Budget Breakdown: If You Love Plywood, Peek Inside This $209K Tiny Cabin in Ontario

Tucked into a cluster of old-growth trees and just a hop, skip, and jump from the shores of Sturgeon Lake in Ontario, Canada, this 260-square-foot retreat feels a lot like a tree house, with all the comforts of home. "We wanted it to blend with the trunks of the trees, to feel like part of the surroundings," designer Chris Van Lierop says.

Van Lierop’s firm, Home by Tim + Chris, designed the getaway for Katelyn Mills, her husband, and their two children, who live full-time in Brooklyn, New York, and have been escaping to the Kawartha Lakes area for as long as they can remember. "It’s a meeting place for our family and friends in the summer," Katelyn says. "My husband’s family has been coming for generations."

When they purchased the property, set just down the road from family, in 2020, it came with a three-bedroom, one-bathroom cottage, a one-room log cabin, and a shed. They planned to occupy the main cottage, use the log cabin as an office, and replace the shed with a guesthouse for visiting friends and family.

The Mills family spent three summers on the property before they were ready to build, and in 2023 they reached out to Van Lierop and Tim Wisener to create a compact structure with a budget of $300,000 CAD (about $216,000 USD). "The community is small and tight-knit, and Tim and Chris have been a part of it for a long time," Katelyn says. "They’ve done projects on my husband’s parents’ place, as well as renovations on the main house on our property."