Guest Post by Ryo Chijiiwa
If I’d accepted the job Mark Zuckerberg offered me in 2005, I probably wouldn’t be here. If I hadn’t quit my job at Google a year and a half ago, I probably wouldn’t be here either. But I am here, and for the most part, I’m glad I am.
“Here” is in a half-finished cabin in the woods, and broke. Again. I was in a similar place when you last heard from me on the Tiny House Blog. When I last wrote here a year ago, I had just finished my 48 square foot hut, which cost me the last of my savings. Without enough funds to buy insulation for the winter, I was forced back to the city of San Francisco where I took refuge during the colder months. Like a regular city-dweller, I did some contract programming work and paid monthly rent. But when spring arrived with its bright warm sunny days, I could no longer stay cooped up indoors.
So, I returned to Serenity Valley, my 60 acres in the woods.
I spent the summer months trying to grow my first garden in poor rocky soil and with no running water. Late in the summer, with some money still left from the previous winter’s work, I started designing a larger hut, which I named, perhaps unimaginatively, Hut 2.0. While I had only allocated $500 for Hut 1.0, I decided I could probably afford to spend a whopping $2000 for the new version. My back-of-the-envelope calculations showed that I could build a 12 x 8 foot structure within that budget, and afford things I couldn’t afford for Hut 1.0: proper roofing, real windows, a commercially-made door, exterior-grade siding and, most importantly, insulation.