Six years ago, Jared Eberhardt—a commercial director and former creative director for Burton snowboards—had a great year of work and set out to buy a fancy sports car in celebration. But once he started looking into the cost, he realized he could invest that money into something that would benefit not just him, but also his wife and daughters.

“My cousins and I grew up spending time at my grandparents’ ranch in Utah,” Jared says. “When we were kids, it was just something we did—but as an adult, I realize how important it was to me, and I wanted my kids to have a similar experience.”

Jared, who initially majored in architecture in college before pivoting to mechanical engineering, had always wanted to remodel a house. He and his family live in Los Angeles and love spending time in Palm Springs, so in 2016, he began looking for fixer-uppers in that area.

“I found a house and renovated the interiors,” he says. “I enjoyed that so much that the next year I decided I wanted to do another one—but this time I was fascinated by the desert landscape.”

$350 Blueprints	$4,185 Permits & Fees	$4,760 Demolition
$20,930 Framing & Foundation Materials	$36,000 Framing & Foundation Labor	$2,395 Plumbing Materials
$5,305 Electrical Materials	$8,870 Plumbing Fixtures	$3,480 Bathroom Tile
$12,270 Electrical Fixtures	$13,609 Kitchen Appliances	$3,570 Kitchen Counters & Cabinets
$450 Kitchen Labor	$5,890 Hot Tub & Deck	$1,980 Pergola
$4,087 Windows	$9,549 HVAC System	$2,480 Lumber
$4,147 Hardware	$1,875 Drywall & Paint	$790 Exterior Paint
$10,125 Roof Materials	$6,240 Equipment Rental	$1,849 Concrete Polishing
Grand Total: $165,186

Jared spent almost a year exploring Pioneertown, Yucca Valley, and Joshua Tree in person, and he went home each night to take up the search on Redfin. One evening, after losing out on a potential property, Jared was hitting refresh when a poorly renovated 1950s cabin near Joshua Tree popped up.

“The house was absolutely horrendous,” he says with a laugh. “The owners had added a garage and a living room where the bedroom windows were, so they opened up into the garage. There was no toilet in the bathroom, just a bathtub and maybe a sink. Things were well built, but everything looked like it had been done in haste.”

The dilapidated state of the house didn’t scare Jared off—instead, he saw the structure’s potential and prioritized the gorgeous slice of desert land where it sat. After taking quite a few work trips to London over the years, Jared had fallen in love with the eclectic architectural Frankenhouses around the city and wanted to see if he could do something similar on a budget.

“I love that aesthetic,” he says. “They embrace the heritage, so the front of the house looks 300 years old, but then they add a space station to the back, and somehow it works.”

Jared purchased the Yucca Valley property in May 2018 with plans to peel away the shoddy additions, then add on to the original structure. He budgeted around $200,000 for the project.

After drawing the plans several times (and enlisting a draftsman to make sure everything was to code), he received approval for construction in July 2019. Then, at the end of the year, the Covid pandemic hit, slowing down the project timeline considerably. A natural do-it-yourselfer, Jared decided that he had the time and interest to tackle the work himself.

“Originally, I planned on using subcontractors,” he says, “but the perfect storm of their long lead times, the pandemic, and not having any commercials to shoot for over a year gave me the gift of no film work, but lots of time to learn to build.”

Jared hired one contractor to frame the house, and another to pour a new concrete foundation for the kitchen, and then he took on the rest of the build himself. The home was rat-infested and unlivable during construction, so he camped on the property several days a week, cooking on a portable stove and rising early to start work.

“The house is divided into two sections: the new side and the old side,” he notes. “I wanted there to be a clear difference between the two on the inside, while making the outside more homogenous. I raised the ceiling and did an eave-less, standing-seam metal roof that wraps around to create a mini-eave on the old section and wraps around to become the wall cladding on the new section.”

The metal roof, made from a sequence of 30-foot-long panels, was a high-budget item that Jared had in mind from the beginning. Initially, bids from contractors came in between $40,000 and $50,000. Instead of biting the bullet and dropping the cash, he bought $10,000 worth of materials and, with the help of a friend, installed it himself.

Inside the original section, the windows, concrete bricks (painted white), and vaulted tongue-and-groove ceiling remain, while the new addition includes a main bedroom with an ensuite bathroom, a guest room loft with a stargazing skylight, built-in living room shelving, and a new white oak kitchen. The new section of the house is entirely clad with three-fourth-inch plywood. “I went through three 50-sheet bundles of plywood piece by piece so that I could get the best-looking one,” Jared says.

A simple and durable interior palette of wood, white-painted brick, and concrete floors complement rental-friendly designer reproductions and vintage Danish pieces. Jared saved wood from the sections of the house that he removed and reused some of it for the new framing, and some for outdoor furniture. He also made furniture for the interiors, including bed frames, side tables, and the built-in shelving in the living room. All three bathroom floors are surfaced with four-inch cement tiles—another splurge that Jared installed himself, admitting that he “had to do the first bathroom two and a half times to get everything lined up correctly.”

During the design phase, the project’s estimated cost ballooned to nearly $350,000—but after Jared opted to handle most of the renovation himself, that number dropped dramatically. The final cost came in around $165,000, which includes an expensive HVAC system that Jared installed to meet California’s strict laws surrounding high-efficiency cooling and heating.

The project stretched for more than three years before completion, although Jared admits that he enjoyed the process so much that he didn’t want it to end.

“The hardest thing for me was having to say ‘I’m done,’” he admits. “I could not figure out what was going on—I wasn’t happy. I felt like a friend had moved away, or I had gone through a breakup. Remodeling a house is as big of a project as you want to make it, and I think I let it have an outsized presence in my life.”

Jared decided to turn the property into an Airbnb, where up to eight guests can enjoy the midcentury-inspired interiors set in an otherworldly landscape. He’s shaken off his post-renovation blues, and he already has a few more projects on deck. “This house was like a proof of concept,” he says. “Now that I know what I can do, I have about 10 years’ worth of projects I’m ready to tackle.”

Hoot Owl Ranch is now available to rent on Airbnb.

More Budget Breakdown stories:

A Couple Build a Cabin in the Blue Ridge Mountains for $150K—Without Borrowing a Cent

A New Zealand Architect’s $96K Plan to Become a First-Time Homeowner

A Seattle Family Builds a Rugged Cabin on a Remote Island for $41K

Project Credits:

Architect of Record: Jared Eberhardt, Eberhaus / @eberhaus_properties

Structural Engineer: David Reith

Landscape Design: Jared Eberhardt, Eberhaus

Lighting Design: Jared Eberhardt, Eberhaus

Interior Design: Jared Eberhardt, Eberhaus

Cabinetry Design: Jared Eberhardt, Eberhaus

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Budget Breakdown: A Dilapidated Desert House Springs Back to Life for $165K