This Homeless Single Mother Built a Two-Room Home in a $200 Shed And Survived 5 Winters In It

Added: 2026-06-02

[00:00:00]Five winters in Rockford, Illinois where January drops to eight, nine below zero, and sits there for days like it forgot how to do anything else, where the wind tears across the Rock River flats and doesn't stop for anything standing in its way. A 28-year-old single mother and her 1-year-old daughter survived all five of those winters in a metal shed that cost $200. The shed is still standing.

[00:00:25]Here's how.

[00:00:26]September 2020. Brinn Sullivan was sleeping in a 2007 Pontiac G6 with a cracked windshield and a backseat that wouldn't fold down.

[00:00:36]Her daughter, Cecily, was 14 months old, strapped into a car seat in the back, wearing two onesies and a fleece sleeper, kicking at the window in her sleep. Brinn had dirty blonde hair she cut herself with kitchen scissors. A chunk on the right side bleached and dyed teal green with Manic Panic from a Walgreens clearance bin.

[00:00:55]Thin nose ring in the left nostril.

[00:00:58]Vertical scar through her right eyebrow from a car wreck at 19. Freckles across both cheeks that made strangers guess she was 22 when she was 28, which she hated because people don't take you seriously when they think you're 22 and homeless with a baby.

[00:01:12]She'd been working nights at a Denny's on East State Street. Cecily stayed with a neighbor named Gail, a retired woman in the apartment below theirs on Kishwaukee Street.

[00:01:22]Gail watched the baby for free, liked the company.

[00:01:26]Then Gail had a stroke in June.

[00:01:29]No Gail meant no child care. No child care meant no night shift. No night shift meant no rent money. $400 a month for a second floor unit in a building that should have been condemned two inspections ago. The landlord gave Brinn 14 days.

[00:01:46]By the end of July, she was in the Pontiac. August in a car with a baby you can survive. Windows cracked, breeze coming through.

[00:01:54]But Rockford starts turning cold in October.

[00:01:57]Not jacket cold. Ice on the glass cold.

[00:02:01]Breath visible by noon cold.

[00:02:03]And Brynn knew what November would bring, what December would bring, what January would bring. Because she'd grown up in the city.

[00:02:11]And she knew exactly what minus eight feels like on skin.

[00:02:15]She heard about the shed from a stranger at a gas station. A man she never saw again.

[00:02:20]He mentioned a guy in Loves Park selling metal sheds out of his driveway.

[00:02:25]Leftover inventory from a landscaping business that went under. $200 for an 8 by 12 Arrow shed. Gray walls, white trim, barn style roof. No floor. Just the panels, the frame hardware, and the assembly instructions written for two people. Brynn was one person with a baby.

[00:02:43]She bought it with her last real cash.

[00:02:45]Loaded the flat pack panels into the Pontiac across three trips.

[00:02:49]Finding a spot to put it was a different problem. You can't bolt a shed together on a sidewalk. She needed a place hidden enough from code enforcement, level enough that the thing wouldn't lean, and close enough to a power outlet that she could plug in a hot plate.

[00:03:03]A woman named Deb from the day shelter on Seventh Street knew a spot.

[00:03:07]An alley behind a closed nail salon on West State Street. About half a mile from the Winnebago County Courthouse.

[00:03:14]The alley sat behind a chain link fence with a torn green privacy screen already stapled to it. The building owner, a woman named Patrice who lived in Belvidere, hadn't visited the property in months. There was an exterior outlet on the back wall that still worked.

[00:03:28]Because Patrice was paying the electric bill on auto pay.

[00:03:32]And hadn't thought to cancel it. Three days to assemble. Brynn bolted panels together with a socket wrench while Cecily sat in a pack and play on the concrete and chewed on a teething ring.

[00:03:42]The instructions said "Two person assembly recommended." On the front page.

[00:03:48]Underlined.

[00:03:49]She did it alone. No floor came with the shed.

[00:03:53]She pulled pallets from behind a Kroger, stacked them two high, and laid a sheet of 3/4-in plywood on top. $22 from the Habitat ReStore on Sandy Hollow Road.

[00:04:04]The pallets raised the whole structure about 10 in off the ground. 10 in of air between a floor and frozen concrete matters more than most people think.

[00:04:13]Cold ground pulls heat out of anything touching it. Conduction.

[00:04:18]A body lying on frozen concrete loses warmth fast, the same way a hand pressed flat on a block of ice goes numb in seconds. 10 in of dead air between the plywood and the ground breaks that contact.

[00:04:30]It's the difference between waking up stiff and not waking up. Bren and Cecily moved in September 14th, 2020.

[00:04:38]The shed had no insulation, no heat, no interior walls. Metal conducts temperature so fast that touching the inside of the wall at 32° feels colder than touching wood at the same temperature because the metal drains warmth from your fingers faster than wood does. At 6:00 one morning in late October, Cecily, 14 months old, put her palm flat against the wall.

[00:05:03]The scream carried through the alley.

[00:05:05]That sound started everything.

[00:05:08]Bren asked around. People at the day shelter. People under the Jefferson Street Bridge.

[00:05:13]A guy named Terrence who slept in a van behind the old Magna plant told her about foam board. Pink or blue sheets you can cut with a box cutter.

[00:05:22]Stops cold better than blankets, better than cardboard, better than packing clothes between the ribs of the metal.

[00:05:29]Late October, she bought 1-in pink XPS foam board from Menards, $40. Her last $40. Cut every piece to fit with a steak knife.

[00:05:39]Glued them to every wall surface with liquid nails.

[00:05:42]Tight seams. Foil tape on every joint.

[00:05:45]For about 3 months, it worked.

[00:05:48]Temperature inside climbed to maybe 45, 50° on a 20° day. She ran a ceramic tower space heater from Goodwill, 12 bucks, plugged into the outlet on Patricia's building.

[00:06:00]Between the foam and the heater, the shed was livable.

[00:06:04]Barely.

[00:06:05]She and Cecily slept in layers. Two sleeping bags, fleece blanket, wool socks, knit hats pulled down over their ears. Then February came and the mold came with it.

[00:06:17]Black spots in the corners first, then streaks running down behind the foam panels. The adhesive started letting go.

[00:06:24]Panels sagged. She pulled one off and the back side was soaked.

[00:06:28]Water pooled on the plywood floor.

[00:06:31]Cecily was coughing.

[00:06:32]Not a cold cough, a wet sticky sound that came from the chest and didn't stop at night.

[00:06:38]What happened was this. Every time Brinn and Cecily breathed, they put moisture into the air. Two people in a sealed box that's 96 square feet breathing all night. The space heater didn't add moisture, but it heated the air, which held more water, which then hit the cold metal behind the foam board and condensed. Water formed at the boundary between the warm insulation and the cold steel, ran down, pooled, soaked into the adhesive and the foam and the plywood.

[00:07:07]The insulation she'd spent her last $40 on was ruined. All of it. She tore everything out. Mid-February. 12° outside. Pulled every panel off the walls, scraped the glue, and sat in a bare metal box with her daughter zipped into a sleeping bag while she tried to figure out what went wrong. The next morning she left Cecily with Deb Kovac at the day shelter and walked to the Rockford Public Library. Deb was 61, used to work maintenance at a Holiday Inn before her hip quit on her. She was the kind of woman who knew things that don't show up on a resume.

[00:07:42]Brinn sat at a public computer for 4 hours, searched condensation in metal building, searched how to insulate a metal shed without mold, searched moisture behind insulation.

[00:07:55]What she found was simple enough to make her angry. Angry because nobody had told her. Angry because $40 and 3 months of work died for something that takes 1 cent to explain. You need an air gap between the insulation and the metal wall.

[00:08:10]That gap lets air move. Half an inch, an inch, with small vents at the top and bottom. Warm, moist air from the living space hits the vapor barrier and stops.

[00:08:21]The air in the gap circulates, carries whatever moisture does get through up and out before it condenses on the metal. The insulation stays dry. Dry insulation works. Wet insulation is dead weight.

[00:08:34]Think about a rain jacket with the vents zipped shut.

[00:08:37]The jacket keeps rain off, but your own sweat builds up inside, soaks your shirt, and you end up wet from within.

[00:08:44]Open the vents and the moisture escapes.

[00:08:47]Same principle, same physics. A sealed wall rots from the inside. A vented wall breathes. Brin couldn't afford new foam board, but she had Deb, and Deb knew about the ReStore. The Habitat for Humanity ReStore on Sandy Hollow Road sells materials pulled from demolished houses, fiberglass insulation bats, the pink fluffy kind, three bucks each, less if the packaging is torn or the bats are discolored, which changes nothing about how they perform.

[00:09:17]Just means somebody opened the bag before you.

[00:09:20]Brin spent $35 on fiberglass bats, enough for every wall and the ceiling, $4 on a roll of 6-mil plastic sheeting from the dollar store, $10 on a pile of furring strips, 1 by 2 lumber, 8 feet long, from a guy on Craigslist clearing out his garage.

[00:09:40]$49 total for the second attempt. She screwed the furring strips to the metal wall ribs vertical about 16 in apart.

[00:09:48]Each strip stood 3/4 of an inch off the metal surface.

[00:09:52]That's the air gap. Between the strips she stuffed fiberglass bats craft paper side facing inward toward the living space.

[00:10:00]Over the bats she stapled the 6 mil plastic sheeting. That's the vapor barrier. Her breath, Cecily's breath, any moisture from cooking on the hot plate.

[00:10:10]All of it hits the plastic and stops.

[00:10:12]Can't reach the cold metal.

[00:10:14]Over the plastic she screwed salvaged paneling from a guy remodeling his basement. Free.

[00:10:20]Fake wood grain the kind that looks like a 1970s rec room.

[00:10:25]She didn't care what it looked like. It was flat. It covered the plastic and it meant Cecily couldn't poke holes in the vapor barrier with her fingers.

[00:10:33]Bottom of each wall she left a half inch gap between the paneling and the floor.

[00:10:38]At the top she cut small rectangles through the metal with a jigsaw Deb lent her and covered them with window screen held on with duct tape. Air entered the gap at the bottom, warmed against the back of the insulation, rose, and exited through the top vents.

[00:10:53]Moisture traveled with it.

[00:10:55]Out of the wall.

[00:10:57]Out of the shed. The second winter was different.

[00:11:00]No mold.

[00:11:01]The walls stayed dry. The fiberglass kept its loft which is the thing that actually makes it work. Compressed or wet fiberglass is useless.

[00:11:11]Dry and fluffy it traps still air in millions of tiny pockets. Still air barely conducts heat.

[00:11:17]3 and 1/2 in of dry fiberglass gives roughly R13. Same insulation value as a standard residential wall. A $49 fix turned a metal box into something that held heat like a house.

[00:11:29]Heating the shed was its own education.

[00:11:32]First winter, she'd use the electric space heater.

[00:11:36]Worked fine until January when the breaker tripped on Patrice's building during a cold snap. Nobody was inside the building to flip it back.

[00:11:44]Two days without heat.

[00:11:46]14° outside. Brin put Cecily inside both sleeping bags, zipped them shut with only her face showing, put on every piece of clothing she owned, and sat next to her daughter all night. She kept a thermos of warm water she'd filled at the gas station before it closed.

[00:12:02]Fed Cecily sips through the night.

[00:12:05]That was the worst night of the first winter.

[00:12:07]Not the coldest, the most helpless.

[00:12:10]Second winter, she switched to a Mr. Buddy portable propane heater.

[00:12:14]9,000 BTU on high. It could bring the shed from 20° to 70 in about 20 minutes.

[00:12:21]But Brin had done her library research by then.

[00:12:24]She'd read about carbon monoxide. She knew that burning propane in a small space produces CO, and that CO is odorless, and that people die from it in their sleep.

[00:12:34]She bought a battery-powered CO detector at Walmart.

[00:12:38]$18.

[00:12:39]Kept it on the shelf at Cecily's head height, and she cracked the door about an inch and a half whenever the heater was on.

[00:12:46]Lost some heat through the gap, but losing some heat beats not waking up.

[00:12:51]She also learned about propane's other problem, water.

[00:12:55]Propane burns clean compared to kerosene, but clean doesn't mean dry.

[00:13:00]Every gallon of propane that burns puts almost a gallon of water vapor into the air. In 96 square feet with a vapor barrier on the walls, that water has two places to go, into your lungs or into your bedding.

[00:13:13]So, Brin ran the heater in cycles.

[00:13:16]30 minutes on, bring the temperature to the mid-60s, shut it off. In a well-insulated, well-sealed space that small with R-13 walls and a tight ceiling, The temperature drops about 2° per hour once you kill the heat source.

[00:13:31]30 minutes of propane bought roughly 5 hours of livable air.

[00:13:35]She'd fire the heater at 9:00 p.m.

[00:13:37]Get the shed to 65, kill it. By 2:00 a.m. it'd be in the mid-50s. She'd wake up, run it again for 20 minutes. Back to 60, kill it. By morning, upper 40s. Not comfortable, not dangerous either if you're under two sleeping bags and wearing wool socks.

[00:13:54]5 hours of propane per day. A single green 1-lb cylinder lasted about 3 days.

[00:14:01]She bought them at Walmart.

[00:14:03]Three bucks and change. About a dollar a day to keep two people alive. The wall between the two rooms came in the third winter.

[00:14:11]Fall of 2022, Cecily was three. Three-year-olds need something that one-year-olds don't. A door to close.

[00:14:19]Not for privacy in any adult sense, for the feeling of it. The sense that the place where you sleep is separate from the place where you eat.

[00:14:28]That there's a room, a specific room, and it belongs to you.

[00:14:33]Brynn understood this about her daughter without anyone having to explain it.

[00:14:37]She found the door first. A hollow-core interior door, white brass-colored knob, leaning against a dumpster behind an apartment complex on 7th Street.

[00:14:47]Some renovator had pulled it and left it with the trash.

[00:14:50]Brynn carried it nine blocks balanced on her shoulder. She didn't own a saw. She scored two by fours with a box cutter and snapped them over the edge of a pallet. Not pretty.

[00:15:01]The breaks were rough and splintered.

[00:15:03]She sanded down the worst splinters with a chunk of concrete.

[00:15:06]The dividing wall went up about 5 ft from the back of the shed. Front room ended up roughly 5 by 8 ft. Back room, about 7 by 8. She made the back room bigger because that's where they slept.

[00:15:18]She screwed the two by four frame into the plywood floor and into a horizontal brace bolted to the shed ceiling ribs.

[00:15:25]Covered both sides of the frame with plywood scraps from the restore.

[00:15:29]Left a gap for the door.

[00:15:31]Hung it on hinges she bought at a yard sale for $3.

[00:15:35]The door wasn't plumb. The frame leaned about 2° so the door swung open on its own unless you pushed it all the way shut. She fixed this with a bent nail twisted into a latch.

[00:15:46]Cecily closed that door the first night and didn't come out for an hour.

[00:15:51]3 years old, she wasn't hiding. She wasn't scared. She was sitting in a room. Her room with the door closed.

[00:15:59]Doing the thing children do when they have a space for the first time in their lives.

[00:16:03]Just being in it.

[00:16:05]Just existing inside a boundary that she controlled.

[00:16:09]Brin sat on the other side of the plywood wall listening to nothing and knowing that nothing was the right sound.

[00:16:16]The third winter also brought a discovery. Deb Kovac told Brin to fill some milk jugs with water and line them up near the heater.

[00:16:23]Stupid simple. Works anyway.

[00:16:26]Water holds heat far better than air does. A gallon of water heated to 65° stores that warmth and releases it slowly over hours.

[00:16:35]Six 1-gallon milk jugs lined up along the base of the dividing wall acted like a battery. When the propane ran the jugs absorbed heat.

[00:16:44]When the propane was off the jugs bled it back into the room.

[00:16:48]Brin said it stretched each heating cycle by about an extra hour.

[00:16:52]An hour she didn't burn fuel.

[00:16:54]An hour the CO detector stayed quiet.

[00:16:57]Fourth winter 2023 into 2024 the hard one. Mid-January.

[00:17:03]Polar vortex dropped on Northern Illinois. Three consecutive nights at -11. Wind chill around -35.

[00:17:11]R-13 walls and a propane heater with a cracked door can handle single digits.

[00:17:16]Can handle zero on a calm night.

[00:17:19]Negative 11 with a 30 mile an hour wind shaking the shed panels like a snare drum is a different situation. Brin did something that night that sounds crazy until you think about it for 5 seconds.

[00:17:31]She took every piece of cardboard she had, wet it with water from the milk jugs, packed the wet cardboard into the gap between the furring strips and the metal wall against the outside face of the fiberglass.

[00:17:43]Then she pulled a tarp over the exterior of the shed and anchored it with cinder blocks.

[00:17:48]Wet cardboard freezes.

[00:17:50]Frozen cardboard becomes a solid sheet.

[00:17:53]A solid sheet blocks wind.

[00:17:55]The wind that had been vibrating the metal panels and ripping heat through convection couldn't reach the steel anymore. Couldn't shake it.

[00:18:03]Couldn't steal warmth through the cracks that had been rattling open all night.

[00:18:06]She ran the heater on low.

[00:18:09]4,000 BTU.

[00:18:11]Door cracked 1 inch. The CO alarm never went off.

[00:18:14]Temperature inside held at 51° through the night. 51° at -11 outside in a $200 shed. Cecily slept through all of it.

[00:18:26]Fifth winter.

[00:18:27]2024 into 2025. By now, Brin had the system refined. She'd replaced the ceiling fiberglass with two layers of foam board, seams staggered so no gap lined up between them because heat rises and the ceiling had been her worst loss point. She'd stuffed old clothes into fabric tubes and laid them along the base of every wall to stop drafts at the floor line.

[00:18:49]She'd taped Reflectix, that silvery bubble wrap material, to the back of the dividing wall facing the front room.

[00:18:56]It bounced radiant heat from the propane heater back into the space instead of letting it absorb into the plywood.

[00:19:02]The front room by the fifth winter had a plastic folding table, two mismatched chairs, a shelf made from a pallet stood on end, the hot plate on a milk crate, and the Mr. Buddy sitting on a ceramic tile. The back room had two sleeping bags zipped together on a foam mattress, a milk crate nightstand with a battery lantern on top, and a row of Cecily's drawings taped to the paneling with medical tape.

[00:19:25]Horses, trees, a house with smoke coming out of the chimney that she drew over and over.

[00:19:31]Always with two windows and a red door.

[00:19:34]From the outside, the shed looked like nothing.

[00:19:37]Gray metal, weathered, dented on one corner from a branch that fell in a windstorm. The kind of thing you'd walk past and assume holds rakes and a gas can.

[00:19:46]Inside, the walls weren't metal anymore.

[00:19:50]They were paneling over plastic over fiberglass over an air gap over metal.

[00:19:55]Five layers between Brin's daughter and the Rockford winter.

[00:19:58]Each layer doing a different job. Each one learned the hard way, paid for with whatever money she could scrape together, built with borrowed tools and knowledge she found on a library computer.

[00:20:10]62° inside on a day when the outside air was 19.

[00:20:14]That's a 43° difference held by materials that cost less than a month of the rent she couldn't pay for the Kishwaukee Street apartment. Two rooms, 96 square feet split by a plywood wall with a hollow core door that didn't hang plumb and latched with a bent nail.

[00:20:30]Brin Sullivan is 33 now.

[00:20:33]Cecily is 6.

[00:20:35]They still live in the shed behind the nail salon on West State Street. Brin works part-time at a laundromat on Charles Street.

[00:20:42]She's on a waiting list for subsidized housing.

[00:20:45]Has been for 2 years.

[00:20:47]The list doesn't move fast in Rockford.

[00:20:49]She told Deb once, sitting outside the day shelter in April, that if she could change one thing about the shed, it wouldn't be the insulation or the heating system or the vapor barrier or the frozen cardboard trick that saved them during the polar vortex.

[00:21:04]She'd have put the door in sooner because everything else she built was about keeping cold out. The wall between the two rooms, the hollow core door with the brass knob, that was about making the inside mean something.

[00:21:16]That was about a three-year-old girl closing a door and sitting alone in a room for the first time in her life.

[00:21:22]Just being in a space that belonged to her.

[00:21:25]Cecily drew a house once at the shelter's free art table.

[00:21:28]Two windows, red door, smoke curling out of the chimney.

[00:21:33]Bryn asked her who lived there.

[00:21:35]Cecily said, "We do."

[00:21:38]She was drawing