Project Person // Profile #7

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💔 The story below is set in the Appalachian Mountains in Western NC. At the bottom of the story, we share Nick’s thoughts on how to best support this area following Hurricane Helene’s destruction. Please join us in donating! 💔

Meet Nick Skytland // Project Person #7

What project are you currently working on? Building and curating a unique place on a mountain in North Carolina—and sharing it with others.

What did it take to get started? Some land, a chainsaw, and a shipping container. Seriously though, we had no idea what it would cost or take to build a cabin out of shipping containers when we started, and we also didn’t have a lot of resources, so we bootstrapped the project.

I get asked all the time what it costs to build a cabin on top of a mountain in the middle of nowhere out of shipping containers. The answer, of course, depends. You can buy a shipping container for about $5,000 from a number of vendors, but you still need the land, the building site, access to utilities, and a strong foundation; THEN you can start the actual development of the cabin itself.

We built the cabin using very traditional building techniques (the inside is a normal “stick” build with 2x4 framing, since that is what the building inspectors were most comfortable with). The cost of building a shipping container cabin is the same as building any structure, and is a combination of the labor and material required. 

After the initial variable costs are established, you can estimate the construction using an average square foot cost calculation. I recommend budgeting for $250-350/square foot.

What’s your most impressive or favorite stat? The amount of times we have shared it with others, which is now well over 500 times!

(Second favorite stat: the container cabin has hosted two weddings and ten engagements and was recently profiled as one of the top ten places in the world to get engaged!)

What’s something that never would have happened for you without this project? In addition to the annual guys’ trip (more on that below), we also hold an annual family reunion at the container cabin with all cousins and their families. This has become an incredible tradition and our kids have grown up together in the mountains. 

The annual guys’ trip has also resulted in a similar annual girls’ trip led by Nick’s wife, as well as a trip for fathers and their kids that they do each summer the weekend before school starts.

What keeps you up at night? Maintaining the property comes with a number of unexpected costs, such as the possibility of a tree falling in a windstorm to a road being washed out by the rain. We were thankfully not impacted by the recent hurricane that devastated Western North Carolina, but our heart breaks for all those in our area that were impacted.

Also, EV infrastructure. To give you something concrete, I would highly recommend NOT renting an all electric Tesla vehicle if you are driving into the remote mountains. As it turns out, the EV infrastructure is mostly city based and hasn’t quite made it to the rest of America yet. We experienced this recently on a trip and spent the entire time trying to manage the charge in our rental rather than really get to relax and enjoy the trip.

What are some of your other projects? Every project person knows that when you complete one project, it just leads to another! A few of my recent projects:

• publishing a book to help other leaders navigate uncertainty, called What Comes Next?

• consulting work through Quite Uncommon, where we help leaders in ministries navigate uncertainty through strategy, technology and innovation. 

• hosting hackathons this this recent one on AI and the church

I’m nervous you might read this story and think it’s too far-fetched. I’m about to tell you about our friend who bought a mountain, after all—a man whose day job is to “extend human presence across the solar system” at NASA. 

But stick with me, because Nick and Krista Skytland are about as real and relatable as they come. 

Nick was raised, in his words, “very poor” in a part of North Dakota where the highest hope was to score a factory job. 

“I had to believe in my own dreams,” he told me. 

Luckily, he had plenty to choose from. 

He was in Kindergarten when his teacher rolled a black-and-white television into his classroom and introduced him to the idea of space exploration. He applied to an internship at Johnson Space Center in college and was subsequently offered a job—one he’s never left. 

(He’s currently the Chief Technologist and Director of Business Development at NASA Johnson Space Center, where he’s trained astronauts, designed next-generation spacesuits, developed open source technology, and led some of the largest purpose-driven collaborations in history.)  

He married Krista, a teacher, and they started their family—another dream realized. 

A few years into their marriage, Krista’s grandparents passed away. The couple had amassed a huge collection of Western Art—400 pieces!—which had unfortunately lost most of their value. Still, there were family fights over who-got-what as they divided up the inheritance, and Nick and Krista found themselves considering their own legacies. They were diligently putting money away into retirement, but they began to question why. Were they just creating a small nest egg to be fought over upon their death?

Nick read an article about being “a good ancestor” and the “urgency of long-term thinking”, and they decided to dream yet again—this time about what that could look like. The idea was to think longer term, consider the impact they might have and be more imaginative in the choices they were making for themselves, and for their future generations.

How could they better invest in their relationships now while also sustainably building for 100 years from now?

Around that time, a friend offered up his cabin in the Smoky Mountains to Nick and Krista for a weekend getaway. As Texans, they had yet to experience the beauty (and cooler weather) of the Appalachians, and they quickly fell in love with the area.

Nick began looking at property, and they put an offer on 30 acres in Otto, NC—a tiny town along the Appalachian Trail, located between Clayton, GA and Franklin, NC.

The seller readily accepted, and the Skytlands suddenly became the proud owners of a quarter of a mountain nearly 1000 miles from their home.  

But they soon discovered the property hadn’t been built upon for a reason. As they walked the property with surveyors and contractors, they just couldn’t figure out how to make it buildable. It was just too steep. 

“I got schooled,” Nick said of the situation.

In frustration one day, he walked to the edges of his property line… and then kept walking. There, he found buildable land, and with it, renewed hope. 

He contacted the owner of the parcel adjacent to his and the owner accepted Nick’s let-me-just-throw-out-a-number offer, and just like that, the Skytlands then found themselves with half a mountain.

This purchase made the mountain buildable, granting them enough land to build a road across the property (a project that has taken about eleven years to complete!). 

They spent the first few years exploring and camping on the land to get a feel for it, taking note of the trees and plants and views in each season as they planned what and where to build. 

When Nick and Krista saw some social media stories about making a “container cabin” with basically $5000 and a hammer, they decided that would be just the thing to do. 

They had also seen an HGTV show called Tiny House, Big Living, and upon further research, discovered the network was launching a new show based near their home in Texas. They reached out and came to a deal with the producers. They were going to be on TV!

“Not everything you see on social media is as it seems,” Nick told me with a laugh when I asked him about the process. And then he got a little more serious. “It’s the same with home renovation reality TV shows.”

The experience with the show gave them a TV appearance, yes—but it fell short of the promises and left them with a half-way built container cabin and nothing in their bank account. As the camera crew pulled away, Nick was left to sort through construction debris and scrap material haphazardly thrown across the property and stuffed into the container. Not sure how to proceed, he locked the door and walked away, without a plan to return.

The thing about Nick, though, is that while he is a dreamer, he is also a doer and does not easily give up. And even more importantly, he can get others onboard.

(I once said Nick is like a pile of hay soaked in lighter fluid; if a spark of an idea is in the vicinity, it’s not long before it’s a full-blown fire.) 

Months later, Nick turned to his community. They made trips from Texas to North Carolina often, DIY-ing this cabin with YouTube videos and barely any funds. 

Nick’s friend Chaz was the first to join him on those earliest trips. They would drive 14 hours to then work all day on the cabin before sleeping in the woods with no electricity or water. A group of six men eventually joined them for their first official men’s trip in 2016, and it grew from there.

The trip has turned into an annual gathering of a group of friends who come together to work with their hands and sleep in the woods! This year will be the ninth annual trip and will be the largest yet; the plan this year is for the 18 guys to use their time and talent to serve those impacted by the recent hurricane.

Nick said building the container cabin was like working with legos; anything was possible! With renewed energy and vision, he asked his boys—just toddlers at the time—what they wanted to build. 

Asher said he wanted a secret room, and Kai asked for a rooftop deck. 

The cabin now has both.

(Hay, sparks, fire.)

Five years after the second land purchase, the container cabin was finally “finished” (in quotations because it’s continually evolving).

In addition to building this for their family and future family, the Skytlands also wanted to be generous with the space. They often offer it often to people in need of respite and rejuvenation and recently hit a big milestone: they’ve been able to share it with others over 500 times!

We met Nick and Krista at a Winshape Marriage retreat one year and immediately hit it off. We spent an evening around the fire swapping stories, and by the end of that trip they had invited us to use the cabin any time. 

Of course we took them up on it, and on New Year's Eve 2019, we sat around another fire together, this time on their mountain. 

I asked them about the halfway-built cabin a bit lower down the mountain, and we soon found ourselves touring the space with its owner. In a story for another day, we bought that shack with the Skytlands in one of my all-time favorite projects. We share more about that whole process here, including this absolutely ridiculous story about what we found in a piece of furniture left in the cabin. (After the renovation and a year of AirBNBing, we eventually sold our half to Krista’s parents.) 

Like “the mountain shack”, the Skytlands also rent out the container cabin via Airbnb when it’s not in use. In fact, Airbnb recently listed the space as one of the top ten places in America to get engaged! The cabin has hosted weddings and reunions and birthdays—and unfortunately, one incredibly destructive party. Thankfully Airbnb was able to cover the $20,000 in damages, but Nick says that has definitely been the low point in the whole journey.

The Skytlands just finished building a 1-mile road to the tip-top of the mountain, to the area once deemed unbuildable. Everyone they talked to told them it would be impossible, and although it took over a decade to build the road, with permitting and surveys holding it up, Nick didn’t stop until it was done.

They hope to eventually build a fire tower at the summit, a place where you can wake up in the clouds while sipping your coffee in the morning and take in the massive 360-degree views while watching the sunset at night.

The grand vision is to create a place that can be passed on to their ancestors—first to their kids, and then on to their grandkids. They are creating this special community one cabin at a time. In fact, Nick plans to spend the summer before his oldest goes to college building an A-Frame with his boys.

“If we would have known everything it would have taken to do this, we never would have started,” Nick said. “But thankfully we only see just a little bit at the beginning.” 

A few years ago, Nick published a book called What Comes Next. In it, he says that if you ask someone where they want to be in five years, they usually say something similar to where they are now, just with a little more. A little more money, more time with the family, etc… 

“But think about where you were five years ago,”  he told me as he explained this concept. “Think of all that has changed! We’ve got to dream bigger.”

Thanks to all that dreaming, Nick and Krista now have a lifetime full of family memories and a mountain they share with others and will one day pass down to their children, but I’d say the inheritance is far richer: for generations to come, the Skytland family will be shaped by big visions and the rewards of seeing them through.

-Callie

🚨 The area near Nick and Krista’s cabin has been devastated by Hurricane Helene. If you are interested in volunteering or donating to help those impacted, Nick suggests checking out https://www.828strong.com. From Nick: “There are so many lives that were changed forever because of the storm, and any donation of time or money you can make would help them considerably.”

Next week, Nick and I will share a primer on becoming an Airbnb Superhost. Stay tuned.