Synopses & Reviews
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.
Review
"Without any carpentry 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. 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
"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. And there you have Patrick Hutchinson's hilarious and poignant CABIN." —Bob Drury, New York Times bestselling author of The Heart of Everything That Is and Blood and Treasure
About the Author
Patrick Hutchison is a writer and builder from the Pacific Northwest. His work has appeared in Outside, Wired, Vice, Seattle magazine, and Seattle Weekly. He grew up in Washington State’s rainy southwest corner, eventually moving to Seattle to attend the University of Washington. After a decade of copywriting, Hutchison left a career behind a keyboard to pursue carpentry. His first book, CABIN, follows him as he makes that clumsy transition. He now lives and works in Tacoma, WA with his wife, Kate, and their black lab, Marge.