$25 Winter Cabin Build (on an Extreme Budget!)

hey guys come on in good morning guys welcome back today we're doing a special project a lot of people have been talking about you know i don't have all those fancy tools and i don't have all those fancy equipment and i want to build a fort or a cabin that's what we're gonna do today today our plan is to build cabin 25 bucks that's our budget our budget is 25 so we've got the wooded beardsman chris my brother here got him got him working he's cutting some paws we've got our stacks we're just sorting out inventory because we want to make this relatively quick because we're taking this to a remote location in the back 40 we're gonna set it up we're gonna show you exactly how we're gonna do it shouldn't take too long the idea is to try to get this thing up in a day what we're using today for our build is these uh basically dead standing cedar poles and then you can you're supposed to thin these guys out long before they get to this point and you can see there's they're all just they're just dead standing sticks so these are these are gonna be the construction material that we're gonna use in order to build our 25 cabin all right let's gather a couple more let's get going [Applause] how's that for curbside delivery yeah they usually drop it off at the sidewalk and get you to pull it in or you got dawn [Applause] done like i shouldn't answer the phone today anyways we we just chucked that thing uh i don't know about four or five miles i don't think it was that far it felt like it felt like that so we've got our material here let's uh let's unload a good building that's my that's my forte i don't like moving material it's like doing the job twice we've got all our materials here we're gonna go over them because i said you guys could do this at home with very few materials so what i basically have is a little box screws these are uh deck screws they're no three in a bit and and i have the cedar poles which you guys watch us bring down here quite a few of them again those are free and we have love it or hate it a bunch of pallet wrap this is uh we've got four rolls pout wrap this is uh the biggest cost of this build you can probably find it locally at your uh either your a building supply store or you can probably find it at like uh office depot but they still have office depot places they sell uh um home office stuff it's pallet wrap saran wrap plastic wrap wrappy stuff shrink wrap we can heat this thing up and make her tight as a drum we're just laying out the uh material here because we uh basically we kind of pre-cut everything and we we're thinking it's going to all fit together we just got to make sure we're just doing inventory of the pieces make sure the shipper got all the right material here nothing's back ordered sign of the times eh you order something and four pieces show up with a 10 and you're like what's the use uh let's get this stuff uh put together [Applause] the basic idea behind this whole cabin is to make it an every man cabin anybody can build one of these you just need a little bit of money by a little bit of money i mean about 25 bucks it's not that much you know what you could you could even fasten this with nails you don't necessarily need to use screws so you could you could take some pallets take them apart collect some nails you know what if you ask the guys a loading dock pretty are like you know nice enough they'll probably give you some power wrap like you don't even you barely need a full roll how's that for unconventional building material was i too close pallet wrap this is the future of building as far as the past i don't know anyway just wrap we'll wrap our building in order to cloud our end walls or our triangle pieces we ended up wrapping the angled piece first and then that gave the actual plastic something to grab onto otherwise it was ended up being sliding up and down and then we kind of went a diagonal fashion in order to make sure the whole area was covered if you can't find pallet wrap the next best thing actually would be if you go to a lumber yard they have the tarps that they wrap wood generally speaking they throw those out they don't actually save them and if you ask the guy at the lumber yard nice enough he probably has a special one saved at the back ask them nicely they'll hook you up dawn came up with an idea of actually weaving it in and out of the actual wood in order to create structure otherwise it's going to be flapping in the wind you got the roof done i got the roof well hop through half the roof there's a roof panel as you can see thom's gonna put that up all by himself once we have all the sections put together the a-frame at the front and then the roof panels at the sides we put it all together adding more screws to the structure itself being sure to overlap the roof panels in order to create a ridge a waterproof ridge that is this is supposed to be a one-day build and it look it even sounds like we're inside this is pretty neat now the way this thing works is that there's two layers of plastic which is ideal because you have an outside layer an inside layer and then you have a trapped air space in the middle which acts as your insulation i think this thing's going to work actually really well with the wood stove that we're going to put in here we've got a little bit of engineering to do to ensure that it's not going to melt our building but as you can see end of uh basically a half day we did half day we started at noon we've got pretty much the uh the majority of the structure up i think that's a success we're gonna come back tomorrow and uh install our wood stove and make this a little bit more comfortable than a excuse it's quite it's it's quite nice right now so i'm gonna chalk that up as a success and we're gonna continue on tomorrow chris is just getting the stove he's getting the stove it's gonna get hot in here it looks rusty it's well it's not it's you know it's not stainless or anything oh okay it's not an expensive stove all right so this is this is the stove that we're gonna jerry macgyver rig inside this inside look you can see here so we're gonna put that in there we're going to make some sort of a gasket type thing that's going to go up inside this area here make it through the roof so it doesn't uh it doesn't melt everything it'd be real easy to break out if you don't catch it on fire just run through the wall well guys we're here the next day the shelter didn't blow away that's that's good news i think it's because it's sheltered inside the trees and the wind doesn't get that high and kind of area so today the plan is to uh is to get this thing all buttoned up so the front obviously it's the door that uh that doesn't exist yet as you can see it's really bright in here i don't know how it gets so bright it's like daylight in here well it's like daylight but i think it's like it's like the softest light you could ever have makes everybody beautiful it does like a shrink it it evens out all my wrinkles anyways so back to the plan i get sidetracked it's chris posing back here yep i'm looking beautiful all right so chris looking beautiful all right we need to build the door to keep all our heat in that we don't have yet you know what it's actually quite warm in here even without the door so the plan is to build a door we're going to build a frame i've got some old hinges that i took out of a box the gold old school put the door in and that gives us a little bit more enclosed space we also on track for today is we're gonna install a wood stove in this fire trap um and we're gonna put yeah some sort of a bracket up there i've got a little bit of a plan for that so yeah carry on as you can see pretty solid i don't think i would want to climb one we probably still have to put some uh ridge plastic on that to kind of shed a little bit more water at the ridge so yeah this uh this thing if you ever buy it in the store i i'd imagine it'd be close to like 1500 bucks or something like that and i think we're all in for 25 or something right now and a couple of screws and some old hinges yeah let's uh let's make a door when you're making a door especially some sort of a gate or structure similar to that it's important to put a diagonal cross member and usually what you do is you go from the bottom to the top and then that gives you a little bit more structure because it kind of displaces the weight and pushes it at the hinge so your gate doesn't sag like with everything else on this build this is going to be the cladding this is the pallet wrap so wrap the door the door is not complete without a handle i fashioned one out of a stick half the battle with getting a good fire going in the wintertime is acquiring the proper wood so what's what we're gonna go do now we're gonna find some wood for our tiny little stove inside our tiny little cabin ideally when you're collecting wood you wanna get a tree that's kind of standing out of the snow if it's laying on the ground chances are it's wet it's not quite ideal firewood so we're just we're on ourselves a hunt for some standing dry wood dry the wood the less it smokes more heat to get out of it better burns how about that one there you push that one over the top is going to snap off the tops oh there it goes stick that field goal you can't see that though look at it oh stuck it right in the ground stuck it right in the ground it's all ready to harvest well they call them widow makers right there it sticks on the top of your head all right let's uh cut that guy up trying to figure out the best way to install this stove this is a uh what kind of stove is this chris it is a run of the mill cheapo hot 10 stove so it's got no fire brick it's just basically a tin box with a door it's got a little baffle here and a little damper at the front so that's kind of neat this thing's gonna get crazy hot and radiate crazy amount of heat outside of it because it doesn't have any fire brick that being said it's also going to be a challenge to install it because the pipe itself which is a single wall telescopic pipe that's kind of cool it's not telescopic telescopic no it's just let's put together like a russian thing a russian thing like a like a finger trap no no that's a chinese trap look at the cribs that build up in that thing you never clean your pipes no no well i hadn't had it the opposite way it's like a telescopic now it's poor snow it's not supposed to stick together i think it's supposed it's supposed to come apart oh try to try taking the little guy out first it's always a chore there you go to figure out how to put this together okay so we're gonna we're gonna make a sort of a piece of flash and we've got some chunks of aluminum and we're going to fashion them between the rafter posts here and then we're going to tape it all up and hope for the best we're going to make it so it sheds water and uh hopefully it doesn't um burn the place down i don't think it's going to burn the place down you know what it might actually it might actually be good for this little tent because it'll actually keep heat in here and it'll actually tighten it all up shrink wrap a lot of the times with these clearances on the single wall pipe is 18 inches well we're not going to get 18 inches here but you know what we could put a piece of aluminum on this on this cross member here and it'll actually deflect the heat but i do know that crucial leaks out of the seam so we're going to put it at the top [Music] so the korea sit doesn't leak down we're aiming for that tree out there we're going to tie it with some tie wire to the tree we're also going to cut this back once we've got the flashing installed this is aluminum flashing i'm going to install it at the base of the chimney and then i'm going to put it on top of the chimney and that allows the rain to shoot over top of it and i'm going to tuck tape it in place this chimney doesn't have a chimney cap so the tendency of the wind blowing directly into the pipe is gonna smoke my brother out so i'm putting this little guy here i'm gonna wire it around the pipe and basically it's gonna prevent air from directly blowing inside the pipe forcing the smoke back into the cabin i've cut away the plastic here to keep it away from the pipe and i kind of don't want to seal this up because i want to actually have air flow in order for the air to actually travel up through here and kind of cool off the pipe as it goes this is sheathing tape or tuck tape brand name i guess and i'm going to seal the top edge of this here in order to prevent the water from actually traveling down so we've got our loop our overlap here so water cascades off here off here and then not inside we're gonna try the indoor stove so i've got some coal from the fire it's already lit half the battle let's just uh go with this and that and the other thing all right [Applause] we're just gonna let that uh catch fire and see if we smoke most of smoke stays outside well you guys asked for it so i'm going to deliver so you guys are wondering where i get my stuff and to be honest i just kind of look keep my eyes open for it so there's a uh a countertop place and i gave him my i gave them i gave them a ring and i asked them about their skids in their back and they're like yeah sure grab as many as you want they look like they're pretty good shape they're all looks like hardwood good burning so if you if you've got too much of it you can always burn it at the end that one's not great because it's got plywood on it but all these little hardwood skids here we've got uh yeah there's a whole pile of them here look at all that granite countertop look at the chunks i think what you make with that look at that piece there's an island piece right there future consideration i'm sure if i asked them for some scrap countertop they'd be like yeah grab it anyways we're gonna load up the uh load up the skids we got a tarp we got a tar our tarp cabin to build as you can see we've got quite a bit on there we've uh stacked them strapped down make sure it's not a wasted trip i had to come to town anyway so i figure if i get uh i get a bunch of material in the process that's what it's all about right it's about it's about collecting stuff kind of what you in in order to have it when you need it it's kind of yeah what are you doing man it's trash who's this guy do you know are you getting i know i'm the freaking fuzz man under arrest you're under arrest hey i i got authorization to grab from who from the guy in in the guy in the countertop place if you guys don't know who this is wreck rick eric has a pond that the wooded beards have been has to put fish in yes and this is kevin kevin from modern self-reliance from modern software lance who's uh yeah scavenge freaking skids from ultraviolet heating and air conditioning they don't know they they don't know who you are they're going to look you up now they're going to look you up though all right he was just checking were you thinking you were thinking i was stealing good stuff dorian saw the cameras like what the hell is going on here it's not scrap metal freaking stealing next thing you know there's gonna be some liability thing where he hurts himself and he pricks himself in the finger or something stupid i don't live in that world yet well you're a movie star we succeeded in building that for 25 dollars but it doesn't quite it just looks like a bunch of tarps so trick this guy out we're gonna add a floor well what's in an actual cabin we're gonna add a floor we're gonna add some benches we're gonna add a sleeping area maybe some electricity we're gonna make it a full functioning cabinet so the plan today is to make this a proper shelter right now it's more or less i don't know it's a greenhouse it's a plastic it's a hobo tint so it's just basically a plastic bag in the bush right now but we want to make it a little bit more accommodating for for the every man you got the structure the pallet it's a great building material when you don't want to pay for anything so you find these you know along the side of the road behind industrial you can find them pretty much anywhere hardware stores have them anybody that really imports stuff has pallets and usually they don't go back to their original place they just kind of toss them or they put them along the side of the road and they're free so you can pick them up and usually all you got to do is de-nail them and in this case i used a sawzall and cut all the nails so i don't have to pull the nails but that's expensive so you can just pull the nails pound them out use a hammer all right oh it already feels like home this floor is amazing something to lay down in the middle of the bush it's already feeling like a cabin it's actually warmer than the ground so now that we've got our floor all down we're going to move the cabin back on top of the floor to make sure it fits so hopefully we measure twice and it fits check that out that floor is already feeling like a cabin it's it's nice and solid it's the finest of all softwood pallets the uh zero dollar spent except for those screws i had laying around but uh but yeah it's solid it's like a dance floor i don't know i think it's it's just for a king or a hobbit squatter it's a nice little house it's all the rage now like barn board pallet wood skid wood the people in the big cities they put these as accent walls and i'm using it as a floor that's insane let's have some lunch so uh yeah mmm grill sent us a grill and uh i should always read the instructions before i light a fire so i lit the fire and then i looked at the grill and it said pound stakes in before lighting fire so we're gonna do that now we've only got a little fire going this is a uh this looks like a pretty neat grill it's the idea is to pound these two little steaks in beside your fire or light a fire underneath your grill you probably should pound them in first before you let your fire but that being said we're gonna do that after we got kind of a half fire going we won't let ourselves on fire let's uh let's pound those stakes in and get this thing set up so while we wait for our fire to turn to coals we're gonna we're gonna put our stove back in to kind of orient the hole inside to make sure it fits because you don't want the stove too close to the bed and you don't want the bed too close to the side and whatever so we're going to put the stove back in we're going to chimney back up and that kind of gives us a better idea on where everything fits it looks like our fire is almost ready to cook so uh yeah first first experience with this thing this thing this thing's built solid it's built last like it's solid looks like solid stainless steel it's got some weight to it it seems really easy to use you can go up and down on your on your uh on your guy here so you just set your height you just set it down to whatever height you got where your coals are they also sent me also sent me these really cool mugs i don't know if that's uh that's that's normal or if that's the standard operating procedure who doesn't like a good hot dog especially cooked on an open fire it adds it adds something hmm canadian mustard seed on an american grill you see that here i'll let you grab your own wiener i don't want to touch your wiener that's watching oh yeah a little bundle of cold it should have warmed the bun up i think it tastes better when it's on a grill outside next up we're working on the bed so now we've got this uh this bed we're gonna be working on and it's made out of slats so the again the pallet slats and uh because we don't have anything that's quite long enough because we're using reclaimed material we're gonna splice together some of the two by threes and then we're gonna add some two by threes to the edge and then we're gonna we're making it eighty inches long and then we're gonna put some feet on it and that's gonna give us a nice platform to lay down that's the plan anyway oh look at that saw it as a rock i don't think that's a good quality in a bed but the bed doesn't break oh doing a lot of laying down on this job gonna test your stuff but i just need a mattress or something a foam pad or maybe some leaves bunch up some leaves on this bad boy posturepedics got nothing on me this is a hot tent stove and it uh formally belonged to my brother it still kind of belongs to my brother he just kind of lent it for this project so it's got uh it's basically a tin box it's got no fire brick in it so it's nice and light it's designed to be portable like i said it's designed to be in a little hot tent so it's got uh it's got all the features of a standard you know wood stove it's got little damper here and it's got the chimney pipe uh the only thing is it's heavy or it's light and it's got no fire brick so but it should heat up this little guy pretty good um if we get this thing sealed up anyway so that's it's got a little side burner so you can actually cook on it it's uh it's neat little stove it's it's seen some it's seen some it's seen some stuff look at that rusty thing anyway we've got a little hole at the back here um it's because we didn't use a dimensional lumber when we built this thing so we've got we've got to kind of adapt and modify and work with what we have so we've cut another tree log there and uh we'll just slide that in place and that'll uh that'll fix the uh the hole you gotta look at dawn the special delivery pole so dawn's gonna put the pole in there's the pool we've filled the gap that's pretty good actually it's like a glove don did you measure that thing it did perfect you know we can stuff some leaves and stuff underneath that if if we're you know moss we'll throw some moss under there to make it airtight because this little stove is somewhat more of a permanent installation i decided to install what is like a little hearth which is a piece of plate steel underneath it so when you open the door the ashes if any are there and they fall down they'll just sit on that little tray until you realize that they just fell down and put them out before you set the woo or the floor on fire that shouldn't happen anyways when you're focused and paying attention to what's going on you'll be aware that there's coals that fell out of your stove and land it on the floor so that's to prevent that if it does it was to occur we do uh we do have a carbon monoxide smoke detector when we stay when we plan on staying here overnight you always kind of want to have that whenever you're you know have any kind of fire going in your in your structure don is out there grabbing some kindling we're going to light the tiny little stove in the uh and the tarp shelter in the cabin and our little cabin made out of saran wrap pallet wrap yeah so we're going to light that guy up gives us a little bit more comfortable working environment is that even going to fit this dough i'm not sure how many looks he's never looked in the stove so anyways don likes making fires so he's going to light that guy up good thing you have a heart i sent don on a wild goose chase through the forest to pick me up some sticks because i'm planning on building a lamp because we need a lamp in our cabin so let's uh we went to the other side of the world you can see how how nice it is out here you guys just get the good view it's like a it's like a you know normal rockwell painting out here it's got the yeah it's perfect spot over here it's got some sticks he's got a whole pile of he's probably looking to burn stuff let's make a big fire okay so now that we have a bed what other furniture do we need we probably need a little table maybe an end table let's say you can put your alarm clock huh you don't need an alarm clock at a cabin what do you put on your end table in a cabin your gun yeah yeah because if a bear sneaks up on you it's coming through the wall all right let's uh we're going to build a table i'm not building a bench table let's put a little table yeah all right let's build a table we got our tabletop this is an old spool of wire you find these guys out back usually by the skids this is uh this is this used to have the round part sticking out with another thing so it's the wheel so it's disconnected and we're gonna make a table out of it so that what we did there we cut cut our legs we're gonna attach our legs to the bottom we're gonna only use three because a three legged table is a lot more stable than a four-legged table although we might put four legs on it we'll see how three work we'll go from there turns out four legs are better than three i ended up flipping it back over and adding a fourth leg and now it's very stable put weight on every corner of the table even though it's a circle solid all right nice place it's actually a nice place because you're right beside the stove so like a little bench right here be perfect coffee table i bet you the pioneers when they were traveling you know discovering new lands i think i bet you the first thing they built when they settled was a chair just to sit down there's something about sitting down after trudging through the snow or through the rain or even like a nice sunny day it's a good time to just sit down make a chair out of a tree stump log pile of rocks chairs where it's at sit so next up on the agenda we're gonna build some coat hooks and uh my plan is to use this board as my basically backdrop on the coat hooks and then i'm going to take little branches and i'm going to stick them to the stick stick them to this brand branch we're taking the branches we're sticking to this board that'll give us a nice rustic looking coat hook rack so there's my stick let's go back let's go back inside where it's warm [Applause] take a look at that you hang up everything you own on that thing [Applause] it's getting warm enough in here we can take your jackets off you know the other good thing about this table is the center hole like i didn't even think about this but you can grab the table by the hole grab the table by the hole and you can move it look at that it's like a table fit for a beef where's my lunch bag of chips what do you got i got toasty baby a toasted bit well you could toast it again well i couldn't do that you could it might be frozen it was sitting out in the bag what do we got for temp we got three degrees in here right now it's actually it's actually it's comfortable it's comfortable working three degrees oh got a banana because you know monkeys oh bottled water but they don't we shouldn't talk we're in a plastic tent we can talk about bottled water it's not that bad it's a fact of life and a sandwich which is also in a plastic container we're surrounded by plastic another i bought down a bottle of water thank you still need some lighting so we're gonna do uh we're gonna deal with lighting this afternoon and um maybe a lamp some overall lighting and then a lamp because you know what i've got like a billion pot lights in my house and i sit there with my lamp i don't know what it is something about a lamp it's cozy so i know a lot of you guys might be thinking why does dawn choose to come out and help me build weird things in the bush let's ask him why why do you come out don what what's your motivation so it's fun it's something to do it's interesting yeah all of the above all of the above so it's something you get out of your house you do something you get into nature you're crafty creative yeah you get to spend some time outside so it's yeah but we're always inside we start we start off outside and then we that's not really true i mean today but we're inside in and out yeah so okay so it's about being in and out of the house that's right yeah yeah well i've always got something going on right it's good to have it's good to have people that do stuff right so so we've got our lampshade built and this is the uh this is going to go over top of the the light and this is what i have for the lighting is an old uh oh i think it's ikea or something that's got the little rocker switch on i'm just going to hook it up to this guy put a mounting bracket inside the lamp in order to uh in order to hold it probably some more screws just to give a little bit more support yeah all right so we got our light bulb in we've got our lamp in and what we brought along is our energy battery pack and this is our this is our line voltage ac voltage that's going to uh power this thing so what's neat about this thing is that it's it's got a lot of power i don't exactly know how much power is in there like 1500 watts or something like that and uh it's got usb ports on so you can charge your phone and it's got ac dc it's got 220. anyways it's good so they could just turn it on we're at 100 so plug it in like a traditional lamp look at that bing you got a little switch you can't tell because it's so bright in here but if it was dark you would welcome that lamp not much change to the outside but i want to take you on a little tour of the inside because that's where all the that's where all the action happened today let's see what we got in here take a look at this actually close the door don't let all the heat out we've got uh got our little little bench slash end table we've got our bed right here we've got our side table with our battery pack down below it's our energy apex battery pack and that allows us to have off-grid power you can hook that thing up to solar yeah or you can charge it at home ac or you can use 12 volt dc you can use on your car our little lamp we built rack and we've got our we're drying some gloves just so it's either dual purpose you can hang your clothes up there you can dry your gloves it's our little camp stove this is uh i guess it's a tent stove it's basically hitting our tent right now coffee table dinner table end table coaster we've got all the all the amenities here we even got our protecting our uh underneath our floor so that's good there and uh like i said we've got a chandelier and this is this is for future consideration so this guy here you can actually uh like if you find deer sheds in the woods which are the antlers that fall off during the i guess every spring or is it in the fall anyways you can put deer sheds on here you've seen those really fancy chandeliers that have the uh the deer antlers or the elk ant there's all intertwined so that's that's future consideration so you can build on it temperature in here it's it's a it's a very comfortable 8.8 degrees right now celsius outside it's about minus four or so so it does it does retain heat it's got enough air seems to be coming in so it's nice and fresh it's not drafty at all this thing is uh this is a viable solution to you know building a quick shelter in the woods and again material on this thing we use reclaimed pallet wood and pallet wrap you know what i mean like you could basically find this you know the back of an industrial area anyways guys i hope you enjoyed this one i uh join me on the next one

Channel: Modern Self Reliance

Views: 1,065,296

Rating: 4.863121 out of 5

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, small cabin, cabin on a budget, cheap cabin, cabin plans, pallet wood cabin, plastic cabin, drill, hammer, carpentry, skill saw, circular saw, winter camping, winter hot tent

Id: ZFez8yhgVI4

Length: 37min 6sec (2226 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 13 2021