Single Mom Builds a Cabin, Rebuilds Her Family

This is the house that Kelley Lewis built.

But she likes to call it the tiny house that built her.

At 32, she’s divorced with three young children. Her story isn’t so different than many women’s; she’s been on the verge of giving up more than once. But those moments seem to galvanize her in extraordinary ways.

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Kelley Lewis with her kids: Norah, the youngest, left; Casey; and Trent, the oldest, right. All pictures via Kelley Lewis and her Cabin Chick website except for a few screenshots from the video, which are noted. Click on any photo for a slideshow.

About three years ago, she literally began rebuilding her life, with her own two hands and the help of her three children. Her marriage had ended just a few weeks before her daughter was born.

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She’d grown up in Ohio an overachiever with a great GPA, she tells Yahoo Real Estate. What she calls her “first entrepreneurial venture” was at age 13. She’d studied piano but observed that harpists were in demand and scarce, so she added that instrument to her skill set. She booked gigs at senior centers and eventually at weddings. “I loved working for myself,” she says.

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“Where other girls want shoes, I want power tools.”

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Like mother, like daughter. This picture and the one directly above it are video screenshots.

And she was always handy: “Where other girls want shoes, I want power tools.” When she went to college, she discovered that her room was a “basement dungeon,” so she set to work, buying herself a jigsaw and building herself a four-poster tiki-hut bed and a tiki bar that were the envy of her roommates.

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Kelley works on the cabin.

Her 20s were “all about trying to stay above water,” Kelley says. She graduated with a degree in social work and went on to work on her master’s, but she had a hard time finding work for more than $10 an hour. Still, she managed in her early 20s to buy a 1,000-square-foot house in Bexley, Ohio, outside Columbus, where homes sell for about $100,000. “I like real estate and investment,” she says. “I think that’s a smart way to spend money.”

[Click here for a slideshow of Kelley Lewis’ cabin.]

And then, when she’d just turned 24, she became pregnant. She married the father five months later. On their one-week “anniversary,” he told his pregnant wife that their marriage had been a mistake — though they would eventually spend five years “trying to make something that wasn’t meant to be, meant to be.”

Their son was born in January 2008. As many mothers know, those early months are a struggle. And she desperately wanted to stay home with baby Trent, as her own mother had with her, but she knew she couldn’t afford not to work. When Trent was about 9 months old, her sense of “complete and utter drowning” came to a crisis point. “I was losing myself and my identity and everything around me. … Everything I thought I was going to be, I wasn’t.”

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Trent and Norah in the cabin’s loft.

Lewis was hospitalized for acute depression in the fall of 2008.

The crisis initiated a kind of epiphany, “putting the things that were most important to me in perspective.” She realized “I had no game plan anymore.”

She needed one.

So, from her hospital bed, she started reading a library book on how to start your own business. When she was discharged, she was armed with a business plan that became BungalowBranch, the nation’s first — and thus far only — in-home child care company and franchise.

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Kelley spent the next several years building BungalowBranch while managing her failing marriage and trying to figure out who she was as an adult.

“For a long time I was working on a business so I could live larger,” she says. She’d look around at her friends and neighbors and she’d feel that she was falling behind — even though she knew she didn’t want the same things they had.

“Man, you get lost in that really quickly!” she says now.

[Click here for a slideshow of Kelley Lewis’ cabin.]

“I typically felt really isolated and really segregated, and when you live in a community like that, it’s hard to see” what’s outside, she says. But “10 bedrooms, so that you never see your kids, is not what I want.”

Still she strove. Her second son was born four years ago.

About a year after that, her daughter was born. But it was Kelley’s own father who held her hand as she gave birth, not her husband. Her broken-down marriage had finally given out for good a few weeks earlier.

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And that’s how the end of one story became the beginning of another.

Maybe it sounds silly now, but when she was pregnant with their daughter, she’d hoped her husband would get her a piece of jewelry to honor her accomplishments. She was disappointed because she’d looked to him for a sense of her own self-worth, but he didn’t or couldn’t supply it.

When the marriage collapsed, “I got the necklace, but I also bought a piece of land,” Kelley says. She wasn’t even sure what she’d do with her lakeside acre at first. She just liked the symbolism, a place of her own where she could start over.

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“I got the necklace, but I also bought a piece of land.”

Adventure, exploration, nature — those are the things that ground her, she has written on her blog, and those were the elements she needed to rebuild, “not just for myself, but for the experience of family I wanted to create.”

Her project started with one given: She’d need permits for a structure over 200 square feet.

She didn’t want to hassle with permits.

[Click here for a slideshow of Kelley Lewis’ cabin.]

Sheds might have been a natural jumping-off point, and she says she did consider buying something from Lowe’s or maybe an Amish shed, but she found that they’re “pretty expensive for what they are.”

So she began looking into tiny houses. Which is when everything changed — that is, when everything came together.

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As Kelley tells it, the appeal of the tiny-home movement isn’t purely economic or architectural; it’s “that what you have has intention behind it, not just buying more crap.”

“This community, they don’t care about those things,” she says. “They kind of applaud you for what you’ve overcome, regardless of what it is.”

Besides, with “a beautiful space and a well-intentioned space,” she says, “you can make everything perfect.”

The lake cabin project braided together loose ends for Kelley: self-sufficiency. Creativity. Confidence. Independence. Action. She discovered, or rediscovered, that “I love building, I love creating, I love designing.”

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She ruled out a tiny house on a trailer, because she had land and no need to skirt municipal rules, settling instead for what she calls a “‘let’s do this bigger, better and cooler’ shed/cabin.” She drew up sketches, with a design loosely based on HGTV’s 2011 Dream Home.

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The initial sketch.

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Now she sells the plans on her site – usually for $90, but currently half off. And she donates 50 percent of the profits to Pencils of Promise to build a school.

She hired out the framing, foundation and electrical — “I don’t want roofs falling down on anyone, or fires starting because I wired something incorrectly” — but has done virtually everything else herself, sourcing many materials from Habitat for Humanity’s Re-Store and Craigslist and paying cash for everything. (The land itself was $70,000; she obtained a 10-year low-interest mortgage from the owner, no banks involved.)

The cabin is off the grid, with power from a generator. She says she’d love to go solar but it’s expensive, and there’s not a lot of information out there for consumer installation rather than commercial; it’s on her lengthy list of things to learn next. She can’t speak highly enough of Menards, the Midwestern home improvement chain, which has actual plumbers and electricians available to help; that’s how she acquired her shallow well system, which pulls water from the lake (private, and therefore subject to fewer restrictions) for washing but not drinking.

[Click here for a slideshow of Kelley Lewis’ cabin.]

Although the cabin is still very much a work in progress, that’s just fine with Kelley. She thinks of it not just as a mere weekend getaway but as a monument to the family that she and her children are building together — and they’re a work in progress, too.

“This came from such a difficult place in my life, and for it to just blossom into something beautiful has been amazing,” she says.

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The two pictures above and the three below are screenshots from the video.

She takes the kids fishing in the lake, or they just hang out at the cabin. And they help, too, when they’re not distracting her. “My 6-year-old can help frame walls, my 3-year-old can help paint, and my 2-year-old loves to help clean,” she wrote last year in a guest post for Tiny House Design.

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It took her a long time, but she’s learned that “simplifying things opens up horizons of new adventures,” Kelley says. She doesn’t feel the pressure for more, more, more the way she used to.

“Maybe this is enough,” she says.

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More Living the Dream on Yahoo Real Estate:

The Family That Lives in a School Bus (37 photos)
In Off-Grid Yurt, Montana Couple Live ‘On Our Own Terms’ (56 photos)
Vacationing Family Stumbles Across Abandoned French Chateau, Decides to Restore It (53 photos)
Yahoo Real Estate’s archive of “Living the Dream” stories