Building a Remote Off Grid Cabin in the woods...Deep Dive commentary

foreign [Music] for the last few weeks this fall I've been building this cabin in a remote section of wilderness not too far from Lake Superior in the Upper Midwest I'm nine miles from the nearest power line and seven miles from the nearest plowed Road in this video I'm gonna go deep this is going to be a deep dive on this cabin if you haven't seen the video for this cabin the link is in the description but today what we're going to do is we're just going to kind of go step by step over everything that happened and really dive deep into this building project now the most important and difficult thing about building a cabin like this in my opinion is finding the right site I looked all over this property and I had intended to build right here in this stand of pine trimmed up I think these Pines would would look really good and it'd be a nice setting they're kind of scraggly right now but I think they would clean up nicely but then just a little farther into the woods I ran into this spot a clearing that's kind of very conducive for a cabin and it's got this nice spruce tree kind of central to the clearing to get a better idea I took and trimmed this tree up just to get the feel of what it would be like with this tree trimmed 21 years ago Brooke and I built our very first Log Cabin outside of Fairbanks Alaska and we had a deck that we built around a spruce tree that's kind of my idea for for this spot there's already kind of a natural Pathway to this clearing I just kind of have to kind of visualize how a cabin would sit in here and if I like the way it would sit I think this is the spot we're going to get to it now I brought these 6x6 treated ground contact six by sixes for building this cabin Foundation but I bought extra I bought 10 Footers when I only really need six feet so I can cut a little bit off the end I'm going to use those end pieces for dunnage to set my Sawmill on I brought my Harbor Freight Sawmill up here and it needs a home so I need to get some dunnage set down so I can put the track on it so I'll cut a chunk off each one of these six by sixes take it to the Sawmill site I'll take the remainder to the building site where the cabin is going to go and it's going to be kind of a win-win oh this property is nothing but Timber there's very little cleared area on this property so some of the bigger stuff if there's bigger Spruce that are dead or bigger White Pine that are dead I'd like to have this Mill set up so I can get two by fours and two by sixes Etc this property has some of the primest Timber on it I've ever seen big old white pine Old Red Pine real clear logs stuff that logging companies would love to get but I'd rather buy lumber than cut any of that stuff but if there is a dead tree I don't have any problem taking down a dead tree and Milling it up now the reason I'm orienting the cabin this way is I think I can improve the view which would be the view out the front window right in this area and this area would be where you'd Park and where you'd walk in out the left hand window you would see this feature this big white pine and actually there's another big white pine right here that you can't see but wants these small scrubby trees right here are cleaned up you'll be able to see that Big Pine really nice out the right hand side window and then this is behind the cabin and it's right into your thick Woods there's really nothing to look at next thing on the agenda is to find a place to burn because I've cut a lot of dead brush and I can't just leave this around here it's got to go somewhere so I can constantly be cleaning this site just 30 feet from the building site you can see that there is actually a nice big area here that would be great for a fire ring and there's just two small white pines that need to come out to make I don't know a 25 foot circle now this is a spot where I don't mind taking out a couple trees these trees are pretty Central to this cleared area you get these two small trees out of here you have all the area you need for a fire pit area where you could have a central fire ring and 10 people could sit around it [Music] now the saw that I'm using here is an echo it's actually the lightest saw that Echo makes the thing weighs hardly anything unless you're cutting a Winner's worth of firewood if you're just cutting small stuff a small chainsaw like a small Echo small steel small husky you really don't need much of a saw to do this kind of work oh my God speaking of fire pits one of the downsides of this country is there are no rocks you could look this property over from one end to the next and you'd be lucky to find a rock suitable to build a fire ring out of and I mean a rock not 10 rocks most of this country is nothing but sand now on each one of these stumps I'm going to take one of the big roots and chop through it I don't have to do this on every one of the roots I'll just pick one of them it'll make them so much easier to pop out of there now the downside to pollen stumps is you need to do something with the stumps you can't just put the stumps in the fire pit and burn them up stumps don't burn when I have a nice big fire I'll check these stumps in and I'll probably have to burn them four or five or six times before there's nothing left of them because Pine stumps like this when they're freshly popped out of the ground they're almost impossible to get burned last year for Christmas I gave everybody in the family one of these toe straps as a gift family farming home had them for 9.95 cents a piece they're fantastically strong there's no gift out there that makes a teenage kid as happy as a toe strap underneath the Christmas tree now this is going to be where every scrap piece of wood out of this cabin building project is going to get burned up and as I'm building I'm going to be constantly trimming the trees in this site trimming up the branches cutting down anything that's dead and just generally cleaning all the time so this fire pit is kind of a big priority foreign here the color is fantastic nice so now I'm set up to burn this is going to make everything go so much faster it's amazing how fast you can accumulate a brush pile a brush pile that just is in the way no matter what you're doing you start trimming up these trees and the branches have to go somewhere now the building site is ready and I can start my excavation and by excavation I mean I'm going to be digging some post hole size holes if you've watched this channel you understand that when I'm doing any kind of a digging I like to I like to put the material on a tarp or on a piece of plywood because I I don't want to just put sand and junk everywhere I like to build to where the cabin or the house or whatever it is looks like it's always been there so it's important to me to to not make a giant mess as I'm putting this cabin Foundation together now all the wood that goes into this cabin Foundation is ground contact green treated wood once in a while you'll see a green treated wood it'll be an all-weather wood or something but it doesn't say ground contact I don't know if there's a difference but these posts that are going to get buried as far as I'm concerned everything needs to be treated needs to be ground contact rated I was looking recently on the Menards website just to check to see the difference between regular Lumber and treated lumber price wise I think the treated lumber is about a third more than just standard construction Lumber and honestly that's really not much it's it's not a big deal and you're only using just a bit of it for the foundation don't cheap out if you're going to build anything and try to use just regular lumber for anything that goes in the ground four corner posts they need to be square they need to be Plumb and they need to be the right distance from each other and that's about it it's not rocket science if you look at what I'm using for nails too I'm I'm using a like a four inch galvanized ring shank good piece of advice when you're using ring shank nails never drive a ring shank nail where you don't want it to be because pulling ring Shanks is no fun now in any kind of a building project you need to know the square which is the corner to corner measurement and it's simple it's the Pythagorean theorem it's one of the only mathematical equations I know by heart you take the length of your building and you times that by the length so if it's 42 feet you would be 42 times 42 and then the width let's say it's 20 feet you would say 20 times 20. now you add those two numbers together and you hit the square root button on your calculator and that will give you the diagonal from one corner to the next figuring out the diagonal from one corner to the next beforehand on a calculator and writing it down it's pretty much all you need to know when you're squaring any kind of a building or a concrete pour or whatever now I'm laying this floor out two feet on Center you you could lay out a floor 12 inches on Center 16 inches on Center or 24 inches on Center whenever you're using plywood which is four foot by eight foot those are your options 12 16 or 24 inches on Center I think it's interesting to point out that the only tools I've used to get this Foundation together are a hammer a saw a pencil tape measure a speed square a level and a post hole digger it's very low cost of Entry to get a building out of the ground with a treated wood foundation like this um now the board that I'm putting on right now is kind of a ledger board the floor joists are going to sit on top of this ledger board and the ledger board is going to take some of the weight of the joists and the joists are also going to nail into that Rim joist that's the first two by eight I put up so it kind of splits the load the floor joists are being held up by the rim joist and by that ledger board kind of an interesting Foundation system I did this last year on the cabin I built in the fall last year I copied the idea from my brother who was building a cabin at the same time but I think it's a smart way to build it's sturdy simple it's very easy to understand anybody can do it no concrete just kind of basic but sturdy it's been a cold and dreary day out here working by myself alone in the woods and finally the sun came out for about 15 seconds I caught a little bit of it on camera just for proof back to it check each one of your boards before you put them on just to make sure if there is a crown that the crown goes up one thing I love about this floor system it shortens the span you're not actually spanning 12 feet you're spanning from this ledger board over to the other ledger board so the weight that the floor joists carry it's kind of being split between a rim joist and then that ledger cut that post a little cockeyed foreign I can nail off my ledger if that ledger was a little bit crowned or a little bit dipped if you nail it off without floor joists in there you might end up forcing all your joists high or it might not touch the bottom of the joist I always want to make sure that I've got a floor joist there either then I can either pull The Ledger up or I can force it down with the floor joists when I nail the joist in and that way it's exactly the right spot this ledger board has just a little bit of a dip to it and I'm glad it didn't nail it off the one other tool I forgot to mention is this digging Spud it's just an iron bar with kind of a spud on the end of it comes in handy for a million things here I'm using it as a pry bar to lift up that ledger but I used it putting in the post to Tamp the soil back in place I think those are thirty dollars from Home Depot or Lowe's you'll find a thousand things to do with just a good chunk of iron like that just to iron digging Spud any carpentry project at all is going to require cutting wood so the most essential tool that you can have is a skill saw but it doesn't need to be fancy my wife Brooke is in a building project right now so she has our skill saw I went and bought this one so I could use it here I paid 10 bucks for it and I really don't know that it's worth that it doesn't even have a brand it just says circular saw on the label but even though it's a poor quality budget tool it's getting the job done no you could spend 200 on a really good skill saw but you don't need to I like to start every building project with a fresh blade though a nice sharp fresh blade is pretty nice and I'll use the old ones I'll flip them around backwards for cutting roof metal when I need to which pretty much destroys a good blade now last year when I built the cabin on this property I put plywood underneath the floor joists to seal off the floor so mice and squirrels and stuff can't get in but that really sucked laying on your back nailing up sheets a half inch plywood above your face was no fun at all so for this Foundation I'm putting on all these two by two ledgers they're all spaced exactly the same space from the top of the floor joist you've got that little block as a spacer and then I'm going to drop in plywood strips like a drawer bottom and that's what is going to be my my floor bottom check out this guy he's hitching a ride come on get off my plywood cool now if you've watched this channel you've probably seen me build several cabins I started building cabins 20 some years ago the first cabin that Brooke and I built it wasn't a vacation cabin it wasn't a trapping cabin or a fishing cabin or Recreation cabin of any kind it was our house we built a 12 by 12 log cabin and we lived in it for two and a half years and the reason we went that route is we bought cheap land it didn't have anything on it but it had downed Timber we had the logs to build we didn't have any money it just made a lot of sense and since then we bought different properties and we like to have a little cabin at least on each one of the properties so when we're visiting a property when we're in Alaska we have some place to stay that's economical and you don't have to invest in building a house which of course who's got the money to do that a cheap little cabin like this can be a fantastic place to stay for a week or a month or or a summer if you want doesn't take a whole lot to build a small building like this it doesn't take a lot to clean it or heat it it's just kind of a building cabins gets into you it gets into your blood now this is by far the biggest property we've ever owned it's almost 80 acres and it was very reasonable for what it actually is and the reason is you couldn't live here year round practically there's no plowed roads in this area you get four feet of snow here in the wintertime you could not commute from here to work so it's beautiful wild country with waterfront that's cheap and the only way you can get that is in a place where nobody can practically live if you've watched this channel you've probably seen the cabin that I built here last fall I wanted a place to stay place to come in for the winter time my idea with this build is to have a guest cabin so if Brooke and I are up we have the other cabin to stay in and people can come visit us and spend some time on this property and they won't have to stay in a tent because the other cabin is definitely a two-person cabin this will also be a two-person cabin but you couldn't put four people comfortably in either one of these places so that's the plan just a simple guest cabin and speaking of that first cabin I built 20 years ago this cabin is going to be built with the same exact design it's going to have a half a loft it's going to have the same amount of windows in the same places the door is going to be the same I'm even going to build a deck around the spruce tree right in front of this cabin so it's going to be very very similar to the first cabin I built back in 2001. oh I think it goes without saying the work by yourself like this of course it's peaceful but it's also really limiting this 12 foot wall is about all I want to stand when it comes to standing a sheeted wall no you have a couple options if you you wanted to stand a bigger wall by yourself don't cheat the wall stand the wall just as a framed wall and then put the sheeting on after the fact or you could also cut out the window and door openings that saves a little bit of weight too helps you lift a wall by yourself easier now the sheeting I'm using here is t11 it's plywood with like a false board face on it so here we are at day three got the floor built insulated decked now I'm ready to stand the back wall I think I'm going to be able to stand the front wall and then I might have to run for material now the beautiful thing about t11 siding is it kind of it has a texture it looks like board and Baton and all you really need to do is stain it with like a log oil stain or like a deck water sealant like Thompson's water seal or any kind of a stain slash oil slash sealant and you're done no siding no house wrap no nothing you just have a finished outside wall and that's really attractive now if you're going to sheet a wall like this in half inch plywood right now as of today it's going to be about 23 24 bucks a sheet where the t11 is closer to 45 bucks a sheet but really the fact that it's a one and done solution makes it really attractive this is a good time to point out too what I'm doing here is I'm building my window opening as a unit by itself before it goes into the wall this way you have all the best leverage and nailing angles available to you if you built it flat you're going to be nailing sideways you're going to have other wall studs to deal with it's really helpful to build window openings and door openings as a unit by themselves and then slide them into place in the wall and nail them off to your top and bottom plate one of the comments I get all the time is why don't I just run a nail gun well I don't want to listen to the generator running an air compressor and I don't own a nail gun I will say some of the battery powered nail guns nowadays are fantastic and you don't have to listen to equipment running in the background when it's not needed they are quite expensive but easy to justify if you do a lot of this kind of work I think now's a pretty good time to put that stud right there that I completely forgot about I didn't even make a mark on the layout just miss the two foot stud y a lot of time it's been just swapping Nails take the big ones out of the pouch put the small ones in the pouch I would have figured out that two foot stud wasn't there when I went to nail it off where it's supposed to be and the nails didn't hit anything always start a sheet of plywood or any kind of sheeting right from the very corner and then make sure you're flush all the way along one of the two sides get it all nailed off flush and then you can work the other side you can move the framed wall in or out to make sure you get it flush along this side because chances are the four by eight sheet Goods the plywood or the t11 is going to be a lot more Square than whatever you're building the two foot measurement where it gets nailed off is right in one of these gaps so I have to set all the nails with this punch thank you so it kind of feels like you're nailing everything twice you might notice there's no header over top of the window or the door opening in this wall and that's because this is not a load-bearing wall the two that I've just stood are the Gable end walls and they're not going to be bearing any weight so they don't really need headers over the doors or Windows I have to start my layout for the center wall where the plywood is going to end that way everything will land to feet on Center like it's supposed to now this wall is only like 11 foot five and the sheeting is hanging over the end so obviously I can't sheet this wall and stand it I have to stand this wall as a just a frame of a wall and then I'll have to sheet it in place foreign once again the tools that you need for this kind of work are just the basics a tape measure a pencil a speed square a hammer and a pocket full of nails and that's pretty much it no it sure is a treat to stand this wall after the other two now I'm going to brace the corner of this building and get it leveled before I nail the one wall off to the other you don't really need to do this you could just nail the one wall to the other because the whole side is going to Rack until you get your siding on it but you will have to make sure that that corner is Plumb before you start putting your siding on you'll notice I nailed a 2x4 against that Rim joist so I can set the plywood on it now these two side walls they're going to be supporting all the roof Rafters so they are load bearing not only that but I'm going to put in a log Loft and so I need a header over both of these windows to support the weight that the window on these side walls is going to carry but I'm not going to sheet that one sidewall and you're going to see why here in just a minute I have three walls sheeted four walls stood I can't sheet that last well yet now I'm going to completely change the direction and I'm going to build a deck because I'm just ready to do something different So the plan with the deck is it's going to be about eight feet out from the building and it's going to be the same width as the building about 12 feet and the deck is going to be built around that spruce tree it's going to be really nice when it's done my plan here is to just put together the frame it's going to be really fragile and I'm just going to support it temporarily by picking it up and tacking the 2x4 onto it that way I can square the frame itself as it exists and then I'll put the posts underneath the frame you'll see here in just a sec now because I want to wrap this deck around the spruce tree and we've got pretty good sized Roots you can actually see there's a root running out right to about where a post would need to be so I'm not going to dig posts for the deck what I'm going to do is I'm going to put down a pair of solid four inch concrete kind of block pavers and then a short section A six by six post I won't be damaging the tree roots because I want the tree to stay where it's at very first cabin I built it was something everybody liked whenever anybody was up on the deck they always thought it was cool to you know sit by the tree that grows through the deck and there's a picture of my first cabin in the same stage of construction with the deck temporarily being held in place by some scrap toolbars I have a little bit of sand left over from filling back in these post holes so I'm going to use that as a nice bed we'll get that Tamp down and I did take the Moss off the ground right there with a shovel so it should just be mineral to Mineral contact I'll put a couple blocks there and then we'll cut ourselves a six by six now I'm going to give this deck just a little bit of fall so I'm going to make sure it's got a little bit of fall before I take my measurement and cut my post now scoring a post like this dozens of times to the same depth and then knocking the chips out is a really quick way to shape a beam like this but on the other hand it makes a giant mess so just a quick piece of advice that I never follow but you might want to is to put something down to catch all these chips so you don't have to pick them up later on because you end up with a lot of scrap chips foreign once again we're going to use the big dog nails on this these four inch ring shank galvanized spikes and then that corner post is going nowhere foreign I squared the frame and now the frame is square the distance from this Edge to the tree is it lands right in the middle of my layout so I've had to modify this layout this first Gap is 24 and then it's 41 and then I split the difference between these last three now as a general rule with layout you lay out at 16 on Center 12 on Center or 24 on Center but that's because plywood is eight feet long and four feet wide and you need to have nailers where the plywood butts together but on this deck I can modify the layout however I need to because I'm using 12 foot boards that are going to span from one side of the deck to the next and I don't have to worry about sheet Goods having something underneath them where they need to get nailed off together see this sometimes in really really old houses the layout for the studs in the wall is really all over the map that's because they sheeted old houses with one-inch boards and they just cut the boards to whatever size the layout needed to be so the board lands on a stud same thing with the deck like this these boards are going from one side to the next so the layout can be whatever it has to be thank you now we're to the point where I need to do a little bit of trimming to to get the boards cut around this tree I don't want huge gaps I can always make the gaps bigger as the tree grows it's a white spruce and it's going to grow really slow so I don't want a big sloppy Gap around this but I don't want it too tight to where if it gets really windy the trunk's going to get damaged bumping into the deck so kind of a happy medium probably like an inch all the way around the tree a jigsaw would be better for the job I'm doing right now but the Sawzall is what I have handy I really love a deck wrapped around a tree and I had this tree it was in the right spot in this clearing it just made sense but it would also be wonderful to have a porch That's a covered porch you kind of have one or the other I can't have a porch and have this tree so I I the deck was kind of I think the better option considering the site and what you could do with the site in case you're wondering too these are five quarter deck boards you can buy these at Lowe's or Home Depot and by five quarter you know they're supposed to be an inch and a quarter thickness well I think that turned out just about right I like the distance the tree is from the house the spruce tree is not going to provide a ton of shade but it is a nice feature now we're really going to shift gears for a minute we need to get the logs for the loft there's going to be two logs that hold the Loft up and luckily I found a nice standing dead Spruce that's only 100 feet from the cabin build and so this one's a no-brainer I'll have to find another one of these but this tree is bone dry it's real close and it's pretty straight now the reason I didn't sheet that last wall is because this Loft log has to go in before the sheeting is on this log is going to sit on top of the window headers and if I sheeted the other wall I would never be able to get the log in you couldn't get it in the second one I'm going to be building supports for you'll see that here in just a bit and the second log that holds the Loft up it can go in by itself once the wall is sheeted but this first one I have to have this first one in before I shoot that wall now to cut this log it's quite self-explanatory I just tacked down a straight 2x4 and I'm using it as a guide to make a cut with a chainsaw it's kind of a pleasant change of pace to peel a log after a lot of measuring and saw cuts and Plywood And dimensional Lumber it's nice to get your hands back onto something that's really natural that is irregular and peeling a log is pretty brainless work it's just kind of therapeutic I wish my sister was here she always said she liked peeling logs I'd let her take the job it's not quite cold enough out to be doing this without sweating foreign just a breather for a second let's look at this log and see how straight that cut ended up this is the flat surface and I'd say that's good enough by a long shot who needs Home Depot you have to be careful in this Woods because right next to every white spruce there's a Balsam Balsam Spruce Balsam fur and all the white spruce is good rigid decent wood to use I wouldn't use a Balsam for anything it's really soft very rot prone you see it all the time in campgrounds around here people cut down dead balsams and put them in the campfire and you can hardly Make Them Burn because the bark is watertight and they just rot from the inside Everywhere You Look Around Here there'll be a white spruce right next to it there'll be a Balsam fur and if you don't know the difference well one sucks and the other one's pretty good wood now this log looks like it's quite heavy but it's really not that bad it's very dry has no rot has no punkiness to it it's about perfect for what I'm using it for now the framing is 12 foot outside the outside not counting the t11 siding which is on the outside of the framing so this log needs to be 12 foot maybe just a little bit shorter maybe a quarter of an inch and then I want it the same thickness on both ends I'm picking four and a half inches arbitrarily that's what I'm going to cut these ends down to thickness wise and the bottom will sit on top of the window header well if you went and grabbed a snack a few minutes ago and missed my explanation now it makes perfect sense why this last wall wasn't cheated because I have to slip that log over top of the header and then back into place over the other window header and if the wall was sheeted there's no way you could get that log in that spot nice well I've run out of building materials at the moment so I'm gonna have to make a run for materials I'm going to be gone a couple days so I'm tarping this off in the meantime because I cannot let it get wet real reason I need the tarp on this is because I've insulated this floor already I can't let the floor get wet but I don't have my roof metal yet and I don't have my roof built I always tell people when it comes to building everything is a sequence I needed to get this log in this is going to hold up the Loft but I need these in before I shoot this wall so I can build a carnival homemade scaffold up here and then I can actually get up and stand the rafters without something to stand on there's really no way to put the roof on this thing [Applause] well that's going to be it for today I'm actually coming up here with a friend of mine we're just going to loaf around burn up a couple days hopefully the weather won't be too bad and hopefully if it does rain we'll be here to fix this tarp if there's a problem well my buddy John and I came up here had a couple days of just loafing around doing nothing and the tarp was fine I ran back down for more building materials and I came back to find this it's probably 40 gallons of water in there I need to get all that water out of there without it blowing up and soaking this floor because the purpose of the tarp was just to keep the water off the floor it's obvious that my tarp it did hold up but the support held the tarp up broke and now I have a swimming pool not exactly sure how I'm going to deal with that a ladder a ratchet strap and a five gallon bucket and that's what I came up with and actually it seems to be working pretty good sometimes the bucket will land where it really doesn't get much water and other times fuel pump fill the bucket kind of a tricky situation you can't you can't get at the water any which way other than from up above you can't cut a hole in the bottom because even a little hole would make the tarp just blow out and then that 200 pounds of water would end up on your foot which is the whole reason we put the tarp up in the first place was to keep the floor dry now we're going to work on the roof and we're going to build Rafters for the roof this roof is going to be an 11 12 pitch that means for every 12 inches of run it's going to have 11 inches of Rise so I'm building this special speed square out of a corner of a piece of plywood it's 24 inches on one side and 22 on the other I'll cut this corner out and basically I'm just going to build a giant speed square that is just specific for this roof the reason I chose 11 12. as I worked the math out several different ways and that was the closest that came to a 10 foot rafter now with 10 foot I can just use stock 10 foot roof metal and I won't have to special order it or cut it so this will be my purpose-built Square for this roof use it to lay out my Rafters you're going to see in a minute see a board like this is missing the corner this is uh this would be the way to orient this so that when I Mark the peak I cut out this corner missing the chip I'm going to check every one of these boards to see if there are any defects that I can remedy while I'm cutting these Peak cuts and there you see how that homemade Square works it pretty much explains itself any of the cuts that are vertical you use the 11 inch side any of the cuts that are horizontal you use the 12 inch side of the square I also want to check each board for Crown if a board has a has a pronounced Crown to it I want that Crown facing up here's another good example by picking which end to cut I get rid of that knot I won't talk to you guys just for a second about wood there's a couple different flavors of wood here I think there's some yellow pine in here there's some Hemlock of the wood that I have here I have some Hemlock and it's got a very pink color and I despise hemlock and I'll tell you why it's very very strong wood but it's also very brittle it's very easy to split with a nail especially when you're nailing on rafters and you're you're toenailing a lot very easy to split I only have it because it's what I could find when I needed to buy it otherwise I would always pick a pine or a spruce over a Hemlock not only that but the knots and Hemlock there's hard as rocks I think Hemlock probably has the hardest knots of any tree out there here's a good example this board right here just looking at the grain I'm gonna guess it's cut out of yellow pine this over here this pinkish colored wood this is hemlock I stay away from this if I can I use it if I have to now I'm gonna do all of the peak Cuts first and then I'm going to flip each one of these Rafters around because I'll need the very tip of that Peak cut to make my measurement for the other two cuts that I need to make so you can see I'm measuring right from the tip and I'm measuring rate down to 97 and 5 8. that's my diagonal just like when we squared the foundation earlier I figured out the square of the roof just a little bit of calculator work I've explained that in other videos and now we're making What's called the bird's mouth cut we're using that diagonal to know where the wall is going to intersect with the roof then I'll make the wall cut and the seat cut the wall cut is the part of the cut that butts up flush against the siding of the wall the seat cut is the part of the cut that sits flat on the top of the wall and then I'm finishing them with a hand saw so they're nice and clean and I don't cut farther than I need to and weaken that particular area of the rafter and it's going to be a happy day when I get this roof on and I don't have to worry about this tarp anymore it's kind of a monster of a tarp and then once the roof is on you know the weather doesn't matter as much as it does right now but to get the roof on I've got to build a platform to work off of which means I need to spike in this Loft log so it's solid it's not going anywhere to do that I'm using eight inch spring steel ring shank Barn spikes then I can build myself a platform just using a couple two by fours flat I'm using a ledger on each side of the building and then that log for the support in the middle I'll throw some plywood on top of this and then I'll have basically a catwalk from one end of the building to the next that I can work off to put all the rafters on now these two pieces of plywood they don't go to this build at all anywhere there's no place for them I don't need them but I've used those two pieces of plywood more than any other tool out here I put them on the saw horses to work off of I'm using them now as scaffolding buying a couple extra chunks of plywood is just just wise foreign now there's two ways to build a rafted roof you could use a Ridge board that would run all the way along the ridge of the building and the rafters would butt in and nail to the Ridge board but I'm nailing the rafters together with gussets kind of like you would see on a truss now the gusset holds the peak together the ends of the rafters of course are nailed off to the wall and the walls are held together left and right by the logs that are holding the Loft up there's going to be one more Loft log but there's already one in place so the walls will never force their way out under a heavy load of snow also with an 11 12 pitch like this it shouldn't hold much snow anyway you should be able to slam the front door and all the snow should fall right off of it now I've nailed off this 2x4 it's marked out for the correct length of the roof and I need that in place so when I stand the next set of rafters I have that 2x4 to tack them into so they stand up like they're supposed to putting the roof up is kind of a magical part of the building project because there's not really a lot of work to it but you get to see a lot of finished result you know just knowing you have something over your head the frame of the roof it just makes you feel like you're making a lot of progress now I need to put in all the bird blocks these go between the rafters at the top of the wall they keep the rafters rigid they keep birds and squirrels and chipmunks and stuff out of your roof well I feel really good about that the only downside is is it is supposed to rain tonight and I don't have the roof done so we'll put that green tarp back over top one more time hopefully this will be it and then today we'll we'll hopefully get that roof wrapped up another thing on the agenda today is filling in these Gable end walls they're all going to need studs to nail plywood to for framing for insulation to sit in and each one of those studs needs to be cut at an angle to sit in that space so that did take a little bit of time it was really boring and there's not a lot to it so I didn't bother filming it and now we're going to sheet the end of The Gables because it's kind of the next thing in the process and at that point we can finish up the purlins on the roof the two by fours we're going to put the roof metal to we're gonna put in Squirrel blocks everywhere on the Gable ends and then we we should be about to the point we can start putting metal on foreign if you've watched this channel before you've seen me using this Hammer I've had this hammer for 22 years probably but the one thing I don't like about it is it does not have a nail magnet on the top so whenever I'm doing something like this with a tall roof I use this one because it has a nail magnet for you guys out there that don't frame a lot the nail magnet you can set a nail in it and it will stay put so you can sink it on a wall and then drive it so like one of them up here put the plywood up put a nail on there and thunk and then tack it in now we're going to nail on the rest of these metal roofing nailers purlins whatever you want to call them we're using two by fours two feet on Center that's what the roof metal is going to screw down to before we get too far on that I'm going to put these the other side of these raster gussets on and then it's kind of jungle gym territory after that it's kind of a fun part of the job it's nice to be up on top of the roof one thing to remember two feet on Center is about what you want to be with these two buys and the reason I say that is if you're 16 they're almost too close together for your knees to be happy and if they're much more than 24 inches they're too far apart and you can't put your foot on one and rust your knee on the other so that two foot is kind of the kind of the magic number for the 2x4 nailers now as far as putting on the metal it's kind of a kind of a back and forth whack-a-mole type situation got to get up on the roof screw off the metal go back down get another sheet this last sheet is always tricky well I had some place I had to be after getting the first half of that roof on and unfortunately in the meantime it decided to snow a whole bunch so now I have to go finish up that roof and I'm dealing with snow which are two things that I'm not cool with either one of them don't love Roofing don't love working in snow but honestly I think I started this build on the 25th of October so so I really have it coming when it comes to getting snowed on I was late to the party and this is just the this is what I have to deal with now good foreign now working in the snow is not ideal and it definitely slows things down but the real downside to this is everything has a nice fine layer of ice on it and working remote working by yourself Roofing and Ice none of that stuff goes together so today I'm taking my sweet time we're going real slow working really safe and of course I'm going to get off that roof with a twenty thousand pound toe strap climbing down that strap is probably the safest way to get off a roof like this there's no way to walk down it and step onto that ladder cutting out the bottom plate in the door threshold is like cutting the umbilical cord on a building project it really feels like you've made it to to a significant point in the process now it's time to pick up this gigantic mess I've got the building is dried in so if it rains or snows or anything we're fine at this point and this is a real milestone now I'm going to cut out these windows we're going to get light we're gonna be able to put the windows in what a nice place to be now I need to get back outside and nail off around these windows today's the opening day of rifle season I've heard a couple shots quite a ways off but you know who knows who's hunting on the state land to the to the west or to the state land of the South so I think I'm just going to keep my hammering to myself today and then in the morning I'll I'll nail all this stuff off and I'll put these windows in in the meantime pack all my windows over here cut the plastic off and I'll get those ready to go I know I wouldn't have wanted to spend all my year looking forward to deer season to go way up into the middle of nowhere and then have some idiot hammering on the wall of a cabin on the next piece of property over bothering your tranquility and and your your deer hunting for the year so I prepped those windows and I stayed busy doing other stuff until the following day and then I nailed off all those window openings put a nice big bead of caulk on them and now we're ready to stuff in some windows I'm just going to use this chunk of plywood as a hokey brace to make sure that window doesn't fall out will I go inside check the gaps and they'll look about even and that's what you want you want that window to sit in that opening evenly so you got a gap that's about the same on every side full of spray foam and move on with life foreign well I have to say it's really nice to be at this point where the roof is on the windows are in I throw a door on here and you could heat this place pretty easily even though it's not insulated yet and I think that's about where we're at we're about to the point we're going to need to do some insulation and do some tongue and groove but before we can do that there is one last thing that has to be done I have to put in that second Loft log and in the evenings when I'm done filming and building for the day when the light is is too dim to really film well I've been walking around and looking for another tree trying to find another tree that's straight white spruce standing dead that would be dry and I haven't been able to find it I'm finding a lot of dead trees that are balsams I find a lot of dead trees that are crooked I just haven't found the perfect tree so I'm going to cut down a green tree that's not that far away because if I can't find what I'm looking for I might as well get something close so I don't have to pack it a half a mile now in Alaska I've built two cabins out of three-sided log and when you buy three-sided log it's green they cut the trees they Mill the three-sided log in you build with it as soon as you can you can't millilog three-sided and then let It season because it will twist so you generally build three-sided log cabins with green Lumber green logs that is the only other option is to either cut standing dead and Mill standing dead and then you can build with that probably whenever because it's mostly dry or you're going to cut your logs allow your logs to season and then Mill them three-sided and then they should be fairly stable so even though the first log I've used was totally bone dry is standing dead and this one is completely green both ways are pretty standard when it comes to building with log foreign there's so many videos on YouTube about building the cabinet and they're really popular and I think one of the things that that people really love about the idea of building a cabin is just a day like this being out in the middle of the Wilderness by yourself peeling a log it's quiet being nice and toasty good simple work I think that's what a lot of people would really appreciate about an experience like this it's cold it's below freezing but when you're busy you know it's fine feels good this evening I'm going to take all this mess that I've made I don't have a big fire I'm just gonna have a big old bonfire and I can't think of anything else I'd rather do tonight than clean this area up and have a nice big warm fire and just sit out here and just listen to The Silence foreign that's a nice looking log now all of this scaffolding has got to come down so I can put that log in I could probably put the log in without taking any of this down but I will have to have it down to insulate and to do my tongue and groove and then I'll be back up top I'll have to rebuild it all again so I can insulate the roof and I can do the tongue and groove up inside the roof foreign now what I'm doing here is I'm building the support that's going to hold up that other Loft log I'm going to build it so that it's the same exact height as that window header then I'm going to cut that Loft log the same way I cut the first one it's going to drop right in there and I can build one side and then go over to the other side get it ready lift that log up in and then I can put those last two chunks of two by four in after the fact and in that way I can get this log in place after the wall has been sighted thank you foreign dudes with asthma shouldn't be doing this sort of thing oh tomorrow I will Spike those in and I'll put part of that scaffolding back up there so I can work off that end let's go have a fire it sure turned out to be a fantastic evening for a fire I got to not only burn up a whole bunch of brush that had accumulated from me trimming things up but I got the burn up some scrap wood that is nice just had a great time well when it comes to stupid decisions I make my fair share of them don't get me wrong I should have built this set of steps as soon as I built the deck and then I wouldn't have had to spend two weeks jumping up and down on and off the deck now building a set of steps like this was kind of an abstract activity because the ground is abstract you don't really have a hard distance to go by I'm gonna dig in some blocks and the two sides of the steps are going to sit on blocks but they're not there yet and they're probably going to be a little different height wise one from the next so it's just kind of a trial and error type of building project me luckily it's still warm enough that the ground isn't Frozen I mean there's a lot of snow and the very top of the soil is crusty but you get down underneath that and it's still just loose thawed out sand and that's exactly what we need it to be at the moment you can see how these steps are going to go takes a little bit of finagling back and forth but pretty soon I had both of the two sides of the steps built got to make sure that they're in place and that they stay in place and I'm going to lag screw those in from the back side with those same big heavy aggressive screws that we use to put the deck boards on [Music] I'll put both four in each one of these now I'm making marks where the tread supports go I want to measure eight inches down from the deck from the top of the deck and then another inch and a half down from that because the Treads are just going to be two by sixes which are an inch and a half thick and I need to be an inch and a half below that eight inch Mark then the steps it'll actually be eight inches between one step and the next and then the deck foreign [Music] Story Each one of these tread supports they I think they got two screws each because I was pretty much out of screws I was really running short and then each one of the Treads that go on top of this that you'll see here in a minute they each got one screw so for the rest of this project going up and down these steps I always kind of wondered you know are they going to hold up because I just ran out of fasteners well the generator just died so far I've built this entire cabin on one gallon of gas in that generator so I think it's time I I take a walk sure you guys are on property a little bit we'll go grab the gas can which is quarter mile that way so if I need something from the cabin the cabin I built last year it's quicker for me to walk through the woods back to the cabin than it is to drive from one property to the other this piece of land is actually two separate Parcels but they touch each other you know they're contiguous but they're not one piece of land and there is there's no road that connects the two of them so it's either drive around or walk through I've timed it just so I know it's about a seven minute walk from one place to the next and then about another extra two minutes to the Outhouse which is important to know I think you guys are gonna find this pretty interesting when we get over here this is kind of the end of the trail and we pop out through these trees and turn the corner and there's my cabin and that's how you get from one cabin site to the other why do I need two cabins in the first place well this is just a two-person cabin and I'd like to have other people up here like to have people visit and just to have some place for other folks to go you know if Brooke and I are up and it's cold we're both going to be staying in this cabin but I'd like to have a guest cabin so people want to come fish the river or go up and Fish Lake Superior or some of the lakes that are around here be room for everybody take a minute make myself a late breakfast before I get back at it got some toast got some eggs kind of got to balance this plate on this little stove how's that you know this porch has become my favorite place to eat breakfast one of them anyway if Brooke were here she'd offer you the first bite so I'm gonna do it here you go this one's for you and that's my breakfast View just kind of a snowy Woods and for dessert how about some cherry pie filling oh yeah who's got it figured out now foreign I should make another piece of toast and put the pie filling on top of the toast I think I'll do that Beauty [Applause] foreign how's that for dessert for breakfast I think they should have a breakfast for dessert I always say that last piece of toast and just cover it with strawberry jam that's like the the dessert of breakfast but I think breakfast should come with a dessert oh yeah it's even better than I thought it'd be I hate these gas caps just take this stupid thing off right now if it works man I hate those stupid gas nozzles I would have just finished this up with my cordless screw gun but the cordless screw gun of course it doesn't have anywhere to get recharged other than the generator and it's pretty much shot at the moment [Music] undies need to throw in a couple nailers this is where the stove flange is going to go where the wood stove exits the wall I want to put a piece of triple wall insulated pipe through this section and I just need some nailers something to nail the sheet metal flange to so here's where we're at we're getting in the middle 20s for a high for the next week we have snow in the forecast I plan on coming back up here in a couple days and wrapping this up but if I don't this will be my goodbye for the year I really didn't think I was going to be able to get back into the site so I shot this outro for this video that's kind of a wrap up two days later we ended up getting about eight inches of snow right around Thanksgiving and then a few days of really really warm weather all that snow melted away and I didn't have to use this outro I ended up back up here about a week from when I shot this and got back to work see you soon actually a week later after Thanksgiving the weather was better than the week I had just filmed it was warmer the snow was going away it looked like we're going to get a second wind for fall and actually have the time it took to finish this project but for a while there I thought we were done for the year I'm using this super fancy homemade Compass to draw a fairly Perfect Circle [Music] [Applause] now before I slid this tin shield in here I had to clip all the nails on that stud that were were nailed through the plywood on the outside when I originally stood this wall so I could slide that sheet of metal in there this is pretty much the same way I've been installing chimneys since the very first cabin I ever built metal plate on the outside of the wall metal plate on the inside triple walled pipe passing through the wall and it just works it's it's very safe it's very easy to install it's just a good way to go now people ask me all the time about these stoves Brooke bought the first one of these stoves for our black cabin if you remember that video this is a stove you can buy off Amazon like the company's Camp Chef and it's for a a canvas wall tent for like a spike Camp if you're out elk hunting or you're living in a wall town or whatever it's a wall tent stove quote unquote but it makes a fantastic little cabin stove one of the only downsides to it is it has a five inch opening so it comes with a a telescoping collapsible stovepipe that packs down and then you can stick it inside the stove but if you want to hook it up for a cabin you have to find a five to six inch reducer and they're a little bit tricky to find like a lot of stoves the paint that they put on this stove reeks and it needs to be burnt off outside once in a while you'll get a stove if you light a fire in it it smells for a couple minutes and then it's fine that's not the case with these stoves they need to get burned for a couple good hours in order for that paint to cure and bake on otherwise it's just going to stink you right out of the cabin and you're not going to have a good time I've been sitting here watching that stove cook for about 40 minutes now just because the next thing is doing insulation and I just I don't really want to we got about eight inches of snow over the the couple days before Thanksgiving but it's been so nice the last couple days it's pretty much melted back down to nothing I'm just sitting here having lunch if you guys wondered what I'm doing for lunch a lot of times salted cashews and some kind of dried fruit you can just Chuck it in the truck you don't have to cook anything oh well you can see our stove over there it's doing better it's not just smoking and fuming everywhere you can see she's good and hot I haven't smelt it for a while either probably still stinks but at least it isn't smoking so that's the question sit here and watch the wood stove cook or go back inside and insulate huh I guess there's nothing else that I can do install like I guess I gotta insulate years ago I used to be a cement contractor and one of the great things about being a cement contractor is you're doing work nobody else wants to do so it's very gratifying I suppose it's the same principle with these contractors you see that are just insulation contractors can you imagine doing this work all day and every day but it is work nobody else really wants to do so I'm sure you get a lot of work doing it and people are really happy to pay you for it foreign but I prefer doing most everything else as opposed to insulation well now we're kind of in the home stretch and I'm going to set up my little workstation out here for cutting this tongue and groove so I can cut tongue and groove and just start slapping it up I bought this Tongan group from Menards it was 17 a piece for 12 foot tongue and groove now there's some local guys on Facebook Marketplace that sell it not too far from here and if I need more of it which I will I'm gonna buy it there Menards It generally has really good quality wood and you can pick what you want you can pick through it but the 12 foot stuff is inside the building so you're putting all of this on a cart you end up with 500 pounds of lumber on a cart and you have to pick through 200 pieces to find 50 of them that are good because that's just the way it is with this kind of lumber people pick through and pick through and the ones that are broke or cracked or the tongues messed up but the grooves messed up they don't take those so pretty soon when they get a shipment in of a hundred there's still a hundred sitting there so then they say on the website they have 200 pieces of tongue and groove 50 of them are calls that should be burned that everyone else has rejected and 50 of them are the new stuff that came in out of which maybe 10 20 is calls also so it's very difficult lion tongue and groove is kind of a process you got to commit a lot of time you got to pick through a lot of it so even though I like Menards for a lot of stuff if you're in the Midwest and they do have good tongue and groove but if you can find an independent supplier you're probably going to do better now my work day working remote like this is basically dictated by Dusk and Dawn once it gets too dark to see or too dark to film I just shut down for the day I go back to the cabin start a fire and enjoy the rest of the evening I generally do a lot of editing too but hopefully by the end of today I'll have most of this tongue and groove done and I'll be able to install at least one light strip and get some light in here then I can work after dark which would just be amazing it'd be a kind of a revolutionary part of the process and I'm using that little stubby chunk of pencil to get that Mark back in behind between the window and the tongue and groove then I'll go back outside cut my piece out bring it back in and install it you can see we've pretty much lost all of our snow which is wonderful really gives you a second wind on a job like this foreign nice nice nice nice my brother Ryan showed me these lights they put out a lot of light they don't take much juice he used them in his cabin project and Ryan was shown these lights by our brother-in-law Scott harema who uses him at his off-grid cabin great solution they're inexpensive they're easy to find put out a lot of light don't use a lot of power once I get this chimney put together and installed I should be at a point where all the outside stuff is done and I can just focus my attention on what's inside the cabin because it's too cold stain and I don't have anything to finish off the Gable lens so I'm pretty much at a wrap for the outside work on this cabin at least for this year but you can see just that single strip of LED lights makes a huge difference in the visibility inside this cabin at night oh hopefully it will get dinged for copyright but Christmas music's on in the background Thanksgiving was last week luckily most of the snow melted off our project here and I've got a couple days of decent weather where I can work on it why am I wearing a t-shirt because I just got done insulating the ceiling the peak ceiling and it was basically like drowning in insulation ah please forgive me for not filming it but no way I don't have the insulation for the Gable ends you know up here but everything else is insulated up there what a nightmare there we go we have a winter weather advisory for this County coming up tomorrow it's also supposed to drop from mid 30s down to about the High Teens low 20s so today maybe the very last chance I have to get anything done here for the year so it's been a Mad Dash all day long one of my top priorities is to get all the tongue and groove that I have cut and put on the wall and nailed off because I don't want any of that just sitting around especially under a tarp or in a pile or just you know leaned up against the wall somewhere that stuff's fairly expensive and it needs to get put in correctly in the event that I don't get back here to work on this cabin again until spring now other than the tongue and groove the other priority I have is getting the wood stove installed inside because then we'll have heated space if I can get back here with materials I can work on this thing all winter long so long as the space is heatable I'm going to put down a masonry Foundation throw that stove in there hook up the stove pipe and at that point I can have a fire [Music] now Ace Hardware is a fantastic place to buy that reducer that five inch two six inch coupler that makes this stove usable with six inch pipe Ace Hardware is a great place to find that but I bought most of the rest of this stuff at Ace Hardware too and I probably paid twice what I should have Family Farm and Home as stovepipe for half that price Menards has stove pipe for half the price Ace is good for a lot of stuff good for those hard to find things but save yourself some money and get your stove pipe somewhere else the other thing to think about is if there's more than two people that want to come up and go snowmobiling into this area two people can stay at this cabin in the wintertime it's just being a bare box unfinished provided that they have heat because I'm sure this place will heat up fine even though that the Gable ends aren't insulated yet foreign this door is really ugly on the other side it's Rusty and it needs to be painted I hung it this way just so it looks better at the moment but from the other side it's actually quite ugly and it should be hung the other direction so that it swings into the right just for the layout of the cabin where the kitchenette is going to go etc etc well after a full day of just rushing and rushing and rushing it's time to take a well-deserved break well enough of that time to get back to it oh there is something really special about lighting the first fire in a new cabin it's like christening a ship foreign I can already start to feel a little bit of heat coming off that stove even though I just lit that fire this place is going to be able to heat quite well I'm sure of it and it's wonderful to see smoke coming out of that chimney one of the questions I know I'm going to get asked a million times is what did this whole place cost now I'm guessing around five thousand dollars but I haven't figured out the receipts yet they're all sitting in a pile on my desk now I feel very grateful that I got this break in the weather after eight inches of snow last week not only that but I had enough time to get this mess cleaned up that wood stove in and at the very end of the day at about 15 minutes where it got very light outside like it was almost gonna be sunny for a minute and I got some nice finishing shots of the cabin well everybody this is about as far as I'm going to be able to get this cabin project for this year tonight it's supposed to rain tomorrow it's supposed to snow we had eight inches of snow last week and I'm lucky that I got this little break in the weather I've been so busy I've been able to just work in the t-shirt and that should say something right there it's about 35 degrees out thank you guys so much for watching I'm glad that you came along for the build my name is Dave Whipple and you've been watching push radical be radically see you soon

Channel: Bushradical

Views: 2,763,733

Keywords: Off Grid Cabin, remote cabin, log cabin, tiny house

Id: rmNoDi7mZyM

Length: 81min 29sec (4889 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 04 2022