Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

We quit our jobs to build a cabin

outsideonline.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

291–300 of 402 posts

Re: We quit our jobs to build a cabin

#291

Post by throw51319 »

throwaway0a5e wrote: post #9
wolco wrote: post #6

They got the property for 3,000 and sold for 115,000 (with cabin) Where can you buy so low for so much land?

You can easily get cheap empty land in the American West so long as it's farther from the nearest city than your average Javascript crapping baboon is willing to drive with his family in the car for a weekend getaway and the parcel is too small for any commercial use. The east coast is similar but all the numbers are smaller and the baboons shit under-performing pharmaceuticals and financial products instead of Javas…

Rofl. Yeah it actually makes complete sense.

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.

Re: We quit our jobs to build a cabin

#292

Post by bluGill »

0xffff2 wrote: post #209
D13Fd wrote: post #180

Why didn't they just add a well so they didn't have to do seller financing? 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.

The word "permit" is suspiciously absent from this story, and adding a well would most certainly have required permits. Probably a lot of things they did required permits, but if the narrative is accurate it doesn't seem like the permits were actually acquired.

Rural areas tend to require less permits in general. I did a significant remodel and the only permit was electrical.

Re: We quit our jobs to build a cabin

#293

Post by ep103 »

jaeming wrote: post #172

I used to have dreams like this. I attempted to chase these ideas every few years. I quit a very good job once and moved halfway around the world in an attempt to fulfill one of these dreams. 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 ti…

I found this poetically beautiful, for some reason : )

Re: We quit our jobs to build a cabin

#294

Post by sethammons »

ChrisLomont wrote: post #173
sushshshsh wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet there are people who have built cabins in Alaska with nothing but some metal and a lot of ingenuity and muscle. 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 propositi…

>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. 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 maj…

I'm on the fence. With youtube, you can find so many things tricks and suggestions, things that professionals don't even know.

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.

Re: We quit our jobs to build a cabin

#295

Post by whack »

As someone who earns good money working at a big corp, this article resonates deeply. From a financial perspective, these guys slaved away for almost a year, earning what was probably minimum wage. From a quality perspective, what they produced doesn't even look impressive, when compared to any other dime-a-dozen cabin.

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.

Re: We quit our jobs to build a cabin

#296

Post by cushychicken »

kyleblarson wrote: post #11

I purchased land in the North Cascades area (Methow Valley, about 3 hours Northeast of Index where these guys built) in 2007 with the intention of building a weekend home myself. I prepped the property myself and ran the main power. It was a junk show and I quickly learned that the best approach was to continue writing software and pay pros to do the job. That was one of the best decisions I have ever made. My wife a…

I love the Methow Valley. Have you ever been to the Methow Valley Chamber Music festival? It's run by a former EE named Howard Johnson, who wrote the book on High Speed Digital Design.

Re: We quit our jobs to build a cabin

#297

Post by sushshshsh »

ChrisLomont wrote: post #173
sushshshsh wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet there are people who have built cabins in Alaska with nothing but some metal and a lot of ingenuity and muscle. 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 propositi…

>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. 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 maj…

As a softeare dev who used to work in the contracting space, I cannot tell you how many stories I have of licensed, insured, regulated tradesmen going to jobsites and the outcome being burned down houses, flooded houses, oil spills, trees falling onto houses, and just monetary and physical damages galore.

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.

Re: We quit our jobs to build a cabin

#298

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

duxup wrote: post #38
drewrv wrote: post #29

This reminds me of a similar article I once read: "I opened a charming neighborhood coffee shop. Then it destroyed my life." https://slate.com/human-interest/2005/12/my-coffeehouse-nigh...

Those stories always get me. 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.

The grass is always greener on the other side. And sometimes you get to see both sides and you can tell that they're both brown and dry!

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."

Re: We quit our jobs to build a cabin

#299

Post by hsod »

hinkley wrote: post #67

I usually just roll my eyes at stuff like this, despite being dangerously close to the stereotype (however, most of my family is working class, so I actually worked with my hands before becoming a developer), but this line made me angry: > 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 yo…

I honestly don't understand why this made you angry. Is it because they are wasting wood?

Re: We quit our jobs to build a cabin

#300

Post by 0xffff2 »

bluGill wrote: post #292
0xffff2 wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The word "permit" is suspiciously absent from this story, and adding a well would most certainly have required permits. Probably a lot of things they did required permits, but if the narrative is accurate it doesn't seem like the permits were actually acquired.

Rural areas tend to require less permits in general. I did a significant remodel and the only permit was electrical.

Are you speaking specifically about Washington state? I don't know the details up there, but I can tell you from experience that this isn't at all true in Oregon (both personally for my own property and from occasionally helping my dad, who is a GC).

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.

Post reply on HN