my municipal taxes are based on assessment value which in large part is lot size and location.
And many municipalities and townships have rather tight restrictions on what can be built and where, and many of the ad-hoc tiny homes may not meet them.
Living in the country looks simpler to people in the city than it is. It is often very very expensive no matter how low the actual land value cost is.
What you're currently seeing is the evolution of the movement to be more photogenic. The OG tiny homes were a (successful) attempt at running around laws about home construction in previously extremely rural areas that now have zealous code enforcement. If it's not technically a house you save a load of money not just in taxes but also permit, inspection, utility, and insurance costs. As a bonus sometimes you can move your living space.
There are often plots of land for sale that will fit just under an RV and may or may not have utilities running to them. The kind of person to buy a lot like that, maybe $1000 total, was the person originally looking at building a tiny house.
I do not especially like tiny houses on wheels, but I think I could live comfortably in an 800sf small house on a rural piece of land.
For me, the tank plus installation was almost $10k CAD, and then the septic field itself would probably run between $30k and $50k CAD. So to be generous we could say $50k total for the full install. So that's about 8 years at $300 bimonthly just to pay it off. And you'll need to get it pumped every 3-4 years depending on tank size (a couple hundred bucks). And the field won't last forever, so in about 25-30 years probably looking at major repairs or even replacement of the field.
Then we get to the well... Also not inexpensive to install... But varies a lot depending on bedrock depth, etc. But probably $20k to install. And then you'll probably want water filtration... because do you trust your neighbour's septic systems? :-)
I suspect most of their ordinances also apply to "tiny homes"
If your electricity is used for heating/cooling, it likely has a lot to do with your house size.
My house was built to be on grid and could be parked in any trailer park. I could connect to city power, water, natural gas, and sewage.
Off-grid homes are more expensive due to the need to install solar panels, drill wells, bury a giant propane tank, and purchase land.
$50K is honestly one of the cheapest builds I've seen for an off-grid cabin. Their house looks amazing.
How?
For power, I installed a 50amp RV-style power inlet to my house. I ran a 50-amp cable from from the power pole to my house.
For water, I was able to connect a standard drinking-water hose from the water line to the inlet into my house.
For natural gas, I ran copper flex tubing from the gas meter to the gas inlet in my house. I ensured that all of my gas appliances had the correct orifices.
For sewer, I drained all of my water fixtures (two sinks, shower, and toilet) through the floor, connected them to a common drain line, and through a sewer hookup below the house.
"Dear Mr. Wright, There are certain things a man wants during life, and of life. Material things and things of the spirit. The writer has one fervent wish that includes both. It is a house created by you."
Wright delivered. It's a beautiful and simple design, initially estimated to cost $5,000 but ended up costing $7,000 (1941) dollars.
Not a bad story, on the contrary, but I was interested in reading about the learnings of pursuing a dream and things going actually wrong. What you do next? Try again? Try another thing? Go back to your old life with renewed insight? Gain in wisdom?
We came back and decided that since we had a nice travel fund and no jobs we should use that buffer to explore career choices and places to live that we hadn't previously.
She is now attempting to become a full-time food photographer, I'm still in software but working as a freelance contractor with a lot more free time and better commute.
So far we've broken roughly even on the experience, with a significant boost in quality of life.
There is nothing in the link you posted, btw. Not sure if a typo or you just didn't publish the site yet
This all should take you from 6 months to a year plus for a big project. Especially if you have little to no experience with it. This is why kits are so popular. Someone else has already run into all the problems and done all the suffering and troubleshooting for you. At the same time, there are other people building the kits that you can ask for help.
I think the initial foundation, framing, roofing and siding was done by contractors. The cabin community it's in has water and power and septic was installed. But every year until I was about 13 we'd spend weeks up there doing finishing work. All the plumbing and electrical was done by the family or friends. All the interior finishing as well. About 15 years back we ripped out the original wood burning stove for a pellet stove when my dad and I both got sick of harvesting trees left behind by the logging crews. And then about 5 years ago we ripped that out and replaced it with propane.
It's getting to the point where I'm considering buying it from them and moving up there full time. There are some issues with getting fast enough internet without paying a small fortune, but every year it's a little cheaper, a little easier.
I was just up there last week, and while I love Seattle I think I moved a step closer to the move while working out on the front porch and looking up to find a small herd of elk chewing on some of the underbrush just a few feet away.
On a serious note, there's so many similarities between building a house and a web app.
Without a proper plan and a blueprint, preferably by an architect and not the contractor - forget about it. Client never knows what they want. Small changes (KILL ME NOW) can take huge amount of time and impact things that don't seem connected, which the client never understands. The last 10% is rarely completed or done badly. It always takes much longer than expected. Everyone's excited in the beginning and considers euthanasia toward the end.
It's hilarious really.
The breaks have to be scheduled like anything else, or they won't happen.
However, I didn't want to go all in, so I bought a small/cheap 0.33 acre parcel 25 minutes from work/home. Had Tuff shed build a 14x16 "workshop" on it. Put in solar, and now spending ~1/2 days a few times a week there. Currently finishing up building a 4x8 storage shed. Planning to build a 400 sf off-grid home/shelter next.
I initially started clearing the land myself, but quickly learned that digging/levelling is not something I want to do and paid ~1200 to have it cleared and graded. I also do not want to do cement work so will have a pad poured.
I wonder if they told the buyer that the cabin was built by 2 underfunded inexperienced guys with no plans?
They aren't out of the woods financially yet... if that cabin collapses or burns up in an electrical fire, they may find themselves on the wrong end of a liability lawsuit.
Also, is it a residence? This could easily be considered a "storage shed" as much as it could be considered a "house", much like RVs are insured differently than jobsite pickup trucks.
Furthermore, it's more or less on the buyer to make the call about a structure's safety and value. Even buying a regular house, in a regular neighborhood, you can go ahead and buy it even if the inspector says it's going to burn down within a year. The bank might not loan you the money, but you can buy it as long as you can afford it. Houses get bought and sold every day that don't meet electrical, plumbing or general safety codes.
I don't know about unincorporated areas, but around here if you put power and water in a shed, it's no longer just a shed and you need permits. And I think that if it's meant for human habitation even without power or water, you need the permits (though you may not get the permit without lighting and water/sewer)
It's absolutely not on the buyer. It's on the buyer to do their due diligence, but it is certainly unethical, if not illegal to sell this cabin without disclosing that all of the work (especially but not limited to plumbing and electrical) was done by untrained and unlicensed amateurs. It's probably illegal too, but I don't have the expertise to be sure of that. And while my libertarian leanings make me comfortable using disclosures at time of sale to put some of the liability on the buyer, I'm very much not sure that the law sees it that way.
While I was in grad school I got bored sitting behind a computer all day, and my wife and I decided to build a tiny house on a trailer as a way of venting our pent-up DIY urges. We'd just build it in our spare time. LOL.
We started in the late summer of 2013, with a trailer and no plans and a stack of construction books from the library.
Cut to spring 2016, having spent every single weekend and most evenings since (in zero degree winters and brutal Pittsburgh summers) sweating and swearing, really pushing the "divorce cabin" line, and having legitimate discussions late at night about the benefits of burning it all to the ground, where my wife, eight month pregnant, is trying to finish the trim work before I submit my dissertation and we tow it across the country.
The way the article captures the "not knowing what we were getting into" / tiny things that delay you to death / stressed out / losing friends / doing absolutely nothing else with your life / so over budget it hurts / final elation at success is absolutely perfect.
We only made it across the finish line because living in Pittsburgh on a grad student stipend is actually, well, livable, and I could do that while my wife worked pretty much full time on our housing boondoggle.
The main learning experience coming out of it was that you should absolutely pay how ever many thousands of dollars it costs for a good set of plans from someone who's done this before. Learning smaller tasks like framing and roofing etc is easy. Stitching it all together into a plan that you're arguing about because neither of you have any idea what you're doing, all while you're wasting precious daylight is _hard_. We would have finished at least a year sooner if we just had plans to follow.
All that said, building a place to live in was super rewarding (as others have said) type II fun.
We still have it, it's beautiful, and I have not yet burned it down.
Where can you buy so low for so much land?
The east coast is similar but all the numbers are smaller and the baboons shit under-performing pharmaceuticals and financial products instead of Javascript and SaaS.
Once you make that land livable you will be stampeded by a horde of Californians (assuming west coast) or New Yorkers (assuming east coast) looking to throw their monopoly money at you so that they may acquire your property and exit the rat race.
I'm only slightly exaggerating here.
I'm definitely putting that on my resume.
If you're willing to dig in and make stuff happen, so that your skills/chutzpah combo is like 2-3 standard devs outside the norm... you can get a crazy good deal.
This is true in so many different applications.
Its good for me though, my home value has increased significantly with no work from me.
Funny that describes some of my (almost ex) colleagues... :-)
1) Is a major metropolitan area (LA, OC, SF, SV, Seattle, a few others)
2) Self identifies as the meth-capital of <state>|the US| the world
A European here. Does such a thing as a liberal rural state exist in the US? Could Colorado be considered as such?
Edit: I forgot about Vermont, which looks and sounds[1] a lot like Northern Europe to me.
But can rural lifestyle and liberal politics be combined with warmer climate in the US?
Maybe rural California?
Edit 2: After reading all the responses, it seems that I should be looking for liberal rural counties rather than states.
I've Googled this and here (England, sure completely different country, but also quite crowded) 'poor livestock land' (which I think their land would qualify as) is worth on average £5,000 an acre, which is about $1,625 for a quarter acre. In Scotland it goes down to £2,000 per acre.
I can therefore imagine that $3,000 was not such an impossibly low offer, not least if the seller accepted immediately.
landwatch.com has 5,734 listings for properties in the US priced for less than $3,000 right now.
Or if you're willing to live somewhere with no access to fresh water, which is what these guys did.
And yet, there's something deeply fulfilling about building something real. With your own two hands.
So much of modern corporate life feels so anonymous. Like you're playing a tiny tiny part in a project so huge, that your part seems almost inconsequential. And even worse, the things you have to do, like sitting through meetings and preparing reports, feels like a total waste of time and talent.
In reality, those "bullshit" tasks that you have to wade through, are essential to keeping the project on track. And the "tiny tiny part" you've built, even as a small fraction, is still highly impactful when multiplied by the massive value-add of the project as a whole. Our corporate jobs at FANG-type companies are just as real and impressive as the cabin these guys built. But it just doesn't feel that way. And that makes it soul-draining, even though I know it shouldn't. I've been trying for years to keep my spirits up, and have yet to succeed.
I went to university learned a lot kept making code.
Got a lot better.
If I knew two guys with 0 training or experience had built a house the wanted to sell. I would stay far away.
It is sort of like a pre alpha house and selling it. Who knows that sort of problems will come out over time.
They made no mention of permits. Inspectors etc. if you build a cabin in the woods are you freed from all those things?
If the story was I quit my job constructing houses that I had done for 20 year and went to school or apprenticed for a coupe of years to learn how to do it To build a small ERP system in C. So I could sell it for good money.
If you have never written any code and have no experience with it. Chances are that your system is really gong to suck.
So is your next one.
If you screw up a house. People can die.
There are thousands Of bugs and even real proper bugs to deal with.
I plan to take 6 months off work to do some heart surgery. Never taken any advan ced biology or medical classe but everyone has a heart and usually But not always in the same place.
If I write out all details of the surgery . Or let’s say I get a proper heart surgeon to write down in detail every step.
I memorize it in a week. Off to buy some tools.
What could go wrong?
Also http://johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/reality-has-a-surprising-...
The biggest learning is that the process is vastly more complicated then whatever I could imagine.
Different materials of materials Priming & painting (on lumber boards, and repair some surrounding areas) Tools Measurements and design Woodworking to hide small blemishes
The amount of labor is staggering as well. To name just one idea, carrying lumber and a bag of tools between the 2nd floor and the garage workshop has been a constant tiring experience.
And a lot of learning, each time when I progressed a bit, new study is required on dozens of youtube videos, and search on HomeDepot/Lowes/Amazon to get an idea on the materils/tools needed.
I also feel like this story isn't complete until they do the follow-up about whether the seller financing worked out. That's a big risk.
First, remodels aren't nearly the same as new construction. Second, in either case it is true in Oregon is that rural counties are less likely to notice or care if you don't pull required permits, particularly for remodels or "repairs" (even if the repair is the Theseus-like replacement of a completely unsalvagable structure). That doesn't mean the permits are any less required though and I would be very leary of pulling those kinds of tricks on a property that I turned around and sold.
This is all doubly true since they sold it owner financed, which means the buyer missed out on the bank doing some due diligence for them. Hopefully the buyer did their own due diligence and knows exactly what they bought.
My dream was always to have an office shed in my backyward until I decided to build one earlier this year before the pandemic. It turned out pretty good and it took me around three months to build it. Its hard work for sure but I couldn't be happier.
I wrote a blog post about it. https://eduardosasso.co/blog/how-i-built-a-wfh-shed/
With Covid-19 and everything, I feel that many folks in cities (I live in San Francisco), especially if financially able to, have been increasingly interested in buying land and/or homes or cabins in the vicinity, either as a permanent move, or as a backup.
Yeah, I probably had a romanticized view of doing this as well, but it doesn't seem insurmountable -- perhaps doing it closer to a primary residence and working part time during the process.
For anyone who wants to read more, I recommend checking out Walden by Henry David Thoreau. Interesting read!
It's going to involve a lot of pain and frustration.
It could have gone viral, with people following the developments, plus pictures, week by week.
I could easily see that cabin, in a bidding war, going for $150,000.
Then sell an ebook documenting How to Build Your Own Cabin for $100, to bring in an extra $50,000.
But I made it myself, and that counts for a lot.