Off-grid cabin build

Year: 2020

It was 2020. The Covid lockdowns had just started. And I was stuck in my 1-bedroom San Francisco apartment. All I wanted to do was escape to nature.

Now, I’ve always loved nature. But I never got to spend as much time as I wanted in it. Weekend backpacking trips just didn’t cut it.

So I thought: what if I could spend months at a time in nature? What would that take?

The answer I fell in love with was building this little place.

It’s close to a ski resort, good fishing, and a beautiful mountain lake to hike to. Starlink was also about to release publicly, so I knew I could get good internet to work on.

Once I found the spot, I spent weeks bingeing YouTube videos on this stuff. Learning about foundations, soil types, water flow, framing, insulation, solar power systems, etc.

I started by figuring out dimensions, framing (2x6 walls for extra insulation), and the foundation. I basically considered a rectangular prism the size of Henry David Thoreau's cabin at Walden Pond and made changes from there (small enough to avoid the need for inspections, permits, etc.).

Then I got to it.

The number of moving parts was overwhelming at first, but if I ever got stuck on something, YouTube came in clutch.

I had to haul and carry a lot of awkwardly large lumber alone.

But one of the hardest parts to do alone was installing metal roofing. 

Here you can see the system I rigged up:

After cutting the roofing to size and chalking lines for screws, I’d screw a temporary bracket into the end that’d be covered by the ridge cap, attach a rope, and hoist the piece up a track made of 2x6 lumber.

There were a lot of tricky little things like that to figure it out, but it call came together in time.

By the end, it was fully equipped with an oven/stove, fridge/freezer, enough battery capacity for multiple days of autonomy (in full cloud cover), water filtration system, shower, and of course blazing fast 400 mbps low ping internet (shout out gigachad Elon).

It’s really magical how we can do anything now with a little determination and an internet connection.