This Man Turned an Old Wooden Cabin Into a Home With Just $100

On a trip into the woods, Richard Aiken spotted a humble rotten cabin deep in the woods of Missouri. He realized that there was something incredibly striking about it. He felt drawn to its simplicity. After spending a mere $100 for it, he would have no idea how much the property would change over the next 10 years.

For Aiken though, the accolades and career achievements were something he worked hard for, but his real passion was nature. Having been vegan for a long time, Aiken was always drawn to nature and the wild. The mathematician had always spent lots of time in the local woods and forests, but his family only realized how much he loved nature when he announced that he wanted to live in the wild. Despite being an unexpected decision, it was one that his family honored…

Being the rational man that he was, his family found Aikens more recent fascination with nature unnerving. While enjoying time out is one thing, opting to move out into the woods was another subject altogether. They were an affluent family and that meant living in a certain way. While they were ready to accept that he loved nature a lot, the idea of him simply packing up and moving into the woods was a bit much to handle. Ultimately though, it was his decision…

However, Aiken’s family couldn’t really do much to stop him. Aiken was a grown man and the main breadwinner of the house. If he decided to pursue his dream, his family would have to either support his decision or simply let him go. While Aiken understood that he was already 65 years old and that surviving out in nature wasn’t that easy, he ultimately decided to put his foot down and stick to the plan. There was just one problem…

For Richard, one of the main factors driving his decision was that he wanted to retire in the wild but planning for retirement isn’t easy. Even if you’re a qualified person and earn a good salary, it’s not easy moving into this phase of your life. While Aiken wasn’t necessarily poor, he didn’t have a lot of cash to support him without a steady income. Buying land and a home were out of the option. Aiken would have to consider all options…

They say it’s often more about who you know than what. This turned out to be true when a friend approached Richard, offering him a cabin in the woods. Knowing that Richard was cash strapped, he wanted to help him out by offering him the cabin for free. Being a respectful person, Aiken accepted but offered to pay him a small sum of $100 for the gesture. However, when Richard first saw the cabin, he realized why it was so cheap!

Although this man, who Richard referred to as Billy, was so helpful towards the early stages of this project, he wasn’t going to just give the cabin away for nothing. Well, technically speaking. He actually did tell Richard that he could have it for nothing but under one condition. “You can have it for nothin’ if you haul away the junk,” Billy said. This seemed like a reasonable catch for a free cabin. But then Richard saw it for the first time…

When Richard eventually decided to go out and see the cabin first-hand, he realized why his friend had been selling it so cheaply. The cabin, if you could still call it that, looked more like a pile of firewood than anything else. The wooden planks had started to rot and time had taken its toll on the small structure. According to Richards daughter, “This (was) the original 1830’s log cabin he started out with”. Despite being a wreck, Richard had a plan for the 200-year-old cabin…

While others would have taken one look at the disheveled cabin in the woods and simply walked on, Richard saw a lot of opportunity in the structure. He considered it a ‘real find’ and remained very optimistic by saying, “It was two stories, with a very large ‘pen’ of about 21-22 feet square,” and that “The material was massive white oak beams, hand hewn and squared with half dovetail notches. Most logs were in excellent condition.” He had committed himself to renovating the ‘unrenovatable’…

If you start in the top left-hand image and go clockwise, you’ll start by looking at the north side of the cabin, followed by the south side, the west side and finally the east side. The west side once had a window and the east side was where an old fireplace once stood. This was plenty to inspire Richard and give him an idea of how he wanted to lay out the new cabin. But he also had to deal with the inside…

Upon closer inspection, Richard realized how much junk there was in the cabin. Most of it was just old, rotten wood and before he could do anything else, he would have to clear all of it. “[The cabin] was a trash bin, so [Billy] wanted to get all the trash out,” he said. “I agreed to remove not just the cabin, but all the junk. I removed all the junk, took it to a dump and left it pretty pristine.”

Naturally, the inside of the derelict cabin was even more chaotic than the outside of it. Starting from the top left and going clockwise, the inside can be seen looking toward the fireplace – an area that Richard was probably most excited to renovate. Next came the inside part looking toward the window, followed by the staircase leading to the second floor. Finally, the part facing the front of the cabin can be seen. Richard certainly had a lot of work to do.

It was amazing that the cabin had remained, for the most part, intact over the years. The main reason for this was that it had been covered with clapboard. As opposed to using crude logs to build the old cabin, clapboard was believed to be a more civilized alternative. Not only did Richard need to get rid of all the junk upon Billy’s request, but he would also need to tear away all of the clapboards in order to properly dismantle the place.

Richard never doubted that the project was going to take a lot of time and energy. Based on the condition of the cabin, he knew that this was going to be a tough project. At first, his family was skeptical, but after a while, they decided to lend a hand. Having his children on board added some much-needed muscle to the project and while progress was slow, it was steady. However, more problems with the cabin soon became apparent. They had a long way to go…

One thing that Richard spent a lot of time doing was meticulously labeling every single log. He assigned directions to each log depending on where they were situated. “The system I chose was two directions, first the side on the north, south, east, and west, and secondly the direction that log was ‘pointed’ to,” Richard wrote. Also, there was a specific number-letter code for each log. For example, if a log was ES 7, it meant that it is the seventh log on the east side.

One issue that Richard faced while deconstructing the old cabin to make way for the new one was how to remove the old oak beams. “How does one remove the 20 foot heavy 12 inch by 12 inch oak beams from the top down?” he asked himself. After consulting a friend of his, who proposed what he described as a “brute force method,” he ultimately decided to go with it. He knew that he wouldn’t be able to do this alone.

The friend in question, who goes by the name of Two Bears, helped Richard dismantle the beams from the top down by simply poking them off, almost like a game of Jenga. Richard was very skeptical about the idea, especially because he didn’t want to break anything. “If they break, that means they were too rotten anyway,” Two Bears said. In the end, he placed his faith in him and nearly all of the logs made it down in one piece.

It didn’t take long for Richard to develop an idea of where exactly he wanted the cabin to stand. For a start, he knew that he needed it to be elevated above any potential swamp areas. However, he did want it close to some sort of body of water. “In our case, the site was about 20 feet above a marshy area and remarkably had a hidden spring along the east side of the cabin,” he wrote. Richard also wanted a fair amount of open space too.

In terms of the environment that Richard was building his cabin in, he wanted the front of it to face north in order to have a pleasant view. However, probably the most exciting thing about where the cabin is located is the fact that it is right in the middle of the woods. Richard did admit though that they had lost some trees during the reconstruction. Not to mention a tree that specifically needed to be removed because it was looming over the cabin location.

One of Richard’s main goals in the restoration process was to try and create a basement. The idea was that this could be used to store essential items like food and supplies more easily. However, pretty soon after excavating 6 feet deep, the family hit solid bedrock. Richard then realized that his only option was to build the cabin above ground in order to maximize on space and structural integrity. Being a clever mathematician, Richard devised a pretty ingenius solution!

Aiken’s idea was to raise the cabin instead and use white oak to help create the floor of the structure. While Richard was disappointed about the fact that he would have to cut down a number of trees to build his cabin, he had come too far to stop now and was making good progress. Pretty soon, the cabin started looking more like a home – but Richard and his family were about to make a discovery that would make them the talk of the town…

Things were already tough enough during Richards restoration challenge, but they made a discovery that soon forced them to make some critical decisions. It turned out that the cabin was resting on a hidden water table and as they excavated, they learned that a secret lake had been lying just underneath the lake. Rather than being disappointed, Richard decided to install a small dock – now they had a family lake! But pretty soon, an even bigger problem would become apparent to Richard during the renovation…

When it came to building the foundation of the cabin, Richard knew that it needed to be sturdy and immovable. The way he started the foundation was by digging holes three-feet deep before placing flat stones on top of them. He did acknowledge that many people who have built cabins in the past have not resorted to this, especially if the ground is already firm enough. However, he wasn’t planning on taking any risks. Next was the bedrock…

The next stage was to see how deep the bedrock was from where they would build the cabin. Richard knew that generally, bedrock in Missouri is about five feet under the ground and so this was enough of an indicator to make him confident that they could build the cabin on top of the bedrock. This also meant that Richard would be able to construct a basement. To successfully do this, he extended the foundation walls to a further one foot above the ground.

Now that the foundation of the cabin had been established, Richard was now in a position where he could start building the new cabin on top of it. Over the poured foundation, he added masoned stones and processed oak on top of them. Richard regretfully chopped down eight oak trees for this part of the project but knew that it would be necessary to give the floor of his home the sturdiness it required. After just a couple of days, a cabin started to take shape…

After just a few days, it was already clear where the entrance would stand and Richard couldn’t help but document his progress through the power of photography. This photo shows Richard’s son standing in the area where the front entrance will be. A basic outline of the door can be seen. “We have placed the first couple of logs around the structure according to the labeling,” he wrote. This would prove to be one of the easier stages of the project.

After removing the old oak beams from the derelict cabin, Richard had come full circle and now needed to work out how to lift oak beams onto his cabin. He didn’t want to spend a ton of money on a crane and he knew that it would be difficult to operate one in this location. In the end, he decided to go with a manual heavy-duty material lift. Before he knew it, Richard would have a fully-formed roof and a fully-shaped cabin.

One process that Richard knew he’d need to do at some point during the reconstruction was something called “chinking.” This is basically where one fills the gaps of a cabin with whatever works. At first, the family tried using “backer rods” but they ultimately proved to be too expensive. Styrofoam also proved to be challenging. Chicken wire was ultimately the material that Richard went with. It was cheap, malleable, and worked well with daubing material, which is the second part of filling the gaps.

While the idea of renovating an old family cabin may sound like a fun exercise for a family, the truth was that Richard’s family had lost interest. They had started to complain about the work and seemed to lose interest in the project altogether. Pretty soon, his family decided to stop helping him and his wife said that she didn’t want to invest any more money into the project. However, Richard persevered an pretty soon, his time and effort would pay off…

With all the effort that Richard and his family were putting into the cabin, pretty soon it had started taking shape. Richard had done his research before setting out on the project and had wanted to recreate the log cabin in am traditional 1830 style. Despite all the troubles and hardships Richard and his family had faced over the course of the project, it started to feel worthwhile as the cabin took form. All in all, he claims to have spent between $30,000 and $40,000 on the restoration project…

Because Richard was a dedicated nature-lover, he wanted as much of the cabin to be built in an environmentally friendly way as possible. One technique they used was to utilize wood from oak trees that had already fallen. A good example of this was the beautiful staircase that Richard had crafted out of fallen oak wood and he paid special attention to the door, which he had custom designed by a carpenter. But that was far from their greatest achievement on the project…

Richard realized that in order to live comfortably, he would need a source of heat for the cold and cooking. So, over the 10-year restoration period, he designed his own fireplace, based on those of the 19th century. “[The Rumford hearth] is a brilliant design widely adopted to optimize heat transfer within a room,” Richard said. “The hearth is even with the flooring so that moving a chair or stool close to the fire is facilitated. The hearth is wide and deep for cooking.”

Richard’s next big issue was creating enough light in the cabin for it to be liveable in. He opted to go with candles instead of light fittings to save on costs and be more eco-friendly. He even went as far as creating a small loft under the newly built ceiling as a separate sleeping area. Not only was it a comfortable and relatively sizeable area, but it also gave access to a small window which helped to provide the cabin with more ambient lighting.

As Richard neared completion on his cabin project, he received a heartwarming gift from a local Amish family that had watched him build the cabin over the last 10 years. They created a beautiful, handmade dining table for Richard to put in the cabin so that his family could enjoy meals there. The table fitted perfectly and was easy to move around. Eventually though, Richard had to point out that the table was not a housewarming gift after all…

After spending the last 10 years of his life renovating the cabin, Richard announced that he would no longer be moving into the cabin. He had set out with that in mind, but over the course of the project, decided that it would be best to stay in civilization and use the cabin as a family holiday home instead. Rather than a permanent home, Richards family now had an awesome vacation spot and second home. The Aiken family then decided to share their story with the world…

Aiken realized that it would be a shame to keep this amazing story entirely to himself and decided to share the story of his new homes transformation with the world. Not being too savvy with social media, Richard simply started sharing posts of his cabin on his Instagram account. His first post was one of his family enjoying a Thanksgiving meal in the cabin. However, it wouldn’t take long until the ‘vegan hillbilly’ became a viral sensation…

As Richard kept sharing pictures of his cabin project on various online platforms like Reddit and Instagram, the internet fell in love with his story. He posted pictures bout the cabin before and after the renovation and spoke about his views as a vegan and environmentally-friendly building processes. A lot of people were inspired by Aikens idea and most were simply blown away by the radical transformation that the cabin had undergone over the last 10 years. Richard’s story had become a viral sensation!

Richard and his family had spent the last 10 years toiling, sweating and making sacrifices to ensure that the cabin would be completed. Now they could finally say the job was done and that they’d managed to achieve something quite remarkable as a family. What was once a mess in the woods was now a beautiful new home – and one that architects and builders would be proud of! However, that wasn’t the only thing that had undergone amazing transformations over the years…

The cabin had undergone some pretty impressive changes over the course of the last 10 years and Richard was really proud with the final result. The cabin looked amazing and all for only $100! But that wasn’t the only thing that had changed over the restoration process. Richard and his family had also become much stronger as a unit by learning how to work together to overcome challenges and complete something creative. “I hope I shall never finish working with this log cabin,” he said.

Over the course of the last 10 years, Richard and his family had constructed a log cabin that could be lived in throughout the year. The cabin had been built sturdily and would be able to handle, rain, snow and even the heat of summer pretty well. Because no one lives on the premises at all times, Richard let the Amish family take care of the property. He visits the cabin once a week and often spends time with family over special occasions.

Richard Aiken is a man who has known quite a lot of success over his life. Being a full-time academic, Aiken had managed to achieve quite a long list of accolades over the course of his career. Not only had he managed to raise and nurture a loving family, but he was also well-respected in his local town of Springfield. He is considered a renaissance man and has managed to earn two doctorates, a medical degree and even published a book, The New Ancestral Diet.