It may seem counterintuitive, but sometimes a lack of funds can work in your favor. Just ask Nova Scotia couple Paula Washington and Peter Mogl, who were looking for land on which to build their first cabin back in 2015. “It was really helpful that we didn’t have any money—that always narrows the decision field down,” says Peter. Though they had no prior design-build experience, the couple were keen on spending time together and working outside; plus, there was an emerging platform called Airbnb that would help them recoup their costs.

“We decided it was a fun moment to have no white in the space and use the fireplace as a kind of accent,” says Paula. The sunken living room features a white Malm fireplace and a built-in couch. " layout="bleed" credit="Photo by Carolina Andrade" photoUserId="7295830895708160000"/>

That inaugural cabin took three years instead of the anticipated six months to complete, but it was an invaluable learning experience. Before long, Paula and Peter had dreams of building two more cabins—an A-frame and a fire tower–inspired getaway—to round out the suite of rental properties they call Shackup, all scattered around their home in the tiny village of Petite Rivère. A business loan from the credit union iNova sent them on the path of realizing their vision.

It was one of the pivotal moments of the project when we realized we could go down,” says Peter. “We’re wrestling with these dimensions, and we weren’t getting head heights and clearances and a bunch of code stuff, and then it kind of just came about being like, ‘Oh, we could just go deeper down in earth.’”" layout="" credit="Photo by Carolina Andrade" photoUserId="7295830895708160000"/>

The couple broke ground on the A-frame, nicknamed the Love Triangle, in November 2020 and finished it in April 2022. Along the way, Paula, whose background is in advertising, and Peter, then a cargo ship captain, quit their jobs to focus on Shackup full time—and welcomed a daughter who’s now 16 months old. We caught up with the designers to learn how they handled all the moving pieces, a feat Peter attributes to “good people and luck: the two most important things in life.”

Learning the Tricks of the Trade

We did a ton of groundwork to get to this beautiful ocean view, but then when the sun goes down, there’s an array of red and green blinking buoys, so you’re looking out on this twinkling thing,” says Peter. “This totally unforeseen feature was a huge bonus.”" layout="wide" credit="Photo by Carolina Andrade" photoUserId="7295830895708160000"/>

Paula: We’d been Airbnb-ing our own apartment since the beginning of time. I was renting on Airbnb when people were like, “What are you doing?” I had a really good handle on that and saw the popularity of it growing. And then as far as building went, I had no experience—not at all. So I was a total novice.

Peter: When I was in high school, I did one summer of construction and then two summers of cabinetmaking. I’d always been an avid hobbyist, albeit without a lot of resources or tools. For the first build, we kept it pretty straightforward and really achievable. And we had a ton of support around us. For all the other bits, we learned—and it was incredible. It was a ton of fun. We watched YouTube and talked to people. We learned that any internet message board is not worth going to; you just find old men yelling.

Paula: It feels like literally everyone is a carpenter here, and so it was easy to find people to explain things to us, lend tools, or come over, but we also just spent a lot of time fumbling through it and being cold in the woods.

We had no experience hiring other people to help us, so building the A-frame was a really big learning experience of, “Oh, you can actually call an electrician and have them wire the place, and you can hire carpenters to help build it.”

Peter: We always joke that we planned on everything except starting a construction company. Once we got through the entire project, we were like, “Wow, we actually have a payroll and payroll taxes, and a health and safety policy.”

Framing the Views

Our thought was to keep the woodwork all a really similar palette, but with a lot of texture, which can be just as interesting as color,” says Paula. “The tambours allowed us to get a nice amount of texture in the space and make it all feel cohesive.”" layout="wide" credit="Photo by Carolina Andrade" photoUserId="7295830895708160000"/>

Paula: The two of us stomped around the land with a ladder, trying to get the right height to see what we would see. There’s a really cute lobster fishing wharf oriented exactly out the double-height dormer. And the front of the A-frame is oriented basically with the best view of the ocean.

Peter: It was easy to see what we wanted, but it was hard for us to find a way to get it into the building. We were trying to get the building forward enough that you can see the fishing wharf without turning it any bearing, because that would then be pulling you away from the ocean view.

Paula: It’s always a melee with orientation because everything’s always in conflict with each other. There’s always different pieces of a property that are beautiful, and it’s really challenging to prioritize which ones are most important and [figure out how to] get the secondary views.

A Not-So-Simple A-Frame

Paula: I would take a screenshot of every A-frame that I liked on the internet, put it in InDesign, and measure the angle on them. And I came to realize that in our opinion, the best A-frames were equilateral triangles. Then we figured out the longest length of beam we could buy in Canada, and 24 feet was really the max before you get into really special orders. Then we took the drawings to the engineer and bickered with him quite a lot because he wanted to be a bit more conservative.

Peter: People regularly defer to the tower, but from a technical aspect, the A-frame was super challenging. That seamless, resolved look took serious blood, sweat, tears…and anxiety. I mean, you’re placing your living room lights the moment after you’ve done the framing, and that’s set in stone because you’re putting that up over some very expensive cladding. When you come back six months from now and drill them out, if there’s no wire behind, that’s going to be a difficult thing to deal with.

Paula: We went into the A-frame thinking it would be a simple build, and it was anything but that. It was a very challenging, complex geometric puzzle to figure out.

Peter: It’s the exact opposite of a bungalow. When you put up a bungalow, you put the trusses across, and the entirety is a soft middle: You can put a window anywhere, move things around. Structurally, everything in the A-frame is solid. The floor is what creates the collar ties to keep it from splitting apart, and the walls are the roof. So it’s like once you design it, that’s it.

Sticking to Scale

Peter: We started realizing the limitation of the equilateral triangle—or any A-frame triangle—is like, if you want one more foot of floor area, you get a substantially larger volume of building because it’s not like a roof where you can just extend the walls, and the roof pitch just stretches out. It’s amazing how quickly the building grew in scale.

Paula: We knew that we wanted the A-frame to feel midcentury because that’s when A-frames originally became popular, and we knew that they were big about Douglas fir, but we wanted to figure out how to have a little more space, and so we came up with the idea of the sunken living room. It has that 1960s feel and allowed the A-frame to look quite small from the outside but then to be quite large on the inside, so that allowed us to keep it at the 24-foot mark.

Peter: If we didn’t have the knee wall, which is hidden by the way we brought the grading back, the ridge line would basically be six feet higher in the air.

Paula: We wanted it to feel like a cabin and not a big chalet.

Raising the Roof

Peter: It was an ordeal and a half to get the Douglas fir roof milled. This was like the depths of the pandemic supply chain, and we ordered thousands of dollars of Douglas fir, and it came in, and it was all off spec. It had wane, it had sapwood, it had mold. We’re like, “We’re rejecting this portion,” and they’re like, “Okay, that’s cool. Just so you know, it’s all the Douglas fir we have.” That was a serious moment because of course, now we have a Douglas fir timber frame standing up. Thankfully, I was away at sea living the easy life [laughs].

Paula: I was dealing with it.

Peter: She laid out the entirety of the order to pick through and knew exactly how many boards we needed and was like, “These are the bad ones, but we can hide them here because they’re behind the beam. Sixty-two percent of the visible coverage is fine.”

Paula: Normally, you’d have 10 percent extra or 20 percent extra. We ended up with just enough; even the last few boards at the top are probably not the nicest. The supply chains just didn’t exist—we couldn’t get what we wanted to get. So yeah, multiple trips in the U-haul back and forth to the mill.

Fine-Tuning the Details

It was something we recognized in our first cabin where it had the loft that not only did it have a sort of intimate, safer feel, it’s this primal, cocoon thing where you're in the woods, but you’re up high,” says Peter. It also opens to a spacious deck." layout="wide" credit="Photo by Carolina Andrade" photoUserId="7295830895708160000"/>

Peter: We realized early on that anything you touch has a very high impact on the aesthetic of a place. Light switches, door handles, faucets, countertops—any of that stuff that you interact with is a big part of making the brand. We’d find something, but be like, “Yeah, but they’re not to North American standard, and they only ship them out of Peru.”

Paula: The lighting in the whole place is all vintage European stuff that our electrician—love him—rewired for us.

We once ran a coffee shop distribution company, so we’re really good at finding the distributor. So I’ll find a product that I want online and figure out the Canadian distributor for it and call them up and say, “Hey, we run a construction company. We’d love to have an account with you guys.” It’s stuff that isn’t available in retail and is a little bit more challenging to look for. We’re kind of used to doing that in Nova Scotia because we have nothing [laughs]. We got an Ikea four years ago or something.

We built some mockups in the shop out of plywood and finally found one that we liked,” she says." layout="bleed" credit="Photo by Carolina Andrade" photoUserId="7295830895708160000"/>

Peter: The tambours are a story in and of themselves because they really clinched the design. We had trouble finding flooring in a secondary wood that was true to the midcentury aesthetic because teak, mahogany, and cypress were difficult from an economic perspective. We ended up going with red oak, which has an open grain and has that dark “broodiness” to it. Paula came up with the idea of tambours, and that was huge.

Paula: They were all the off cuts of the loft floor. Peter spent an evening in the shop just cutting different angles on them because we wanted them to be able to go around the radius. We made thousands of linear feet.

Peter: They’re also the most satisfying thing to install. You could do a section in an hour and a half and go from two-by-fours and rough structure to the most gorgeous thing.

Paula: We’d joke, like, anywhere we didn’t know what to do: “Just tambour it.”

From Project Management to Parenting

Paula: I think a traditional contractor would have had a lot more specs, a lot more drawings, maybe surveys, and we didn't have any of that, and so it was really working with [tradespeople] day to day. I was there with the plumbers being like, “I think we want the toilet here.”

We swung some hammers, but I got pregnant in January. Our idea, having never had a kid before, was that I would be fine to work for seven months and then I would just need to rest at the end of my pregnancy. That was really naive because I was nauseous and sick and exhausted.

Peter: Week two, Paula was sick and couldn’t get out of bed, and we were like, “This isn’t the plan.”

I actually look back on it quite fondly. The A-frame was only partially done when our daughter arrived, and that was a special time. We took two weeks off, and then we were both back in it.

Paula: And we trucked her around to every site in her little car seat. It reminds me of being taken to all the building sites when I was a kid with my dad.

Peter and I were trying to figure out how to work together on the first project. It took us a long time to realize how to communicate effectively and how not to get frustrated. By the time these [cabins] came around, it was pretty easy to make decisions. It’s also made raising a kid really easy so far, decision-making wise. We had the tools to communicate effectively by the time it came to parenting.

Peter: Every couple that has ever renovated a house is like, “It nearly destroyed my marriage.” You get in fights over trim profiles. By the time it came to the A-frame, it was not an issue. You said your opinion, made your case, and we could both look at it objectively. We both learned if the other person really cared about it, there was a good reason.

More Construction Diary stories:

Jaime Hayon’s 1920s Valencia Apartment Is a Master Class in Color

A Brooklyn Couple Revive an ’80s Time Capsule in the Catskills

A Ceramicist Gets Hands On While Renovating Her Midcentury Home

Project Credits:

Builder: Shackup Cabins