At 68, Jeannette Belliveau sold her Baltimore home and moved to rural Idaho to build her dream homestead from the ground up. With no prior building experience, she relied on YouTube tutorials and the help of neighbors and even local high school students to construct two arched cabins on her 16 acres. She calls the project “the home YouTube built.”
source-image: Kirsten Dirksen
Her first experiment was a 12×24 arched workshop, a smaller prototype that gave her the confidence to launch into two larger 20×24 cabins. She designed the plans herself in SketchUp, sought advice from a builder friend, and raised the main structures barn-raising style in this sparsely populated county with no building codes. Each cabin ultimately cost about $125,000 in labor and materials.
source-image: Kirsten Dirksen
One cabin is her full-time home, oriented east-west to capture sunrises and sunsets and outfitted with clever storage solutions for small-space living. The other, “The Bunkhouse,” is a handcrafted guest rental. Both cabins feature watercolor-like exteriors of multi-colored metal and cedar siding, blending into the wide-open Idaho landscape.
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Her property also includes the prototype workshop (built for $11K) and a chicken coop made from recycled pallets, with raccoon-proof latches, composting litter from shredded cardboard, and a portable “tractor” that allows birds to graze safely.
Jeannette says she still misses parts of her old life in Baltimore, but she is constantly rewarded by incredible sunsets and the “Disney-like” wonder of all the animals that visit.
