They found a small, affordable cabin on an island. What can go wrong?

For an escape in the San Juan Islands, a little over two hours north of Seattle, Joe Herrin knew he wouldn’t need much.

Growing up, the highlight of each summer was a two-week boat trip to the islands near the Canadian border, where his family slept within the confines of a 26-foot-long ship’s hull. Later, when he was a young adult, he assumed that he would have a boat of his own.

But soon after he met his future wife, Belinda Bail, he took her to see Orcas Island, the largest of those islands in northwestern Washington, by ferry and by car. “And I discovered that there is much more to the islands than can be seen from the shoreline,” said Mr. Herrin, 57, a founding director of Heliotrope Architects.

“He took me to his favorite place and I fell in love too,” said Bail, 56, an architect who works for the real estate investment company. BentallGreenOak. “I’ll never forget the first time I drove through Orcas Island, past this huge state park, Moran State Park, and next to this beautiful little lake, Cascade Lake. It was a truly magical place.”

In the years that followed, the couple married and purchased a home in Seattle that had belonged to Mr. Herrin’s grandparents, making piecemeal renovations as finances allowed. In early 2002, they were expecting their first daughter, Audrey, who is now 21 years old.

It was then that Mr. Herrin suddenly felt compelled to look for a holiday home on the islands.

“It was financially stupid,” he said, since he and Ms. Bail were already overwhelmed by the Seattle renovation and had little savings. “But I just wanted to give my kids something like what I had as a kid.”

With a loan from Mrs. Bail’s parents, they began looking for the least expensive home they could buy on Orcas Island. What they found was a 1960s A-frame built from a kit that was part of a condominium association, providing nine owners with 50 feet of oceanfront each, on 36 shared acres. The cabin was about 825 square feet, including an open sleeping loft. And little by little it sank into the earth, because it had no foundation.

The sale price was $350,000. The couple offered $275,000, the most they could pay. They received no response. The cabin was still on the market in the fall of 2002, so they made the same offer again, and this time, the seller accepted.

Over the next two decades, they worked to improve it. The first big project: putting a foundation under the cab and replacing the single-pane windows with double-pane ones.

“We had to refinance our house to get enough money to put the foundation under it,” Herrin said. “After the contractor finished, we had spent every penny we had, so the only way to go any further was to do it ourselves.”

So the couple began hosting periodic “work parties”: weekends with friends where they provided lodging, food, beer and wine in exchange for free labor. They built a new deck; he ripped out the shag carpet and laid the pine floor; he painted the wooden beams inside; whitewashed panels; and planted a garden.

“It was great,” Mr. Herrin said. “People loved it”.

Along the way, they welcomed a second daughter, Marina, who is now 13 years old. And as their finances improved, they began hiring contractors to do bigger jobs.

They removed the old roof to install better insulation and then added a metal roof. They cut out a tall skylight that rises from the kitchen to the sleeping loft. They added a built-in bed with built-in storage drawers in the sleeping loft and a built-in sofa at the bottom of the stairs to maximize space in the living room.

More recently they expanded (slightly) with a small addition to the rear of the house. At 48 square feet, it provides a convenient entrance and a more comfortable shower. They clad this section with cedar siding that their contractor cut from a log he found floating on the water. At the same time, they updated the kitchen with simple birch plywood cabinets and laminate countertops.

The total cost of the improvements before the addition was only $70,000, Herrin said, because they did much of the work themselves. The kitchen addition and renovation, completed in 2021, cost an additional $100,000.

But even after all the work, “what we like best is simplicity,” Bail said, noting that they never aspired to create anything more than a functional beach cabana.

“It is the place that is permanent for our family,” he added. “We could move and change houses in the city. But the cabin is the special place for our family, where we will always return to spend quality time together and share memories, friends, family and food.”

Living Small is a bi-weekly column exploring what it takes to lead a simpler, more sustainable, or more compact life.

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