Have you ever stumbled upon the shabby and sad burned shack near Bonechill Passage, with two dead bodies outside — recently killed by a dragon — and thought it would be a nice roleplaying idea to pretend they were your character's family, for a dramatic and sort of deeper/traumatic game start? Well...

Lia's Shack is a carefully crafted, lore-friendly player home set in the wilds near Helgen, using the often-overlooked and unmarked "Prospector's Shack", "Destroyed Shack", "Burned Shack", whatever you call it, as its base. This exterior-only home is designed for players seeking a deeper connection to the worldspace of Skyrim, where the boundary between inside and outside blurs seamlessly, offering breathtaking views and an intimate relationship with nature, without loading screens. For the moment, the location in-game is being called Silvershade for some future mod I have in mind, but for now, let's just say it's because of the silver ore veins and the shade from the trees nearby :)

The shack is modest but resourceful, featuring everything a self-sufficient family — or a lone survivor — would need:

• A cooking pot and oven for preparing meals.
• One double bed, one single bed, and two bedrolls for family or companions.
• Little enchanting and alchemy tabletops for disguised enchantments and potion crafting.
• A few alchemy ingredients growing in the planters by the bedroom windows.
• Complete smithing and mining equipment for forging and gathering resources.
• A campfire for warmth.
• Access to fish and bathing (with a bathing mod) at the nearby waterfall.
• A very small farm plot and apiary to sustain life off the land.
• Interactable windows, allowing players to feel both sheltered and immersed in the surrounding wilderness, watching the beautiful views.
• Thoughtfully placed markers for immersive interaction.
• Protected storage for all your personal belongings.
• “Note to the Authorities” and “Purloined Shadows” are placed on the desk beside the front door.
  

Whether you're imagining your character as a lone wanderer, the last of a simple family, or just someone looking for a beautiful and immersive place to call home, this shack offers a nice backdrop for your story. The location itself tells a simple one: a family living on the edge of society, farming, hunting, and secretly mining the nearby silver veins for a modest trade in Helgen. But the danger of this isolated life is real, with bandits lurking close and wolves ever a threat. A scenario some players might choose to explore is that their character’s family — while quietly living here — was lost to a dragon attack, leaving them as the sole survivor. This home works particularly well when paired with Alternate Start / New Beginnings. This can enable players to create their own backstory of survival, loss, and resilience: maybe a stealthy hunter returning home, only to find their family lost to Skyrim's current harsh reality? The burnt bodies present can be easily disabled via console commands once the player has "discovered" their fate, if preferred (pretending you buried them? that they turned to ash or something like that?).

While the shack is rustic and run-down, it has been crafted with care to feel lived-in yet believable, striking a balance between comfort and a sense of realism (except for the smithing equipment I guess). The aesthetic remains grounded: weathered wood, practical furnishings, but with hints of beauty and decoration. This build was also made with 100% vanilla assets.

This is my first ever mod, so if you run into any trouble or weirdness happening, please let me know — and keep in mind I'm not totally sure what I'm doing yet!

And, please, feel free to use this mod as a base to make your own version, or whatever you want, just give me credits too please if you upload it somewhere :D

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Depending on your modlist, this build may look much different in your game — as it will pick your own texture & mesh replacer mods.
In my opinion, it looks cute in 100% vanilla too :)

If you wish to have the shack look exactly like the screenshots, you should consider using the following mods:

Better Pelts and Hides
Diverse Series
Dovahkiin Can Use Special Markers
Fluffy Moths
Iimlenny's Replacers
Immersive Fallen Trees
Jazbay by Mari
JS Knapsacks
High Quality Ivy
High Quality Ivy for Stumps and Logs
Natural Waterfalls
Peltapalooza
Raid Weathers
Rally's Market Stalls
Realistic HD Blacksmith Remastered
Serene Grasslands
Simply Bigger Trees
Skyland
SMIM + SMIM Solstheim + Quality Addon
Vanilla Remastered
Weathered Apiary
Weathered Buckets
Weathered Furniture
Weathered Dark Elf Furniture

As for Hearthfire Multiple Adoptions and Custom Home Support, I tried, but haven't been able to make it be recognized by the "bless home" spell, most probably because there is no interior cell. For those who are familiar with the Creation Kit, you can check all the requirements and whatnot in the shack, but in the end I think the interior cell is mandatory. However, I personally never really use the game's adoption and marriage system — I just use my custom followers (Kaidan lol) and whatever romance is built within them, and I always end up using NFF to "adopt" Aventus (as a follower/dismissed follower) if I'm having some child-fever.

Incompatible with any mods that makes changes to the same shack.

Interesting NPCs SE (3DNPC) is incompatible and needs patching, might try to make one in the futue.

When using New Beginnings, particularly the "attacked by a dragon" option, everything works fine except for a chest right at the front door, but nothing crazy, you can simply disable it with console commands. Will try to patch soon.

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Happy modding :)