How to Construct a Cabin and a Career
Spoiler: It’s all about the substrate that holds it together.
Patrick Hutchison has gone on to build and sell multiple cabins.
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Patrick Hutchison had been building a career in media as a writer of various sorts for more than a decade. It had been a grind, but he was on the verge of having the career he dreamed of: Traveling to far-away places to report interesting stories for well-paying national outlets. “I had this belief that when I achieved that, that's when I'd be fulfilled and when everything would fall into place,” he says. But then, there he was in China working on stories about fixie bicycle culture and panda rehabilitation, staying in an upscale hotel, mingling with interesting people, yet still feeling tired, alone, and a sense of dread.
Hutchison, like many other desk workers of today, felt a tug toward something more. Something more primal, more tangible, more connected to the web of life. The average office worker spends 92 percent of their time indoors, much of that staring at a screen. Hutchison and a colleague decided to get out from under the fluorescent lights and, with minimal carpentry skills, set out to build a small cabin in a remote area of the Cascade mountain range in the Pacific Northwest.
Very quickly the reality of building a cabin in the woods displaced the romantic fantasy of building a cabin in the woods. Each task took much longer and cost much more than anticipated. The work was physically demanding and the days were exhausting, often extending well beyond sunrise to sunset. Hutchison continued to find himself dwelling on work while lying in bed at night—but now it was with enthusiasm, not dread. “There is so much energy to be found in working when you’re fully engaged,” he says.
Hutchison, who in December published a memoir called Cabin: Off the Grid Adventures with a Clueless Craftsman, went on to work other construction jobs in other contexts. Not all produced the same effect. “Finding the right career is an idea too specifically aimed at a job title,” he says. “I learned to give value to all the variables that make up a job,” he says.
The key building blocks for Hutchison are moving his body (ideally outside and with music playing), having close relationships with those he works with, and getting direct feedback on his efforts. Every step of construction impacts the next. If the framing is not level, plumb, and flush, it’s going to make installing the doors a lot more difficult. And it doesn’t take a committee to evaluate whether a door is hung well. Either it latches easily—or it doesn’t. Matthew Crawford, a fellow at the University of Virginia Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture and author of Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work, says it’s not so much whether workers are using their hands but whether they get to use ingenuity.
Hutchison calls that special substrate “jazz.” Jazz is the resourcefulness that gets one from Point A to Point B when there is no clear path forward, whether that’s sliding a ridge beam into place on a rugged slope with minimal crew and equipment, or innovating a new product. “Jazz is the process of solving problems when you are free to get creative and use your own judgment and reasoning,” Hutchison says.
Hutchison has now built two cabins from the foundation up, which he subsequently sold. People often ask if it's hard for him to walk away after putting in all that work. “No,” he replies. “The most exciting part is when we sell it, because that means we’re on the doorstep of all that future jazz of the next one.”
Photo Credits: Courtesy of Patrick Hutchison; Portra, Thomas Barwick, 10,000 HOURS, Fotostorm, Westend61/Getty Images
