Escaping the cold isn’t easy.

Especially for the unhoused.

Thankfully, eight residents of the Caswell-Brown Village on Mill Road were given the chance to warm up behind a door of their own this weekend.

“It’s amazing. I had to turn the heat off last night,” Janet Dizick said after spending her first night in the newly built tiny house delivered to the property last week.

Each of the homes comes with a built-in, electric wall-heater.

The Olympic Community Action Programs (OlyCAP) leases the land from the county, offering the local unhoused population a temporary place to stay while working to find permanent housing, but volunteers from Community Build were the ones to construct the new buildings.

On Friday night, OlyCAP shelter manager Robin Pangborn gathered the residents receiving tiny houses to tell them the good news.

“I have never met some more motivated, dedicated people in my life,” Pangborn said of the residents.

“They pitch in. They’ve helped and enhanced what we do here.”

All but one of those who got the chance to move in to a tiny house had been living in tents, including Dizick, while the exception was a man whose RV had become so inundated with mold that it was making him sick.

Having four freshly insulated walls and a roof makes a difference all its own, but there were other surprises beyond heat.

“We’re not used to the brightness,” Dizick said, noting that for the first time the sun had woken her up through her new windows.

Community Build volunteers are currently sewing curtains to help with that issue, but the tents many residents had been using were so layered with tarps to protect them from the rain that the darkness within required flashlights to see inside even during the day.

Even then, that protection doesn’t always hold up.

“I was getting soaked,” Dizick said of her last night in the tent.

She moved to the area four years ago, living in the emergency shelter at the American Legion Hall in Port Townsend on and off for a year and a half before moving into a tent for the last two years.

Ongoing health problems have kept her in distress for years, with breast cancer surgery in younger years and a recent diagnosis of stage four stomach cancer.

These days she’s able to work at the warming center in downtown Port Townsend, helping others in similar straits stay out of the cold during the day when the shelter is closed.

Community Build is hoping to get another 10 houses built as there are still some people in tents and vehicles who could use the insulation while they get back up on their feet.

In order to accomplish the goal, the group is asking the community for donations through its website at community-build.org.