Alaska Log Cabin .....Start to finish.

how's it going everybody my name is Dave for pool and you're watching Busch for radical during this last summer the summer of 2017 I started work on my fourth log cabin project and I hope you guys have had a chance to take a look at that series building the Alaska log cabin in this video I'd like to take you guys all back in time 17 years to 2001 and show you my first cabin build stay with me [Music] you so this is the very first cabin that I ever built Brooke and I lived in this cabin for two and a half years now it's pretty cool looking here but it didn't look like that from the start this is the property as we bought it just north of Fairbanks probably 10 or 15 minutes you could see that somebody else had tried to homestead this piece at one point it's got some fencing around it I don't know whether they had goats or horses or anything but it's a nice little piece tucked into a little valley the pipeline runs through that valley you'll see that here in a minute but with this fence along the front and it kind of a gentle slope you know the place had potential I think we spent $6,800 on this two acre piece and we ended up buying two acres on either side of us we ended up with about six you see the pipeline back there it runs through that valley and there was nothing else back there there's some old mining equipment in that valley he was pretty cool and this place actually came with its own furniture too that's kind of a big plus you know when you when you buy a place and it's already furnished yeah well this is the place that we set up to live in while we built the place that we were building this is our two-man Eureka pup tent and the cat lived on the roof that's Mable and me and the dogs we lived outside in the front yard but the one thing that this property had it had a lot of down timber when they put the power line through this area they cut a lot of these trees down and once we looked through the pile of logs that we had we found that we had enough material there to make about a 12 by 12 cabin and then we would be completely out of logs so that's what we decided to do you can see here Brooke is is peeling a log great to the left there's a pile of logs and we we started off peeling and and prepping our material here we you can see that we've got a pretty good stack of logs already peeled up we brought in someone by material to make our floor with what we ended up doing is we built a three ply ring beam and then two by eight joists and to buy a ring beams this is it's the face of somebody who is ready to get out of a tent [Music] and when you take a look at that beam around the edge that's just three two by eights sandwiched up together and glued nailed and what you're doing is you're building something that will support the weight of a log wall you don't really want to stack a thousand pound wall on a single rim joist so we would build that exterior beam up three thicknesses of two by material gluing it and nailing it and then we'd hang the floor joist from the inside with joist dinners if you look at that cement block we were just anxious to get going so we kind of propped this Florida with whatever we had but what we ended up doing ultimately is we brought in some large concrete disks that a friend of mine had already poured they were like eight inches thick and about two and a half feet across they weighed probably 400 pounds and we brought in I think eight of them and there was one mid span and one on every corner so this is the deck of the house this would ultimately end up being the floor of the cabin but right now we just used it for a deck and what is nice to have someplace other than just the tent to be we could sit up on the deck where looks nice back to peeling logs we bought two brand-new draw knives that year and we would use those draw knives on all kinds of stuff for years to come and sometimes we would just spend the evening and draw knife and logs trying to get our pile built up that's the face of somebody who would rather be doing something else you can see in this picture there's a big red home light chain saw this saw that we used to do this entire cabin I think it was probably from the 1970s work it just getting started on the first two courses in this picture got to keep that thing sharp and you want to make sure that your your chainsaw is very good and dialed in for this kind of work because what you're actually doing is you scribe fitting the logs together from the top to the bottom as you go I'll explain more in a minute now doing a full round 12 by 12 cabin I would say that a 12 foot log is just about all anyone wants to handle and you could see the corner post here we started with a corner post on each corner and we filled in the walls between the corner posts there's another picture of that big nasty red chainsaw that's a home like super XL and that thing weighed I don't know it must have weighed 20 pounds anyway that saw it was given to us by our friend Neil Eklund if you've ever seen Yukon River on the National Geographic program that Brooke and I were on that's Neil's show and Neil gave us that saw the year previous in two thousand Brooke worked for Neil on this log raft and Neil was bringing in guests to float down the river is kind of a paying business it'd be about 13 years later that we all got to go back out on the river and float the river for the National Geographic Channel but as you can tell from that previous picture of a log raft the wall graphs Neil built we're all pretty much along the same lines and this is the one we built in 2014 to put an amazing trip down the Yukon River beautiful beautiful country and there's just something pretty magical about floating a raft down a river it's so hard to tell what you're gonna do from one year to the next but one thing I would like to do again in my life it's spiked together a nice log raft and float it down the river and maybe build another cabin because building cabins is something like log rafting that just kind of gets into your blood and this one is were I got started with the cabin building bug and this is also another good picture where you can see that there's four corner posts to this cabin and they went up first if you look at the top of the frame you can also see these skinny log poles that we use to keep the corner posts square that lock Brooks peel and it's probably the biggest one that went in the whole cabin although I can't remember exactly where it went it was big as we were building we're also cleaning up the yard stacking up anything that would be firewood for the winter and just kind of tidy in the place up every night for months on end we would have a big bonfire out in our muddy yard and burn up brush we'd burn up poles burn up garbage left from whoever had the place before and just tidy it up and we had mud boots and a big fire and a nice radio and classic country it was great there's a good picture of the actual process of building a log house like this you put your log on the the next log in the course and you tack it into the corner post and then you tack it some way in the other end to hold it in place and you run the chainsaw bar between the two logs what this does is this it knocks off the high spots on the bottom log and the log above it then you take your saw you hammer that log down tight to the one below it and you make another pass usually takes about four passes to make those logs up well there's a good picture of the doorway doorways are great because you can use shorter logs and it really feels like you're making some headway all these logs are screwed together with log screws and they're like an eight inch spring steel screw they only have about two inches to thread on the end there's another good picture where you can look above and see the polls that we use to keep the corner posts nice and square once we got a little higher on the wall we took those off because they were no longer needed you can see by this frame we're actually getting close to the top just like screwing the top log to the log below it putting a nice long toenail screw into each corner post was part of the job too and once I got to the top I use the chainsaw to score that top log just kind of eyeballing it it didn't have to be perfect but it had to be right in the ballpark and I chalk a line all around the wall at the same height and score this top log and then just take a hammer and knock out the the chunks of wood to try to get a roughed in flat surface once there was a flat surface we put down insulation and we nailed down a double top plate now the double top plate serves two purposes it gives you a flat area to nail your roof rafters to and it also ties corners in not that it needed it in this building sir there's a million screws in it you got to watch this neighborhood you know so that I kept my guard dog right next to all our building materials and you can see she's doing a great job all those rafters are cut the exact same size from from one side to the next they're all the same now what you're looking at here is this is a log purlins I put a pearl in on each side and then I put a big one right up the middle so once the ceiling was done these log purlins were exposed they're really not doing anything functionally they're just basically there for looks in this frame I'm notching out the center purlins which would be the ridge beam kind of if you looked right up at the peak of the ceiling this is the log that you would see and it kind of gives the illusion inside that you're you know the the roof is held up by logs but it's not it's just it's a rafter roof and the logs were just there for looks you can see I'm notching this log in order that it will fit into the last rafter and then I can just screw it all into place and it just stay there here we are in this picture getting the roof together just standing up the the rafters now with a rafter roof I've done lots of rafter roofs and they do go fast once your rafters are all cut you can just throw them right up there nice and quick and I've probably got a half dozen or more different settings where I'm cutting rafter tails but this was my first being at my first cabin that we built this is my first show chopping rafter tails what this roof ended up being was a nine and a half 12 pitch the reason it was a nine and a half 12 pitch is because I wanted to use just standard sheet metal for the roof that I didn't have to cut to length I think these were 10-foot pieces of roofing material so it just worked out that it was a nine and a half 12 pitch roof and little too steep stand on you see those kicker boards there but we ended up getting that roof all cheated in and now came the tricky part putting the metal on because with the metal you don't have any kicker boards to stand on this is kind of a an ominous picture for me because right after this was taken I fell off this roof I fell off this roof to the east side of the building and landed in about a foot of nice thick cushy moths I was laid down completely flat I almost hit Brooke in the process because she was standing below and I bounced I literally bounced six inches off the ground once I hit the ground and I didn't get a scratch out of it but it ruined my day so I decided to spend the rest of the day digging an outhouse hole and working on the deck I didn't want back on the roof any time soon so me and Millie we just put in the rest of the day doing other things that didn't have to do with roofing but eventually I got the nerve to get back on the roof again and of course this time you can see I'm up there with a rope and we got the roof on now you can look at the deck here you can see that it's held up just by two by fours nailed into we also built that deck around that spruce tree which I always loved that it was kind of a nice touch and there's what the cabin looks like pretty much finished [Music] I really love living there that was it's like living in a tree house in this frame you can see that along the front of the property where all those downed Timbers were that we've got it cleaned up and Brooke even has some planters using the same big cookies and posts we put posts under the deck and then we use some new used cedar shake shingles and covered in the gable ends of the cabin I think those shingles really sets place off at that point if we were ready to go inside now inside we laid down a twelve by twelve piece of linoleum because that was the entire floor space poured a little bit of concrete with some stones out of the driveway and set up our little fireplace hearth a couple pieces of cement board for the Packers right there keep the wall from getting too hot and in this frame you can see we took the chimney and we routed it 90 degrees out through the wall yeah that way we didn't have to put it up through the loft and and ruin any usable space in the cabin you could say it's a really good place to just hang out in your favorite chair with your 80-pound lap dog and enjoy the fire we also put up some shelves for magazines and books and knickknacks and stuff like that not much room in a cabin shelves are important now the windows we used in this cabin almost every one of them came from the dumper they were used windows are either broken or they're not broken so we recycled windows to make this cabin also if you look at the wall one of the beautiful things about a log cabin is that you can put a nail anywhere and hang anything you want any place you'd like all those pots are just hanging on the wall with 16 penny nails not only did we use recycled materials for the windows but also this countertop is a recycled countertop and as opposed to going to Home Depot and buy in cheap junk cabinets we decided we just build our own cheap junk cabinet these are just half-inch plywood we had a little tiny rack there that we use for drying dishes underneath that sink which that sink is a used sink too we just had a five-gallon bucket for wash water and once we'd wash dishes we'd take the five gallon bucket outside and dump it pretty efficient system there's another one of our beautiful handmade cabinets just having a few places to store stuff in a cabin like this is pretty important we use some caribou bone antler handles for the the door pulls now the problem with a cabinet size is where do you put the Christmas tree right I think in this situation the best place to put the Christmas tree was out in the driveway because there's just no room and it's gonna place that small but we lived in that cabin just the two of us for two years winter and summer and it was just a wonderful wonderful little experience to have a little tiny place like that and then it was the three of us and it was probably a little small for three people and of all the places we've had over the years I think it was it was kind of hard to do better than that cabin you could leave and let the place freeze up it had no plumbing and it was a very simple way to live and we had a lot of great times there and the only thing that moved us out of that cabin was just space once Belle was born our daughter and there was three of us in there it was just a little on the claustrophobic side but for two people it'd be great we ended up building this cabin in the summer of 2003 and we moved into it on Christmas Eve and although the places we ended up with over the years got bigger and nicer and more amenities there's always going to be a special place in my heart for our first cabin our 12 by 12 cabin that we lived in for two and a half years it was a simple way of life and hard to improve on thank you guys for watching [Music] [Music]

Channel: Bushradical

Views: 641,765

Rating: 4.8743129 out of 5

Keywords: Alaska log cabin, Alaska log cabin start to finish, Alaska homestead video, tiny home, tiny house, log cabin homestead, dave whipple, building log cabin, homesteading, off grid cabin, off grid, off grid living

Id: K-0voq3nQ6U

Length: 19min 31sec (1171 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 05 2018