Cottage for Sale, Must Be Moved: A Woman Moves a House to Make a Home

Before #housebeforespouse, before Tiny Houses were a thing, even before DIY’ers got hooked on HGTV, Kate Whouley bought a fixerupper three-room cottage on Cape Cod. Not yet thirty, and running a small business from home, she began dreaming of an office of her own. But years would pass before a headline in the weekly Pennysaver sparked plans for an unconventional (and maybe even affordable) addition, and Kate’s year-long domestic adventure would spark a book. In Cottage For Sale, Must Be Moved, Kate and her bossy feline sidekick, Egypt, encounter cranky town officials, a scruffy building-mover of few words, a construction crew of fulltime firefighters, an electrician who is at heart, a surfer-dude, and a swoon-worthy mason who illuminates the history of concrete. Captivating readers for almost two decades, the memoir Anna Quindlen called ＂a pitch-perfect description of both small-town life and personal anticipation＂ now includes a bonus chapter by the author that catches readers up on the cottage, Kate, and the current (just as bossy) Cat-in-Charge.

Kate Whouley is a contributing editor at Yankee magazine and the 2012 recipient of the New England Book Award in nonfiction for Remembering the Music, Forgetting the Words. A longtime designer of independent bookstores, Kate currently directs the MFA program in creative writing at Bay Path University, and serves as the editor of Multiplicity, the literary magazine of the Bay Path MFA. Kate lives and writes on Cape Cod in a cottage that is no longer on the move.