About
Fun Hideaways began in 2011 as a handshake arrangement between three neighbors who each owned a cabin they didn't use enough. We pooled a cleaning kit, wrote up a one-page set of rules, and took turns hosting each other's friends-of-friends. Nobody trashed anything. A few people asked if we did this for a living. We started doing it for a living.
Fourteen years later the directory is eleven properties. We've turned down about forty others. The math isn't complicated: if we can't drive to a cabin in under three hours, change a propane line on it ourselves, and vouch for the owner at a bar, it doesn't go in the directory.
We're a broker, not a platform. A guest asks if we have something for four people in late September with a wood stove and a good porch. We look at the board, make two calls, hold a week, send a map. The cabin owner gets paid, we get a cut, the guest gets a place that matches what they asked for. There is no app. There is no algorithm. There is a whiteboard, in a kitchen, in a converted grange hall we rent from a retired wheat farmer named Hollis.
The whiteboard is divided into eleven rows. Each row is a property. Columns are the next twelve weeks. Green magnet means open, red magnet means booked, yellow means held. A black sharpie scrawl next to a row means "ask Del first" — usually because something's broken, or a road is washed out, or the propane tank is due for its refill and we don't want a guest showing up to a cold stove.
We tried public booking once, in 2016. It lasted eight months. We got people looking for bachelor weekends, people who brought ten friends to a cabin that sleeps four, and one group who drove a rented RV through a gate that had been closed for a reason. The owners met at Dry Creek in November of that year, sat around the wood stove, and voted eight-to-three to shut it down. Now every guest comes in through someone who's already stayed. It works.
The referral chain is short on purpose. If your vouching guest hasn't stayed with us in the last three years, we ask for a second introduction. Not because we don't trust them, but because cabins change. A place that was perfect for a couple in 2019 might now be the place where the porch needs replacing and we're steering people elsewhere while we sort it out.
Bookings, maps, the whiteboard. Former wilderness ranger, nine seasons. Keeps the paper ledger, answers most guest messages within a day unless she's at a cabin, which is often.
Maintenance, propane, roofs, the truck (a 1998 F-250 named Hazel). If something breaks between guests, Del's already driving. Has never been stuck longer than overnight and he'll tell you why.
Turnovers, linens, kindling bundles, the garden at Dry Creek. Writes the welcome notes. Used to be a librarian; the cabin libraries are her doing, and so is the unofficial rule that every cabin keeps at least one mystery, one field guide, and one book of poems.
Everything we represent is within a three-hour drive of our home base in the Inland Northwest, spanning bits of Idaho's panhandle, northeast Washington, and the top edge of the Palouse. The farthest property is Crowsnest, a fire lookout up a forest road that's closed five months a year by snow and another four by mud. The closest is about forty minutes from a small grocery store where they still card you for beer and don't take anything but cash and checks.
The eleven cabins belong to nine different owners. Four are retired — two teachers, a millwright, and a woman who used to run a tree nursery. Three are working families who inherited land and don't want to sell it. Two are a couple of siblings splitting their grandfather's place. Every owner gets 70% of the nightly rate; we take 20% for brokering and turnover coordination; 10% goes into a shared maintenance fund that everyone draws from when a roof gives up or a well pump dies.
We meet once a year, in October, at whichever cabin's owner is willing to host. We eat chili. We go over the maintenance fund. We argue about rates. We drink one beer and drive home sober, because most of us live at least an hour from wherever we just ate chili.
No weddings. No commercial shoots. No "influencer" stays (we've been asked eleven times; we've said no eleven times). No dynamic pricing. No asking guests to leave reviews. No holiday markup. No third-party booking platforms — we own the keys, we keep the keys, we hand them to people we know.