At the start of the pandemic, San Francisco residents Heather Hafey and Eli Chamberlin were suddenly in need of more space. Their sub-500-square-foot apartment wasn’t going to cut it. “We couldn’t live and work where we’d been living,” says Heather. So they set their sights on Heather’s hometown, Pinedale, Wyoming. “We figured we could be outside there without being around too many people, something we couldn’t do in San Francisco,” adds Heather. “There’s only about two thousand people in the whole town and it’s surrounded by nature.”

Before:

The couple rented an Airbnb in Pinedale that had enough space to live and work, then began the search for something more permanent. “One of our friends is a real estate agent in town and she convinced us to look at places to buy,” says Heather. “We couldn’t afford San Francisco, but we could afford Pinedale, and it’s just really beautiful here.”

Heather and Eli looked at homes, finding that most lacked the character they were looking for. But one stood out: a 1930s forest service cabin that had been moved almost 100 miles from the woods in Winton, now a ghost town, to Pinedale. They fell in love with the 890-square-foot cabin’s pitched roof and cedar-wrapped exterior, but couldn’t tour the property before heading back to California. So they toured it via FaceTime.

Heather was immediately sold. “I really thought we should buy it,” she says. Eli wasn’t so sure. “I was skeptical,” he says. “The house looked like it was about to cave in and there was so much fake wood paneling and different types of trim.” A tile ceiling, painted floors, and chainlink fence around the exterior made Eli that much more dubious.

Heather saw the disrepair as an opportunity. “I thought it was something we could really tackle,” she says. “And again, we just couldn’t live and work remotely on a full-time basis in our tiny San Francisco apartment. Thankfully, Eli was amenable.” They landed the cabin, with a plan to renovate while working and living in it part-time. “Our vision, which sort of evolved as we went along, was to modernize,” says Heather. “We wanted to strip everything back but didn’t want to tackle anything too structural—we didn’t want to take something away and have the house fall down.”

With a $40,000 budget, Heather and Eli began by taking out the kitchen cabinetry. “I was in Pinedale by myself right after we bought the cabin and Eli FaceTimed me from California,” says Heather. “I was like, look what I did! I’d ripped out an entire wall of paneling and all the kitchen cabinets, taking them completely down to the studs.” When Eli arrived in Pinedale, they removed the tile ceiling and the bedroom’s faux wood paneling, replacing them with drywall. They kept the real wood paneling, painting it white in the living room and matte black in the dining area. (They also replaced much of the trim.) “The wood paneling in the living room had to be completely sanded down,” says Eli. “It took six coats of oil paint for the wood to stop showing through. I can’t say enough about how instrumental YouTube was in getting this done.”

$4,525 Appliances	$500.55 Blinds	$1,947.49 Cabinets
$2,132 Countertops	$3,800 Drywall/Insulation	$1,958.04 Electrical
$6,539.03 Fencing	$124.23 Fixtures	$1,611.59 Flooring
$6,311.84 Furnishings	$496.11 Lighting	$2,687.04 Miscellaneous
$1,197.21 Paint	$1,607.60 Plumbing/Heating	$1,541.95 Roofing/Soffits
$3,123 Tile	$595.33 Trim
Grand Total: $40,698

They completely recreated the kitchen, splurging on a Chambers refrigerator for some vintage flair. “We also splurged in the bathroom,” says Heather. “We ripped out this cheap plastic shower and did a tub surrounded by subway tile for $3,123.” The tall cedar fence that wraps around the house and yard was their biggest expense. “It was $6,500, and that was just for materials since we did the work,” says Eli.

They saved money in the kitchen and dining room by employing Ikea cabinetry, reusing the original butcher-block counters, and building a dining table and a base for the kitchen island. The saved with the floors, too. “It would’ve cost us $5,000 to replace them, so we spent $1,600 stripping and refinishing them ourselves,” says Eli. They purchased a cast-iron fireplace and dishwasher on Craigslist. “As we were traveling in the U-Haul from San Francisco to Pinedale, we kept stopping and buying things for the cabin,” says Eli. “We were checking Craigslist along the route and got a washer-dryer in Sacramento and the dishwasher in Reno—we saved a lot of money on appliances.”

Heather and Eli couldn’t have stayed within budget without the help of friends and family. “My brother is a contractor and donated a stove he pulled out of a remodel,” says Heather, whose mom found somebody to donate sod for the yard. “People brought us chop saws and helped in so many instances,” says Eli. “Instead of paying thousands of dollars to professionally remove a clay pipe in the yard, friends of ours rented an excavator and did it themselves, asking only to be paid in beer. We bought them golf memberships for the summer, which was a couple hundred dollars.”

The entire renovation took Heather and Eli four months. “We purchased the cabin in November of 2020 and renovated from January to April of 2021,” says Eli. “It took a lot of patience.” Even so, Heather says she’d do it again. “But there were a lot of lessons learned and there are things I will definitely leave to professionals the next time,” she adds. “I will never put up drywall again,” says Eli. Heather couldn’t agree more: “Nope, no way.”

More Budget Breakdown:

In a Pandemic Pivot, a Couple Take Up Carpentry and Build Their Own Home for $35K

It Took 40 Days and $46K to Build This Tiny House in Texas

Project Credits:

Design & Construction: Heather Hafey and Eli Chamberlin