Cabin: Off the Grid Adventures with a Clueless Craftsman

Praise for Patrick Hutchison:

"Funny and thoughtful...Hutchison's dread at returning to Seattle after weekends at the cabin is the same Sunday blues many feel, amplified by the proximity of what he increasingly becomes convinced is a better way to live. You feel his desire to be back in the woods, working with his hands. Don't we all?" --New York Times

"full of charm and puckish detail...Mr. Hutchison is no clueless craftsman when it comes to the writing department." --Wall Street Journal

"Patrick Hutchison left his city life in Seattle to live an urbanite's rural dream, buying a $7,500 cabin on Craigslist from a guy named Tony and spending his weekends learning the skills to renovate and update it. This thoughtful and appealing memoir tells the whole funny, philosophical, chainsaw-wielding story." --New York Times Book Review (Editors' Choice Column)

"Will have you wanting to quit your job and head to the woods in order to build your own cabin, even if you don't have a single lick of carpentry skills. Filled with belly-laugh-inducing stories alongside grounded sentiment in chapters both short and sweet, 'Cabin' is the perfect book to take with you the next time you set out on a great adventure." --The Today Show

"Cabin is Hutchison's charming, funny account of his journey rehabilitating the dilapidated hovel on Wit's End Place...In this equally motivating and relatable book, that earnest commitment to learning and the thrill that accompanies even the tiniest achievement shows on nearly every page." --Washington Post

"Who could resist a house selling for less than $10,000 with the name "Wit's End"? Author Hutchison couldn't, and once he'd purchased the tiny cabin in Washington State's Cascade Mountains, he decided to learn how to make it habitable. Embarking on remote-home improvement took him and his buddies six years, and changed his life: Once a copywriter, he's now a full-time carpenter. He never turns down a beer, or a chance to laugh at himself." --Los Angeles Times

"Henry David Thoreau meets Home Improvement in Hutchison's charming debut...With endearing directness and an infectious can-do spirit, this makes for a sturdy ode to self-discovery." --Publishers Weekly

"This memoir debut brims with situational humor, quirky characters, a natural disaster, lessons learned, and one guy's search for purpose." --Booklist

"At the intersection between Bill Bryson and Drew Philp lies Patrick Hutchison's beguiling memoir...His appealingly self-deprecating account of his misadventures renovating a ramshackle cabin in the woods, transforming his own life in the process, is as inspiring as it is richly humorous...a sneakily uplifting story that just might turn out to be life-changing for some of his readers as well." --Book Reporter

"A small cabin, purchased of Craigslist and tucked in Washington State's Cascade Mountains, becomes a life-changer for Patrick Hutchinson, who amusingly details a rather impulsive, woodland adventure in his first memoir...What ensues is a comedy of errors where headstrong, learn-things-the-hard-way-Hutchinson is drawn down a winding path that ultimately leads to personal enlightenment." --Shelf Awareness

"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

"Without any carpentry or fix-er-up skills, Patrick Hutchison risked his modest savings on a dilapidated cabin deep in the Northwest's Cascades. His life, and now this book, became a love affair with shelter, home, and self-education. I particularly appreciated his gifts for introspection and self-deprecating humor, which mirror the same insecurities we all experience. Henry David Thoreau would have loved (or: is loving) this book." --Rinker Buck, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Oregon Trail and Life on the Mississippi

"Patrick Hutchison's CABIN is about the most damned American book you'll ever read. It's as warm, welcoming and as full of rejuvenating spirit as a crackling potbellied stove in a little cabin in the woods. Hutchison's cabin in the woods. Fan's of Thoreau's Walden, Tracy Kidder's House and Jon Krakauer's Into the Wild will all relish in Hutchison's indefatigable spirit as this Seattle copywriter sets his sights on fixing up a hut-shaped pile of wood about to turn back to the earth. CABIN will make you ask to borrow your mom's little pickup and some power tools, buy a case of Rainier and head for the hills to see if you, too, can't fix a little something up yourself. You're going to freaking love this book." --Matthew Batt, author of Sugarhouse and The Last Supper Club