1-Full Year at the Off Grid Homestead! | Defects, Catching Fish, Rain Water, and Project Wrap Ups!

have you ever had so much mulch you don't quite know what to do with it i'm kind of in that situation now where i've kind of asked for mulch and i got mulch lots and lots of mulch well good morning guys another fine day in the forest today the sun has come out graced us with its appearance it's a great day in the bush it's always a great day in the bush when it's you know mild it's not raining things around here have been piling up we've got things to do we just don't seem to have enough time ever to do them so today is going to be all about buttoning off checking off those things off the list that we've got to do that we've been kind of putting off literally piles of stuff to do on top of the honeydew list i've got some things i got to do inside i didn't quite finish the chinking the other week so i'm back here i've got a little bit of chicken left to do i've got the top three layers of chicken and basically this whole back wall i've got to do so that's a that's a little bit of a chore no big deal it'll probably go pretty quick so that's kind of on the list too and also i got to deal with the uh the root cellar um issue and overall housekeeping we gotta we gotta deal with the piles first so we're gonna head on up upper level we've gotta deal with the trails my trails have been kind of a bone of contention with me because it's been they've been kind of muddy they haven't really got the attention they deserve they kind of need some sort of topping or mulch so i got my buddy over at jl tree service he has decided to start dropping off mulch here or tree from the chipper so i've got to move it i gotta make trails i can't leave it any longer i must move mulch once i got my piles sorted out i think i gotta deal with the rainwater collection system get that make sure that's online maintained and working so it did survive the winter as you guys can see it's still on there there was some doubt whether or not it was going to last the winter if the snow was going to rip it off the building there it is still standing amazing really no i didn't i didn't doubt it one bit water tote still seems to be collecting water so i got to get that online make sure it's all cleaned out maybe have a look inside just to take a little peek so anyways got lots of stuff on the list but we're going to start by pushing some mulch i got mulch in my underwear oh oh i'm going to be picking that out for a while this is the good stuff this is the mostly trunk wood little branches of mulch and this is what's going to be my glorious glorious trail say goodbye to mud say hello to mr chip so it gets really muddy and slick when it's rained so the plan is to take all the mulch that i have up there and bring it down here and give myself a nice nice trail nice soft trail keep the mud down keep myself clean when i come down here and especially the tractor tires and whatnot anytime you can keep yourself out of the mud it makes everything a little bit better gives you some traction too [Applause] i've kind of already started a little bit i've pushed some piles around the problem i'm having right now is that the piles are coming too quickly and i can't actually push them out quick enough so i've got to get that one out of the road because there's more chips coming they just keep coming and you got to find time in order to push them around so that's the plan so [Music] [Applause] [Music] squirrel where's the squirrel can you see the squirrel this is a chipmunk well guys there you have it my yellow chip road is complete i'm not the best operating heavy equipment but i try you know i don't got thousands of hours of experience using i have i got that tractor a couple years ago so i don't think i'm doing too bad like i do watch the channel of the andrew camareta property maintenance guy and he just got the knack you know what you watch his stuff and it's just like easy peasy and everything's smooth and uh i gotta you gotta attribute that to thousands of hours of operation um i found the best method for me was to get the stuff close and then use a rake that's the easiest way i could think of doing it uh you know besides you know the imminent danger of actually getting too big of a load there with the bucket and uh tipping over because it is kind of slanted there so is all right remove your food uh well the pigs are doing great what i'm learning is that it doesn't matter what time of day you give them food they always seem like they've never had food and they're going to eat it all immediately as soon as you give it to them so i don't think you can give them too much food i think they they will eat until they explode well they'll probably just eat until they're full but i don't think i have enough kitchen scraps in order to uh you know make them pull off just kissing stuff so i do give them kibble which is those little pellets hog feed give them top them up on that but they do enjoy their kitchen scraps hey buddies hey hey what do you think yep they do like their kitchen scraps they are digging a little bit near that far side i'm not too concerned about it they've got a long way to go seem to be entertained i don't know hey oh yeah they're just having their breakfast delicious i've been throwing leaves and sticks and grass and sort of stuff in there and they seem to be enjoying that as well just kind of play around throw some sticks around i was in town last night and uh going for dinner and i actually uh saw a dumpster and the gentleman there was like yeah grab whatever you want and they had a whole bunch of uh edging for ceramic tile and some metal edging for ceramic tile as well i think you gotta grab whatever you want you know it's better to reuse it right so i don't necessarily need that right now but it's good to have it on on hand and there's also a piece of 636 pipe and if you don't know what that stuff is that's venting for hot water tanks and furnaces so that stuff's worth 35 bucks a piece so i grabbed it i don't know when i'll ever use it if i will but i got a place for it so it's kind of having your own little general store it's better to have it and not need it than he did not have and especially have to buy it that sort of stuff is good to have on hand and there's a vent so i found a vent which is cool because i need that for the root cellar i just need one more so i'm gonna keep my eyes open for one more and then we're gonna make sure that things vented mix mix mix all day long mix mix mix while i sing this song great don't inhale the dust next up on the punch list is finishing off the chinking which uh we're gonna mix in our mortar we've got uh one part portland three-part sand and we're mixing like three batches up so that's nine parts of each that's not no that's not right three parts portland nine part sand it's a lot of math there anyway so that's what we're doing we're finishing off the chinking because uh then i'll have substantial completion those are like you know industry terms of uh when you get paid when you have spent substantial completion oh come on where's the lights oh my phone's ringing nobody's home nobody's home oh hang on ah they wanted to clean my air ducts well does everybody get those phone calls i always want to clean my ducks i should really try to filter all those guys out they want to clean my air ducts hello duck cleaning we clean your ducks i got no ducks yeah anyways so what i was saying is we have to put more chicken in these little areas here uh but as you can see it took we're about a week out for the stuff to drive but this stuff's solid as a rock there's no even hairline cracks it's it's very solid it's it's bridge the gap nothing it's it's actually perfectly stable which i'm very impressed with very pleased with you can see even on the outside there's no there's no hairline cracks or anything it's perfect perfect i'm impressed with that so uh again big shout out and a big thank you to the outsider he was uh instrumental in convincing me to use wire laugh which i was like that's crazy but uh instead we did use it and it worked out great even the back side we've got no airline cracks or anything i think this is going to last many many many years how's mixing gone don i think uh it's almost ready although it may be a little too dry for your liking that's right i i like it a little wetter because i can push it into the laugh a little easier and you don't require that much force so i kind of want it more like not necessarily tomato soup how do i want it it's like a smoothie it's like pouring like pouring cement i want more like a chocolate milkshake a thick chocolate milkshake then i don't know i don't know i can't think of anything right now dawn's going to make that all chocolate milk shaky i see you got a montreal expo hat going yes because my other winnipeg jets hot like the team was starting to stink so i thought i'd change that's right he's going on montreal so they're playing tonight they're playing tonight in the uh in the finals right they were playing for the stanley cup tonight no no no aren't they still the okay so if they win tonight they go on to play the stanley cup i don't watch a lot of hockey i play hockey but don't watch it so anyways i was just going to show you guys a little bit of the pond the pond is looking very pond-like because the frogs have come in and they've laid their laid their eggs and the eggs developed into uh i like to call them as good pollywogs but they're not called playlogs they're like tadpoles tadpoles for frogs we should have a whole bunch of frogs any day now chris has got his little uh fish feeder going on there his uh bug light and this whipper snipper doohickey you can check out on his channel woody beardsman if you want to see him whip or snip flies and moths and stuff like that is kind of cool anyways let's get uh task at hand is to get this parging in so we can get this off our punch list and move on to the next project uh all so right we got we got three more rows left have you just have you devised a system that works better yeah i kind of like chucking it in and then you go back and smooth it out look at that you live and learn right the next cabin it is going in there pretty good all you got to do is smooth that thing out now let's one more time look at that the old mud chucking technique that's good looking i know there's going to be some guys out there saying why didn't you put insulation between the chinking and the reason why i didn't is because i did not want to trap moisture between two impermeable surfaces because what's going to happen with the concrete or the mar or the mortar the chinking on both sides is that if water ever gets in there and it has somewhere to live let's say something like spray foam or even let's say roxul insulation what it's going to do is going to sit there and linger on top of the log and i think what's going to do it's going to take a path of least resistance it's going to work itself into the log and i believe it's going to rot our log over time so i'm leaving it to dry out naturally this is sort of the same idea when they built double brick homes they what they did was they put one layer of brick they put an air space and then they put another layer of brick and that allowed basically an air space so the air space acts as insulation anytime you can trap air in a space it acts as insulation so it gives you a barrier from the hot and the cold synthetic chinking there is a type of caulking that you can put between logs it is the ultra modern version for a log cabin i did look into that sort of stuff and i determined it is cost prohibitive it would have been thousands of dollars to put synthetic chinking in this tiny little cabin this isn't my primary residence this is an occasional cabin that you may or may stay at it's going to have an oversized fireplace in it so i don't think it'll ever have a hard time heating this thing up we're going to give it a whirl and if it doesn't work we can always revisit this later about the monitor that you think somebody came and lived here yeah get down in that hole bean find it what's that maybe i'm completely wrong because it doesn't even take a whiff bean is not a fox hound dean what's down here nothing go find it go in there what'd you see do you see anything mean take the camera take the camera go inside that hole we gotta send a rc car up there i don't know it does look like a home for something hopefully a skunk doesn't fly out of there oh yeah dawn either thinks it's a skunk or a groundhog or something making a house bean stuck her nose in there and didn't kind of keep going so it was a monitor hopefully it's not a skunk because that would suck i have a skunk in there resident skunk well no it didn't smell usually easy skunk houses smell like skunk all right we're mixing our last batch we actually the uh we ended up using three bags of portland which isn't terrible because the portland bags were about 15 bucks a piece we're at 30 45 45 in portland i had some sand laying around so really this is a very cost effective way of chinking the wire lath i think was the most expensive part so anyways that's that's where we're at monetarily on the chinking process dance last batch this is exciting last batch you're excited right don now that we know how to do it that's that's right now that we had to do it we can do another one i'm thinking of cordwood cabin what do you think a cord wood cabin is it on your list i think it might be down there somewhere dog got a bucket list of things that he would like to do i don't know if a cord would cabin i was we were talking about a quarter of a cabin a little while because we got a lot of dead standing little logs and if you don't know what a cord wood cabin is it's using what looks like firewood to build walls of the cabin you kind of set them like bricks so so well guys i'm pretty happy on how this thing all turned out we've got everything chinked up everything's ready for the inside finishing i'm not sure what i'm going to get to that that might be like a you know cooler weather sort of project but we've got some more exciting things on tap next up on my to-do list is venting in the root cellar it's jam season meaning strawberry jam we are in the process of canning it and uh preserving it the wife's doing it she needs a spot for it so i'm going to clean up the root cellar add some much needed venting we're gonna have a look at inside to see well i'll give you guys an update i've been in here a couple times the door's sticking okay we gotta fix that anyways root cellar okay so what the plan on this is to actually install a vent on the top and the bottom what i'm going to use for that is these these are i think these are actually vents for root cellars i'm not exactly sure what they are um i did find some other ones that i was going to use but they look too much like a dryer vent so these guys i can probably conceal a little bit better make it non-conspicuous inconspicuous that's the word so but first maybe i'm gonna paint them [Applause] part can brown spray paint and again if i had something color matched in a perfect world but i'm not going to buy a whole can of spray paint i had the stuff laying around probably somebody else bought it didn't want i was doing a clean out and they're like yeah i want some paint i went yeah sure so i forgot my pencil ah a blast from the past isn't it i need a stick there we go big fish on oh these things got huge dude look how big that thing is we have a net oh dude all that hard work we made them fat look at that fish that's a big fish no kidding it doubled in size since we put them in here for sure oh look at that that was no that doubled in size for sure since we put it in 100 percent that's crazy go back to the pond it's not always the case when your brother is uh fishing and you're doing all the work anyways the sl slight rain delay i don't think the red's gonna last very long so i'm just gonna wait it out and then we'll install those vents it's gotta dry anyways so well guys i almost forgot on my to-do list i had the um rain water collection system i want to put back online so what a great opportunity it's raining i can make it make it work all at the same time i think there was a little bit of plug in the in the filter itself so i'm going to set it up so it uh it's cleaned out and it works because i got some i maybe have some guests coming by so i might as well get that thing up and running she's full that's my uh my filter was plugged so give that a clean so i got my end cleanout cap and it was made out of a cedar plug and it goes into the end of it and it makes it really convenient to clean this thing out so if you look i don't be able to see this but we can go to the end of the pipe and you can kind of see the crud that's in there and i'm just going to work my way along there and uh and clean out the sludge but like after an entire year worth of stuff that is not very much sludge in a knee trough so once we get that cleaned out it should be up and ready to go well the stick's not working very well to clean that thing out because there's screws going through the trough every once in a while so i've got another plan when i originally designed the system my thoughts were to put something at the end of that and blow everything out the other side so i got my leaf blower my power pack and i'm gonna do that wish me the best [Applause] [Applause] well guys i think that worked pretty good clean as a whistle look at looking down the pipe can you see anything in there oh you could you could drink out of that guy well we still won't drink it this is only for this is rain water collection for cleaning stuff so we got our clean water coming in there we got it into our ibc tote for storage and then we got it pumped into the cabin for later to use you gotta wash your hands wash my hands well he's cleaning fish that's a big that's a big trout that's i would say taking it gutting it it's obviously a lot smaller but i'd say a game like 30 40 of its body mass in two months that's crazy so now you know what the potential is if you get that pawn dug deep properly you can put uh 50 100 fish in there and that's lots of meals you can get out of that pond but yeah as is it's a little muddy so i think you're gonna have to get rid of those other three fish soon there that's right everyone just i didn't know you didn't know they were still alive did you well i kind of well i had my doubts so it is it is getting to the point in the season where the water level is dropping and it's muddy well it's the silver not good for trout well the trout seem to be okay yeah but how long yeah that's true we don't want to waste them how long are you going to be okay and they may be like well like three or four more days you don't know all of a sudden it's like a switch yeah oxygen levels decline and then the fish struggle when they die that's why we got our aerator anyways so that is a legitimate concern and uh we have to deal with that so but first we have to actually take the fish out of the pond because we can't do anything while the fish are in the pond i've been waiting for that moment to get rid of the fish he edits the video so he's going to find that out anyways task at hand we're always doing something right so the rainwater collection system is back online i'm just going to let that drain for a little bit longer i think that's all you need to do for your annual rainwater collection system maintenance so it's ready for the three seasons that come ahead again this water is not for drinking it is more of a washing system and you should also treat it kind of like pool water so it doesn't hurt to put a little bit of javax chlorine in there every once in a while to keep your water fresh and free of smelling so anyways that's uh that's it so now we're gonna do is wait for it to fill up it is supposed to rain for the next couple of days so i don't know if i'll actually be able to post how much we collect but uh there's a thousand liter tote over there so we'll see how much we get and uh i might as well give you guys a little bit of a tour around a few guys have been inside this cabin this is the this is the main main off grid cap by off-grid we got our power pack over there powering it so as you guys can see everything seems to be good there are a lot of skeptical people out there when they're like why would you drywall an off-grid cabin well i say why wouldn't you drive while an off-grid cabin it is a perfect substrate to have an off-grid cap everything seems to be good there is going to be any nail pops which is a testament to the wood we were using because we did build this out with green lumber by green i mean it wasn't particularly dry when we built it and we let it sit and dry out a lot of the times when people were building homes back in the day what they would do is they would close up a house so stick frame the entire house and they'd let it sit for a couple of months six months five months whatever they would let it sit and what that would do is it would dry out in place now with the factory building you see now so the stick frame houses what happens is they put them up so quick and they don't let them settle they don't let them dry out they don't become acclimatized to the natural environment before they close them in they just close bang bang bang and that's why a lot of new homes when you see them a couple of months after they've been built drywall painted everything's moved in you start seeing nail pops and the reason why is because everything's drying out after the fact so this as you can see it's been here for i think this is going on year three we're you know all the windows still open all the doors still closed the nails pops aren't really non-existent and uh you know you can still you can't see any of the seams or anything anyways i'm rambling too much rambling not enough doing gotta do a couple more [Applause] things mmm mud so well this guy opened up in it it's not stopping anytime soon liquid sunshine my tractor's sad doesn't see the rain very often but it's sad today so the uh as it turns out the grills that i have uh painted uh they don't look terrible they do like they do they're they do stand out so there's there shouldn't be a feature they should just kind of blend in and disappear so i think i'm going to take these guys up and uh give them paint some color match paint maybe i've got the i've got the holes now so i can actually bring the bring the holes with me to actually get a match because i want those things to kind of disappear i don't want them to be blatantly obvious but otherwise got the floor cleaned up i'm going to look for a plastic runner that's going to go down the center just keep it off the floor and then hopefully we won't get the mud collection so in the meantime i'm just going to leave this guy open and we're going to call this a success because on a side note i'm probably also going to address the fact that there's just mud out front because it's how do you keep something clean when there's just mud out in front of your door i'm going to add some wood chips when it bing bada boom you'll probably have to see that on the next one because this one's running a little long but anyways success partial success rain delay i

Channel: Kevin Builds (Modern Self Reliance)

Views: 149,571

Keywords: building, tools, hand tools, power tools, sawmill, cabin construction, how to build a cabin, tiny house, forest house, small house, log cabin, construction, cabin design, sawing, cutting wood, off grid, homestead, cottage, tiny cabin, self reliance, solar powered house, small home, axe, saw, off grid homestead, 1 year off grid

Id: I3u0t0CvvIo

Length: 29min 42sec (1782 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 03 2021