When he was working at Microsoft in the aughts, Dan Wheeler had a photo taped to the edge of his computer monitor: an image of a tiny modernist cabin in the woods, crafted from weathering steel.

“It was the coolest,” said Mr. Wheeler, 47, who was as smitten with the idea of living in the wild landscape of rural Washington State as he was with the building. “I was like, ‘Oh, this is what I want.’”

At the time, he lived in a three-bedroom, 1,200-square-foot house with a large garage in Kirkland, Wash., a Seattle suburb that is hardly a rustic outpost. He took the first step toward realizing his dream in 2010 when he bought an undeveloped 0.4-acre lot on the Wenatchee River about 100 miles east of Seattle for $130,000.

It was a long, slender piece of land in a flood plain, with about 100 feet of frontage on the water. “My friends called it ‘the sliver on the river,’” Mr. Wheeler said. But it seemed like enough.

For years, he and his friends used the lot as a place to camp on weekends, driving there to float down the river in small inflatable boats and tubes. Then, in 2018, Mr. Wheeler felt as if he finally had the time and resources to dedicate to building a cabin, and he hired the Seattle-based architecture firm Wittman Estes to design it.

“He wanted it small. That was a directive,” said Matt Wittman, a founding principal at the firm. “He asked, ‘What’s the smallest size we can design and still have a kitchen and a dining table, and be comfortable?’.”

It was a good thing Mr. Wheeler wanted a small cabin because after taking into account setbacks from lot lines and a septic system, there wasn’t much space left to build a big house.

Another challenge was that the building needed to be at least four feet off the ground to lift it above flood level. “Dan’s idea, since we were elevating it, was to lift it up even more to create a shelter underneath it,” Mr. Wittman said. That area would function as a carport where Mr. Wheeler could work on his Ford Bronco.

The design Wittman Estes developed is a 747-square-foot, two-story cabin that is held 10 feet off the ground by concrete columns. The building measures 20 feet wide by 24 feet deep.

Inside, much of the interior space is taken up by a double-height area that contains the kitchen, dining and living room and has a wall of windows looking out to the river. Behind the kitchen, smaller rooms hold the cabin’s single full bathroom and a storage space. A staircase climbs to a bedroom with a half bathroom on the second floor. That level also has a mezzanine for an office, which opens to a small cantilevered steel deck facing the river.

Construction began in 2020, and Mr. Wheeler was content to take his time. He had a contractor build the shell of the building, including its stained cedar siding, wall of windows and concrete floors, but Mr. Wheeler, an avid metalworker and tinkerer, finished much of the interior himself.

The cabin was habitable in 2023, “but then I was picking away at it for another two years or so,” Mr. Wheeler said.

The kitchen has aluminum cabinet fronts from Reform, but Mr. Wheeler built his own counter, backsplash and shelf from hot-rolled steel. He crafted a dining table and side tables with hemlock tops and steel bases. He fabricated interior guardrails from steel tubes and metal mesh. He built bathroom cabinets with hemlock and painted plywood.

The cabin was largely complete this year even though “there’s still stuff to do,” Mr. Wheeler said. But by undertaking so much of the work himself, he said, he kept costs down to about $350,000.

Although he initially envisioned the cabin as a weekend and vacation home, Mr. Wheeler saw an opportunity for a lifestyle change when he was laid off from Microsoft two years ago. He decided to move to the cabin full time and found work in information technology consulting that he can perform remotely.

“Living on the river is awesome. It’s just a beautiful thing to look at every morning,” he said. “I get up, walk across the bedroom to start the computer and go downstairs for tea,” he added. “It’s pretty chill.”

For now, he’s renting out his house in Kirkland as he gradually works on selling, donating or disposing of his many possessions in the garage. “I don’t want to bring it here because the idea is to keep it small, keep it simple,” he said.

With fewer things to clutter his space, he has no qualms about living in a compact home. “I don’t find it small at all,” he said. “I could go even smaller.”