Patrick Hutchison did what many people only dream of doing: He bought a ramshackle cabin in the woods and quit his day job as a copywriter in Seattle to renovate it.
“I was just sort of …
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Patrick Hutchison did what many people only dream of doing: He bought a ramshackle cabin in the woods and quit his day job as a copywriter in Seattle to renovate it.
“I was just sort of going to a job that I didn’t really care about and coming home and, you know, eat, sleep, go to a job I didn’t really care about,” the 39-year-old Tacoma resident said in a phone interview. “I think I was looking for some other thing to grasp onto that kind of felt like I was doing something with my life that I was interested in or excited about or proud of.”
But while living his dream, he wrote about his six-year adventure, sending a friend in California tidbits every week about the latest in his remodeling adventure and reading about his friend’s work restoring an old boat.
Those stories created the backbone for his debut memoir, “Cabin: Off the Grid Adventures with a Clueless Craftsman,” released on Dec. 3 by St. Martin’s Press. And thanks to Centralia’s Jan Leth, Hutchison will be a featured speaker at both the American Association of University Women’s (AAUW) Evening with Authors and the Southwest Washington Writers Conference in September.
The Today Show anchors described Hutchison’s memoir as hilarious, touching and beautiful.
“It’s about fixing up a place, but it’s really about connecting with yourself and with nature,” bestselling author Isaac Fitzgerald said on the show.
The New York Times called the book “funny and thoughtful” while The Washington Post described it as an “equally motivating and relatable book.”
“Embarking on remote-home improvement took him and his buddies six years, and changed his life: Once a copywriter, he’s now a full-time carpenter,” The Los Angeles Times wrote. “He never turns down a beer, or a chance to laugh at himself.”
Although he was born in Olympia, Hutchison grew up in Chehalis, attended St. Joseph Catholic School and graduated from W.F. West High School in 2004. His father, the late Lewis Hutchison, a judge for the Washington Board of Industrial Appeals, was elected as a Lewis County District Court judge but in early February 2003 passed away from a heart attack at 60, only a month after taking office. His mother, Joann (Franklin) Hutchison, a retired nursing manager at Providence, serves on the South Puget Sound Community Mission Board. Patrick has two older half-sisters — Jill and Nicole — and an older half-brother, Lewis. He credits his parents and siblings for helping him develop his rich sense of humor.
During high school, Patrick played soccer and golfed for W.F. West, and those years were OK, he said.
“If I had a time machine, it’s not where I would go back,” he said.
After graduating, he headed north to the University of Washington in Seattle, where he intended to pursue a pre-med career with the goal of becoming a doctor. Why?
“I think maybe I just wanted to be a doctor because they made the most money in the game of ‘Life,’” he said.
But once at UW, he quickly realized his fellow pre-med students possessed a passion for medicine, which he didn’t have. He considered becoming a physical therapist and worked a summer at a clinic. But then he simply took classes from professors he liked, primarily in anthropology and history.
“And then I was like, ‘oh, there is no more college left. What do I get now?’”
He acquired enough credits for a degree in anthropology but lacked History 101 for a double major in history, so he worked as a bartender, delivered sandwiches on his bike to frat houses, and changed the diapers on baby monkeys in the primatology lab during graveyard shift (which gave him bizarre dreams) while taking the introductory history class with a bunch of freshmen. He graduated in 2010 with a double major.
“Not very employable, but I enjoyed the classes,” he said.
Hutchison loved to travel, starting with a study-abroad trip to China and then backpacking through Europe with a buddy. He wrote “long-winded emails back home,” and an uncle suggested he consider travel writing. He pitched stories to newspaper and magazine editors, hoping to travel and write for their publications and eventually leaned more into freelance journalism.
“I quickly realized that if you say you’re a journalist, or if you’re doing a story, it sort of unlocked these doors to all of these strange places and strange people that you would never otherwise have access to, and I just loved that,” Hutchison said.
He started writing for free and, while living in Argentina, wrote thousands of $15 articles over a year for ehow.com.
“It was just a bizarre way of life, but I slowly started getting more into journalism,” he said. “I just love the places that it took me.”
He pitched stories to editors at Esquire and other publications, offering to write a story on rhino poachers in South Africa or another interesting topic, but received little response. At the same time, he built up his copywriting experience. He wrote for Seattle Weekly and Seattle magazine and eventually started working full time as a copywriter for a startup tech company in Seattle in about 2012, and a few years later, started working as a copywriter for Expedia.
But about that time, he stopped to consider where he was at in life. His peers were finishing master’s degrees or settling down.
“I think it kind of feels a little bit like musical chairs, or at least it did to me,” Hutchison said. “I was just so desperate to sort of settle into something. I’m just sort of at a desk writing advertising copy for plumbers.”
He started looking at houses to buy, but in Seattle, he couldn’t touch anything for less than $200,000, so he kept zooming out on Redfin to find affordable houses farther away from the city. He saw cool cabins and toyed with the idea of buying one but then gave up on the idea.
Then one night, after a robbery at the house he shared with roommates and a break-in of his car, he searched on Craigslist to see if anyone was selling his stolen laptop, television, bicycle or other items.
“On a total whim, I just typed in cabin, just to see what happened,” he said. “And the first result that popped up was this picture of this little, tiny 10-by-12 cabin in Index (Washington) for $7,500.”
He never recovered his stolen merchandise, but the next day, he visited the cabin on a lane called Wit’s End Road nestled in woods above the Skykomish River on the western slope of the Cascades in Snohomish County and bought what he described as an “oversize doghouse.”
“I had no idea what I was doing, which in hindsight was probably the best,” Hutchison said. “Because if I’d known anything about building, when I went up and looked at the cabin, I would have seen all the problems with it ... I didn’t know enough to know what was really bad about it.”
Instead, he dove in, hanging out with friends on weekends and fixing the cabin. They added a deck, an outhouse and a driveway.
“I didn’t have any tools,” he said. “I didn’t know anything about building.”
But, he said, “I had this compulsion to keep learning about it and coming up with new projects to do. I couldn’t think about anything else.”
He shifted to freelance copywriting, found a job with Homegrown Trailers building retro wood camping trailers and did carpentry and copyediting for its glamping (glamorous camping) sister company, Roam Beyond, in Montana.
“Working with professionals, I’ve probably learned about 10 times as fast as I did just, you know, watching This Old House,” Hutchison said.
And he started writing about his journey.
“I was writing about it pretty much instantly,” Hutchison said, noting that he commiserated with a good friend in California, Bryan Schatz, a fellow writer, about what they were doing with their lives.
“We were supposed to be like flying all over the world, doing all these rad stories,” he said. “We really wanted to have an outlet for writing about things that we were passionate about.”
So, they decided to hold each other accountable by sending pages to each other every week with writing that excited them. For Hutchison, it focused on his work with the cabin. For Schatz, it was fixing an old boat in a marina in Oakland. Hutchison hoped his efforts might someday make a book.
“I thought if I couldn’t even get magazine editors to respond to me, the idea that I could sell a book seemed twice as unimaginable,” he said.
Eventually, Schatz moved to Washington, and they both quit their desk jobs to build careers as carpenters. They built a cabin from scratch in the same neighborhood.
“We quit our jobs and built one from scratch, and we wrote about that experience for Outside Magazine,” Hutchison said, just before the dawn of the coronavirus pandemic. “I think this idea of just getting out of the city and building a cabin was just especially poignant at that time.”
The popularity of the magazine article prompted him to consider pitching a book about the cabin. He contacted a ghostwriting client who recommended an agent, Farley Chase. He queried the agent, who signed him as a client. They shopped the memoir to publishers, received several offers, and accepted one from St. Martin’s. Hutchison received a five-figure advance.
He scrambled to pull together his journal entries into the book about the renovation of the cabin and revamping of his career path from copywriting to carpentry.
“It was fun to kind of juxtapose the things I was doing back then with the sort of perspective of knowing kind of where it took me,” Hutchison said. “I took about four or five months off to take all those early writings and organize them and sort of get them into outline for the book.”
He worked on edits from the publisher and discovered it takes several years to birth a book baby.
“I think that it’s a strange thing to go through from the excitement I felt when my agent said that he’d represent me, and the excitement that happened when we sold the book, and now that’s almost three years later.”
When people congratulate him on his new book, Hutchison said he thinks “new book? It’s all I’ve been dealing with three years now.”
“It’s a little overwhelming, for sure,” he said. “But certainly I feel very lucky, and I think that I’m very fortunate to have everybody at St Martin’s and my agent, who I think really sort of lauded it and pushed it to their contacts at different places.”
Today, he works for Wild Tree Woodworks in Seattle building custom-designed tree houses and lives in Tacoma with his wife, Kate, who he married last June at Millersylvania State Park, and their black lab, Marge.
He’s taken a break from writing, but ideas are starting to pop up again.
“The joke that I like to tell people is that it took me quitting writing to get a book deal,” he said. “When I quit I was just like, I’m not going to try any kind of writing anymore. I never thought that the book would be successful, either. So I thought, I’ll just do this one thing, and that’ll be my sort of like farewell to writing. I’ll do this book, and then that’ll be it.
“But I really enjoyed it, and it’s done well.”
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Julie McDonald, a personal historian from Toledo, may be reached at memoirs@chaptersoflife.com.