In March 2021, we bought a piece of land. A south-facing slope strewn with pine trees and thorny blackberry bushes in a corner of New Marlborough, it took in a sweeping view of blue hills in the distance. “This is just the right place to build,” my twelve-year-own son proclaimed, after he clambered up a majestic boulder to see the view. So began a four-year adventure to transform that hillside into a home.
We dreamt of a cottage in the woods. We dreamt of that cottage tucked into nature while still respectful of it, using as little energy and leaving as small a footprint as we could. And finally, we dreamt we would build it all ourselves. We are not a family of contractors, mind you, but rather a couple working in public education in New York, our son attending a public school in the Bronx, and our dog minding the apartment in Washington Heights. What drove us to go on this adventure? Perhaps it was the pandemic, perhaps climate change, perhaps the attraction of the Berkshires paired with the cost of housing; likely, it was a little of each.
By October, after drafting the design and getting feedback from a builder and an architect, we had our sketches: a modern cottage with a 397-square-foot footprint and 120-square-foot loft. The design included various features to maximize energy efficiency, starting with the size: a small house takes less energy to heat and cool. We oriented the house to face due south, where the large windows not only took in that beautiful view but also the sun’s rays. We designed the roof with an outsized 26-inch overhang, angled just right to let in the sun’s rays to warm the house in the winter and cast a shadow to block them in the summer. Opposite that, the north wall was tall and dotted with just a few small windows, a solid mass designed to hold in the temperature. The walls and floor, at six inches thick, along with the foot-thick roof, were designed to pack in enough insulation to trap heat in the winter and cool in the summer.
All these elements in our construction plans—like R (resistance to heat flow) values of 24 in the walls, 27 in the floors, nearly 60 in the roof; air leakage of about 1.65 percent; and our windows’ U-rating of 0.25 and SHGE (Solar Heat Gain Coefficient) of 0.44—are details we had never before known to care about, let alone query, when buying homes. Now that we were doing it ourselves, we learned about them, searched copious databases like the EPA’s of household appliances and the National Fenestration Rating Council’s on windows and doors, and then built these into our design.
Construction began in earnest in the spring of 2021. Setting up our makeshift workspace in the rented garage of a neighbor, we assembled the simple frames for our floors. In a rented UHaul, we lugged those frames to the land where we stuffed them with insulation and sealed them with foam to keep out the air and hardware cloth to keep out the critters. On a cool fall day, we invited a few cousins together to lift and lay the 300-pound floor slabs on the girders. Thus, our house was born.
As the winter of 2022 approached, we swaddled the floor in tarps to protect it from the ice and began work on the walls. In a typical construction, walls would quickly sprout above floors. This was not typical construction. Throughout the winter, we would head up to New Marlborough on weekends, spend our nights in a dog-friendly hotel and days bundled up on our snow-covered land cutting and drilling together 2×6 studs. We divided the walls into eleven frames—each small enough to later be lifted into place individually. One weekend meant one frame. We stood in the snow, drilled on a makeshift workbench, stacked the latest frame on its neighbors, then wrapped them securely in tarps before we drove back to New York. Eleven weekends: Eleven walls.
On a warm spring day in May 2022, we invited friends to our humble plot of land. Together, we raised that jigsaw puzzle of frames, fastened them together, squared them in every direction, and secured them in place.
The space was finally beginning to feel real. Instead of staying in hotels, we would occasionally pitch a tent on our subfloor and take in the view through our skeleton walls. Still, any hint of rain or need to pee was a quick reminder that this was still far from being a home.
We turned a week of summer vacation in July 2022, into the adventure of two people raising 17 20-foot, 100-pound rafter beams into the air by climbing and lifting them up the skeleton of our 15-foot walls, then fastening them in place. A friend took a break from renovating his home in North Adams to help us hoist plywood onto those rafters and secure them in place.
That fall, we added waterproof sheathing and, after putting a two-inch thermal break of insulation on top of the roof, rolled out a waterproof barrier and long strips of interlocking metal roofing. Finally, as the weather began to chill, over a series of weekends in the fall, we went through the deliberate craft of installing doors and windows, for each one stretching waterproof tape around the inside frame, then shifting, shoving, and shimming the window into its place, hammering in the flanges, and covering the outside with another shingled layer of waterproof tape. By the end of 2022, our skeleton of a house had transformed into an encased, waterproof box.
Now it was time to fill that box with the things of life: light, warmth, and water. While the world of DYI is replete with off-gridders, we had no interest in relying on propane and kerosene as off-gridders do, but rather in having as little environmental impact as possible, so we built the entire house to run on energy-efficient electrical utilities that we searched out on those EPA databases: a Steibel tankless water heater, Beko dishwasher, LG washer and ventless dryer, Daikan heat pump, and Aeratron fan. On an October weekend in 2022, my electrical engineer brother got us started on mapping a maze of 700 feet of electrical paths to the bedroom, the bathroom, the living room, and loft, then proceeded along three months of weekends with the task of measuring and stripping hundreds of wires, worming them through studs to junction boxes, testing and re-testing each one, then clamping and fastening each in place to get it to code.
In January 2023, a plumber came to install our pipes, which we designed to carefully include spigots to empty completely so we can easily winterize the house. The next month, an insulation contractor sprayed layers of closed-cell spray foam into our walls and ceiling, helping us achieve those high R values that keep the house temperate and heating and cooling costs low. Finally, we put in a wood stove we had carefully chosen by selecting among the most energy-efficient models that were simultaneously small enough to take little space in our tiny house. With stone tile and a borrowed tile cutter, we made a cozy hearth and, by adding double-wall pipe and a homemade copper heat shield, fit it snugly into a corner.
Utilities in place, we proceeded on the next step of our journey to turn the interior into a living space. The bathroom shower is one example of that journey. First, there was the practical challenge of layers and layers of waterproofing: adding plastic over our wood frame, concrete board over plastic, two coats of waterproof sealant over the concrete board, a layer of micro-cement over the sealant, shingling this over a shower pan over a gasket over a drainpipe. After that, there was the aesthetic: covering that shower pan with cedar boards and those concrete edges with cedar trim to look and feel like the cabin in the woods we had dreamt of.
By 2024, our house did all the things a house should. Still, as we would frequently remind each other, if we had ever stepped foot in a house like this from Air B&B—with running water and electricity, yes, but also with unfinished floors, insulation bubbling from walls, and light bulbs dangling from wires—we would think we had been ripped off. Over the fall of 2023 and winter of 2024, working with a local sawmill in Falls Village, we added pinewood siding and cherry wood floors. With the help of Ikea, we added kitchen cabinets, then used leftover wood from siding and flooring to make shelves. Perhaps it was purely aesthetic, but now our livable box finally felt transformed into a house.
As 2025 arrived, finishing touches inside further transformed the space from livable to lovable. A twisting staircase and catwalk over the kitchen brought you to the loft space. Drawers and a triangular closet tucked under the stair squeezed every bit of use we could get out of the space.
Finally, now that the house was good enough to live inside, we tackled the final touch: a deck nearly as large as the house itself. And so, by May 2025, about a dozen yards from the boulder where we started in February, 2021, we could sit outside and take in the view, the sun, and the little piece of woods in the Berkshires we had transformed into our own.
Here is the completed entry to the house.
And as we make ourselves more comfortable, the interior of the house is beginning to feel more like a home.
