Cabin

Off the Grid Adventures with a Clueless Craftsman

By: Patrick Hutchison

Narrated by: Patrick Hutchison

Length: 9 hrs and 15 mins

Publisher's summary

A memoir of the author's journey from an office job to restoring a cabin in the Pacific Northwest, based on his wildly popular Outside Magazine piece.

Wit’s End isn’t just a state of mind. It’s the name of a gravel road, the address of a run-down off-the-grid cabin, 120 shabby square feet of fixer-upper Patrick Hutchison purchased on a whim in the mossy woods of the Cascade Mountains in Washington state.

To say Hutchison didn’t know what he was getting into is no more an exaggeration than to say he’s a man with nearly zero carpentry skills. Well, used to be. You can learn a lot over six years of renovations.

CABIN is the story of those renovations, but it's also a love story; of a place, of possibilities, and of the process of construction, of seeing what could be instead of what is. It is a book for those who know what it’s like to bite off more than you can chew, or who desperately wish to.

©2024 Patrick Hutchison (P)2024 Macmillan Audio

Critic reviews

"A hammer and nail mini-saga, told not by a master carpenter, but by a dynamic prose stylist who possesses the best of all skills: the ability to laugh at himself. This is a charming sample of the cabin dream afoot in America today and Hutchison is the perfect neophyte builder who is made better by the building he makes better."—Joseph Monninger, author of A Barn in New England: Making a Home on Three Acres

"At some point in his life, every man has the thought of going off into the woods to build a cabin. Patrick Hutchison didn’t stop at just thinking about building a cabin, he went and built one. A Walden for the modern age, CABIN humorously chronicles the misadventures, mishaps, and unexpected joys of escaping the digital world for a slice of rustic reality. It’s a book that celebrates and inspires the reader to be more agentic and take action to bring one’s daydreams to life. It’s a book about doing what Thoreau himself advised: putting foundations under your castles in the air."—Brett McKay, bestselling author of The Art of Manliness

"Imagine if Bill Bryson had decided to put down stakes during his walk in the woods and asked Charles Bukowski to help him refurbish a derelict shack deep in the forest of the Cascade Mountains. And there you have Patrick Hutchinson's hilarious and poignant CABIN. Hutchison braves truck-swallowing mudslides, spiders vying for outhouse ownership, hermit meth tweakers, and glowing-eyed mountain lions (both real and imagined) to chronicle not only his dilapidated cabin's transformation, but his own."—Bob Drury, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Last Hill and Throne of Grace