This is the Haven Ultra™ Bunkie (or cabin) made by Canadian company Bunkie Life. Each one ships out in a flat packed box and is then assembled onsite by the owner (or by their contractor).
Bunkie Life notes that around 80% of these cabins are assembled by their owners, with a “Novice Plus” difficulty level. The MSRP is $16,995 USD and each one is made in Canada from kiln-dried Northern Spruce, which is all pre-cut and notched – this means that the wall boards interlock, making assembly relatively straightforward even for a first time builder.
This is the Haven Ultra™ Bunkie, or cabin, made by Canadian company Bunkie Life. Each one ships out in a flat packed box and is then assembled onsite by the owner (or by their contractor).
History Speedrun: Bunkie Life
In Canada, a “bunkie” is a detached sleeping cabin that takes the overflow at a country cottage or home, though American dictionaries have an older definition for the word – a bunkmate, dating all he way back to the 1850s. Bunkie Life is an Ontario, Canada-based company that builds affordable pre-cut log cabin kits and ships the across North America.
The company started out in 2015, when David and Karrie Fraser, then living in Erin, Ontario, ran out of bedrooms for visiting parents and built a small cabin in the yard to solve the problem. Guests who saw it asked for their own. The Frasers formally started the business in 2017, though the company still dates itself to that first build in 2015.
The company grew quickly – Fraser told a local paper the company shipped 250 kits in 2020 and expected to ship 700 or more in 2021. That year the Frasers pitched on CBC’s TV show Dragons’ Den, assembling their largest bunkie backstage at the studio and wheeling the 16-foot structure through a 16-foot door before taking it apart the same day.
The episode aired as the season finale on December the 16th, 2021. All five Dragons made an offer, an unusual outcome for a show with a famously conservative panel of investors.
In September of 2022, Bunkie Life held the grand opening for a new 14,000 sq ft factory in Rockwood. More than 17 staff had been hired from the local area, and kits ship from Vancouver Island to the Maritimes, and into the United States.
The kit ships as a single package measuring 192″ x 48″ x 41″ and weighing 4,105 lbs, which means a flat-deck trailer for pickup or a freight quote for delivery. Bunkie Life rates the build “Novice Plus” on a five-hammer difficulty scale and says roughly 80% of customers assemble their own.
The Haven Ultra™ Cabin
The Haven Ultra Cabin is the larger-lofted of the two Haven models from Bunkie Life. Both sit on the same 104.6 sq ft base, 10’2¾” square, but where the standard Haven gets an 80 sq ft loft, the Ultra carries a full 120 sq ft platform overhead. That works out to 224.6 sq ft across two levels on a footprint smaller than a single-car garage. The exterior height is 15’5 5/16″ and loft headroom is 6’11 11/16″ floor to peak.
Construction is kiln-dried Northern Spruce, pre-cut and notched so the wall boards interlock. Pressure-treated sleepers carry the floor, and both the floor boards and roof deck are tongue and groove. A wood ladder at the rear wall serves the loft, which has a floor rated to 2,500 lbs.
The kit includes the tongue-and-groove roof deck but nothing above it, so the weatherproofing layer (underlayment plus metal panels or asphalt shingles) is sourced locally, with Bunkie Life providing a model-specific roofing guide giving the measurements needed to order.
Five windows come with the kit – two tall units on either side of the door, a double on the side wall, a double in the loft, and a fixed pane in the door. Additional windows are sold separately, for people who want more light. Price is listed at $16,995 USD, Snow loading is rated for the northernmost parts of Ontario, and an engineered drawing is available for a fee where a permit application requires one.
The MSRP is $16,995 USD and each one is made in Canada from kiln-dried Northern Spruce, which is all pre-cut and notched – this means that the wall boards interlock, making assembly relatively straightforward even for a first time builder.
The kit ships as a single package measuring 192″ x 48″ x 41″ and weighing 4,105 lbs, which means a flat-deck trailer for pickup or a freight quote for delivery. Bunkie Life rates the build “Novice Plus” on a five-hammer difficulty scale and says roughly 80% of customers assemble their own.
If you’d like to read more about the Haven Ultra you can visit the listing on the official Bunkie Life online store here.
Images courtesy of Bunkie Life
Articles that Ben Branch has written have been covered on CNN, Popular Mechanics, Smithsonian Magazine, Road & Track Magazine, the official Pinterest blog, the official eBay Motors blog, BuzzFeed, Autoweek Magazine, Wired Magazine, Autoblog, Gear Patrol, Jalopnik, The Verge, and many more.
Silodrome was founded by Ben back in 2010, in the years since the site has grown to become a world leader in the alternative and vintage motoring sector, with well over a million monthly readers from around the world and many hundreds of thousands of followers on social media.
