Building Our Small House Katy Morikawa & Michael Whitlock

We broke ground in early spring of 2015, just months before we would quit our jobs and suddenly find ourselves operating on a very slim budget! It’s probably good we didn’t know financial insecurity lay right around the corner or we might not have started.

Michael did most of our site prep with borrowed or rented excavators, including installing a culvert pipe, roughing in the building site, and pulling out a mountain of roots and stumps.

Part Two of the series about how we built our small house. In which we picked a spot and figured out how to finance it.

When we started building our house, we weren't restricted by a tiny budget, but we had fallen in love with my mom’s 1930’s cabin in North Carolina and made it our inspiration. “Let’s build our house just like this,” we said to each other. With modern updates, of course. But our hearts were set and we never really wavered from our vision. At its core, it was a vision of simplicity as well as a core design that works remarkably well for two.