There’s no place like home!

We ordinarily like to post on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and I would usually have a post queued up and ready to go yesterday.

However.

We had been on pins and needles for the past four or five days, because finally, after nearly a month of waiting, our cabin was delivered on Monday!

(Side note: on this blog, you may hear our abode referred to as a “cabbage.” That’s due to the fact that we initially couldn’t agree on whether we were going to live in a cottage or a cabin, so we made an efficient [but confusing] portmanteau of the two words: cabbage. At this point, however, we use all three words — cottage, cabin, and cabbage — interchangeably.)

So, why a pre-built cabin?

Recall from our very first post that our move to the country was not entirely planned. Ideally, we would have loved to build a cabin from the ground on up using locally reclaimed materials. In practice, though, that would have required far more time, money, and skills than we currently have. Realistically, we would have had to start as soon as winter turned into spring, several months ago, and if we were extremely lucky, we might have had the shell completed by fall. Which would have left us in the position of trying to overwinter in a cabin without insulation, plumbing, electrical, or any source of heat. And as much as The Long Winter is my favorite Little House book, I had no desire to re-enact any of its events.

Obviously the tiny house movement is huge right now, and we’ve lived comfortably in small spaces before, but we didn’t have the money to order a tiny house from someplace like Tumbleweed and get it delivered. It was Mindy’s mom who came up with a great solution.

She told us about a local place called The Spokane Shed Company, where we ended up ordering from. They’re a franchise of Old Hickory Sheds and the sheds they build are sturdy, spacious, and economical. While the sheds are ideally used for storage or playhouses, they can also be fitted out on the inside to be livable spaces. So we figured we’d give it a shot, because it’s in our budget, and we need a place to live.

We are very lucky to have a wealth of knowledge in our little community. This makes finishing the cabin much easier. While I don’t have any electrical, septic system, or carpentry skills, there are immediate family members who know how to do all these things and have volunteered to help teach us.

Watching it get delivered was pretty exciting. This is a 14×40 building getting towed behind a truck, coming up our tiny country approach (not even a road.) Later, after everyone left, Mindy and I enjoyed a thunderstorm in our brand new home. I had never heard hail on a metal roof before, but man, it’s intense.

Next Steps

I’m going to be spending the rest of the day drawing up floor plans. We need to figure out where the bathroom, kitchen, and living areas will be before we can really make any progress, since that will dictate where wiring and plumbing goes. In addition to the open space in the cabin, we also have two big lofts that we haven’t even figured out entirely what to do with yet. And then there’s floor underlayment, insulation, flooring, paneling and/or sheetrocking, installing a wood stove, final design details, and so on …

Number one priority, though, is that we’ll need to get electrical in ASAP. Luckily, my brother-in-law, Bryan, knows a lot about electric and wiring and will be our point man on that project. More on what installing electrical looks like in another post when I have more details and actually understand what he’s talking about. Right now I’m only catching about every third word.

For now, though, we are so excited to have a space of our own, even as rough and unfinished as it is. But that’s going to be really fun to work out.

And we weren’t the only ones excited about the cabbage getting planted! As soon as we got inside, we had an impromptu dance party with our nieces and nephews.