Our cabin is located in very northern Wisconsin only a few miles from Lake Superior. After purchasing it at the beginning of the year, we decided to continue running it as a short term rental through 2025. Starting in 2026, we’ll be transitioning to only using for personal use. I hope to spend a great deal of time at the cabin and in the area. I’ve always loved doing projects and the cabin provides a lot of opportunity to do so. As I’m hoping to spend my weeks up north, I need to build out an office that allows me to work remotely.
Because we still have guests through out the remainder of the year, I haven’t been working on anything within the main home. I also don’t want to invest in a fancy office with strangers using the space. After some consideration, I decided to adapt the former hot tub outbuilding into an office.
Before we purchased the cabin, this building housed a hot tub but during the purchase process, the hot tub died and we didn’t have it replaced. While a hot tub would be nice, it’s a lot to maintain at a place we aren’t at year round. I didn’t know what to do with the building. It is well constructed, insulated and has regular four-season windows. It certainly can be used as a three season porch but has no climate control or running water. It does have electrical, including 240v for the hot tub.
After having my entire family stay up for a week, we found it hard to have 10 people, 4 dogs and 2 people trying to work from home all in one place. There wasn’t a good quiet place to take a work call. This led me to consider the outbuilding for an office.
Plans
The space is 10 foot by 10 foot. The plan is to create a workspace for remote work with a great view of the valley we overlook on the south side of the building.
The west side of the building will be home to a PTAC self-contained heat pump and electric heater and shelving for books or other office related items.
The north side of the building will inherit a trundle bed that is currently in the loft of the cabin. We’ll move this once we are done renting.
The east side is the sliding entry door.
Flooring
The current flooring is outdoor carpet. It has absorbed years of chlorine from the hot tub. It smells pretty strongly of it. I plan to remove all the carpet and wash down the subflooring to see if that will remove the smell. If need be, I’ll replace the subflooring. I’m going to install hardwood or laminate flooring to make it easy to clean. Being an outbuilding, there is no mud room. I will put a rug over it to make it a bit more comfortable.
Desk
I have already installed an adjustable height standing desk in the space. I bought motorized legs from eBay and affixed an old desktop I had laying around at home. Eventually, I’ll build a more permanent desk with drawers and additional storage, built in electrical outlooks and a place to store a desktop computer.
The legs are similar to the ones below. They seem to work great and were less than 200 dollars.
Bed
The trundle bed will be for guests to stay in the outbuilding if they desire their own space. It’s a bit of a day bed so will also be a nice place to read a book. I’ll need to install some shades on the windows to provide some privacy.
Here’s the bed with the current office setup in the loft.
Climate Control
I’ll be cutting a hole in the west side of the structure to install a PTAC. These self-contained climate control units are typically found in hotel rooms. You can purchase ones that include both a heat pump and an electric heater. The heat pump will work well when the climate is mild or in the summer to cool down the building. Being far northern Wisconsin, the winters get very cold and, if I desire to use the building during this time, the electric heater will be necessary to make the room comfortable. More PTACs are more than enough for a smaller space such as this one. Even the smallest may be oversized for such a space.
Shelving
I plan to building shelving on the west side of the building to hold books or other items. I hope to mask the PTAC a bit by building the shelves around it and including wooden vents. They typically come with remotes so it won’t necessarily need direct access to it.
Computer
I’ll build a desktop computer into the desk. I already have a Newegg dream list setup for the build.
I have an extremely large computer case I’ll use for it.
