Building an Off-Grid Homestead ..... start to finish

an off-grid homestead it's a dream for millions of people working with your hands building your own cabin in the woods camping as you build paying as you go providing for your own heat your own water no rent no mortgage but freedom and simplicity and independence and the satisfaction of doing it yourself in this video i'm going to show you what that looks like start to finish building an off-grid homestead from the ground up and not some fantasy hollywood version but what it's really like let's get started my wife brooke and i started this homestead project on a four acre piece of property 25 miles outside of fairbanks alaska we set up a wall tent and got right to work this is the spot we picked for our cabin we started with the foundation mixing all the concrete by hand in a wheelbarrow the road we live on is so muddy there's no way to get a cement truck up here so i would drive to the gravel pit get gravel bags of portland cement mix all the concrete by hand now a foundation like this anybody can do it's just going to take a bit of time and a bit of work [Music] now at this point we have a concrete foundation in and we have a first story floor and we're living in a wall tent full time like real homesteaders before us we're gonna use what we have a lot of on the property to build this cabin in this case it's aspen trees this four acre piece is covered with aspen trees so we've decided to build a vertical log cabin using the aspen logs not only do we need to build a cabin we're also going to need to build storage shed and we're going to need to build a shower house now we're only 25 miles out of town but if your dream is to build a homestead in a very remote area chainsaw jigs like this one they could come in really handy you can cut boards you can cut beams you can two side logs like i'm doing here this is a head and lumber maker and it doesn't require a special kind of saw or a special kind of chain handy tool to have for a homesteader [Music] all the log work in this cabin is going to be held together with log screws a lot of times you'll see these under the name timber lock you can pick them up pretty much anywhere we're going to use these log screws to fasten one log to the next we're going to fasten the log to the bottom we're going to fasten the logs to the top now i've never built a vertical log cabin like this before so i'm going to be learning as i go i have no idea what to expect or how to do it i'm just going to figure it out as i build i think that's one of the great things about the american frontier homestead spirit you just get your hands dirty and you figure it out what i'm doing here is i've got two double top plates i'm lapping on the corners then i'm going to fill the wall in now that i have four corner posts up and the double top plate in place i can start filling in this wall now we could have built a cabin many different ways but these logs are free for the taking right here on our property so as opposed to working and paying for building materials we can just get busy and get building with what we have now i'm building with green aspen logs and i know that they're gonna shrink there's not much i can do about it when you build a horizontal log cabin you've got gravity on your side and all the joints stay nice and tight because the cabin will settle in a vertical style cabin the logs never subtle but they will shrink side to side so it's important that i get these logs as tight together as possible not only that but once everything is dried out i'm going to fill those gaps with permachink which is a rubberized cabin chinking material that permachink is going to seal the gap from one log to the next it's also going to assist in rigidity and it's going to fill any gap that develops from shrinkage [Music] now where you're at you might have really good access you might have really good timber you might be able to build a very different cabin than what i'm building with the materials you have i'm just using what i've got and i'm having a good time with it no matter how you choose to build just the idea of building something by yourself with your hands you learn so much every time i build anything i learn something such a satisfying experience to build something with your own hands that you can live in [Music] now for beveling these logs i'm using a poland chainsaw that brook found at the dump that just goes to show you don't need very special tools to do something like this chainsaw just needed a little bit of work then it fired right up it's a light saw and it's pretty handy for these kind of cuts you notice i'm cutting these bevels at some pretty odd angles i always want the chain coming into the log so it doesn't pull out a whole bunch of nasty wood fibers now during this building process we're about 25 miles from downtown fairbanks so if we want gas for the generator or gas for the chainsaws or groceries or whatnot it's a drive to town but that's okay it's kind of nice to be out away from everybody but we're certainly not remote that's one of the fantasies about off-grid living that you see quite a lot sometimes you'll see a youtube video or a television show that depicts people living days into the wilderness where they have to make all their own tools and they have to grow all their own food and that's just not real i don't think that happens anywhere [Music] you watch the old dick prenicke videos there's a guy who really did live remote but even dick prenicky had flour and tabasco sauce and spices obviously he had that flown into him the truth is most of the off-griders are just people like you and me want to be just a far enough away from people we can be left alone do our own things a lot of people just want to live a more simple rustic life a more peaceful type of lifestyle closer to nature and it's very doable but there's a whole lot of misinformation out there shows and videos that show people who are very very remote yet they have a lot of money and a lot of expensive things yet they're trying to survive quote unquote that's not really how it works the truth is always more interesting than the hollywood version [Music] right now we do most of our cooking on a standard old-fashioned coleman camp stove [Music] we also have a propane stove that we'll be ready to install once the cabin's ready for it now we bought this property's raw land we paid a neighbor with a bulldozer 275 to shove us in a driveway and we've been living in a wall tent since we've been here we also have a tarp style storage building where we can keep odds and ends but in my opinion camp living is good living and we're working towards something much better and that keeps us motivated through the hot weather and the bugs and the fatigue of hard labor [Music] it's a lot of work to build this way but it's cheap we had to pay for materials for the floor we'll have to pay for the roof but for the walls they're going to be free just a lot of work now to keep it real when it comes to building with logs the later in the season the harder it is to get the bark off and speaking from experience the quicker you can get a log cabin up and sealed the better but chances are it's going to take you most of the summer to put together a cabin like this you're going to deal with rain and you're gonna deal with mold now mold on logs is very easy to get rid of you're just gonna have to wash it with a little water and bleach after the fact having to wash mold off of beautiful logs is kind of heartbreaking but it's a reality in the log cabin building world even if you're using logs that are fairly dry if they get really wet they're going to mold and it's just something you have to deal with we've tarped off this top so we can work underneath of it quicker we can get a roof on the better we'll be so right now i'm working on doing the floor joists that are going to support the upstairs floor and for that well you guessed it i'm using logs [Music] now i want the ends of these logs to be six inches top to bottom parallel so i'm using this alaska chainsaw mill i didn't use this very often because it requires a rip chain a good stout piece of rope a little bit of redneck engineering and we can get these big logs up by ourselves i don't know that it would have benefited to have two people involved in this project because these went up pretty easy they just required a little bit of finagling i think if you had two people working on a project like this you might be tempted to try to muscle it and muscling a 300 pound 17 foot log is probably not the best idea [Music] if you're gonna move on to a bare piece of property and start a project like this from scratch you'd be hard-pressed to find anything more valuable than a good rope good hundred foot chunk of rope you'll find a million things to do with it and it's always going to be worth having when you have to move heavy materials and get stuff done by yourself you find a lot of interesting ways to work alone it's kind of a free education one thing about building a vertical log cabin is there's not a whole lot of information out there i pretty much had to figure it out as i went and did what made sense at the time which is what you'll do 90 of the time building a homestead anyway [Music] just kind of do what works and what makes sense in that environment now it's time to move on to the roof i've got all my floor joists for the upstairs and i've thrown some osb sheeting up there just for for walking i'll put the roof rafters on this cabin is 16 by 20 foot and the roof is a 12 12 pitch so it's going to be good and steep it's going to shed snow really easily and the snow that you get in fairbanks alaska well it's pretty much always powder because in the wintertime it's always cold nice steep rough like this walk inside you slam the door all the snow comes off now if you've never built anything and you're intimidated by carpentry go out and find a couple videos by a guy named larry hahn h-a-u-n i've never seen anybody explain building better than larry han for the beginner that's a great place to start the best thing about a project like this is that anybody can do it anybody can run a chainsaw jig that's not a problem most of the lugs i've used anybody could lift and carry some of the bigger ones you might want a friend [Music] now brooke is cutting the fascia board that's going to go on the edges of the cabin and it's really going to make this place look amazing i love to do skip sheeting for a roof because you've turned your roof into a big jungle gym and you're not likely to ever fall off it it's just a ladder lighter on one side ladder on the other side you can walk all over it gives you a lot of security when you're working with the fascia when you're working with roof metal roofing is inherently dangerous but when you use a 1 by 4 or 2 by 4 16 inches on center for skip sheeting it takes a lot of the danger off as far as falling off the roof it gives you all kinds of stability while you're up there on that roof before it has roofing on it once there's metal roofing on it nobody's ever going to get back up here again without a rope but while i'm putting the metal on it's very stable it's very safe it's very easy to get around up there now the way i'm going to finish this roof is i'm going to pull the last sheet up get a few screws in it put the ridge cap on and then work my way down the sheet off a rope i don't recommend this to anybody it's just the way that i've decided to do it having worked on a lot of roofs by myself i use a rope that i run underneath the ridge cap and it's tied to the roof itself it will never come off and i trust a rope i don't trust standing on anything like this this is way too steep metal is way too slippery i feel secure with that rope or i wouldn't bother to do it at all now that the roof is on we can start patching in what's left of the walls and cleaning up the logs once the logs are clean they'll be ready to be stained kind of a convoluted way to build a cabin really you can have the roof on and still not have the walls finished [Music] by the time all the log work is done we probably have three hundred dollars into log screws brooke probably has 75 dollars into the outside finish which we're using a super duck back log oil to finish the cabin and waco danish oil which is what we're going to use on the inside while i'm putting in the last of the logs brooke is cleaning and staining the log walls on the outside she's also cleaning up some of the log tops from the trees we used for the log wall and putting away some wood for colder weather when you're living on a piece of property and you're building out of pocket your stuff is all over the place because you haven't yet built a place to put it you don't have a storage shed to start with you don't have a house you don't have cupboards so you have things that need to be put away one of the most beneficial things we can do at this point in the process is work on the kitchen cabinets and the countertop and the sink we build cabinets a countertop and a sink we can do food prep indoors we can put our food away we can wash our dishes indoors it's going to be a game changer even though the place isn't finished or even close to it this is going to make a huge difference now i like to make my own cabinets and i like to do it simple and i like it to be cheap but it's going to be way sturdier than the chipboard garbage you're going to find at lowe's because i'm going to use plywood and nails and glue what a luxury it's going to be to have a countertop it's been a long time since we had a real countertop living in a wall tent this is a sink we picked up at the fairbanks dump now a stainless steel sink like this is never gonna go bad so long as it isn't bent up just wash it up put it in the countertop and it's just as good as the day it was new [Music] it always makes me nervous cutting the hole for the sink because you only get one shot at it if you're wrong well you go buy another piece of countertop and i hate that idea so i'm going to take my time make sure all the corners are right make sure all the measurements are right i'm going to cut out this sink opening i'd love to tell you the right way to make cabinets but i don't know it myself i just do what makes sense in the moment in the space that i have to work with a lot of times even if you build something that's a little unconventional and maybe it's not the way someone else would build it chances are it'll work just fine for you it's always better to go ahead and build something and learn from the process and get a usable product than it is to have never built something and then you didn't even get the experience [Music] a few finished nails a few furring strips some tight bond glue a framing hammer pretty soon it's actually starting to look like something the world today is plagued with experts quote unquote people who want you to hire them to do the things you could do yourself because they're experts i don't believe in experts i think people are just designed to build stuff to make stuff it's it's what we do it's it's really in our dna we're creative beings take a look at what's there what you want to have happen in that space just figure out the way to make it work there was once an evangelist named dl moody and somebody came up to him one day and they told him that they didn't care for the way he was preaching and he said i like the way i do it better than the way you don't do it this is the third property brooke and i have homesteaded pulling onto it right from bare land and building a home on that property and i've learned so much so much in those processes and i like the way i get things done much better than the way people sit at home and assume it should be done if i've run contrary to someone else's fantasy of building an off-grid homestead well that's not my problem the best way to get anything done is to put your mind to it to put your hands on it and to get a finished product that works for you that you're happy with what could taste better than that first meal you cook in your own cabin on an old propane stove that was bought at a garage sale on a set of kitchen cabinets you just nailed together from scrap delicious sure has been a whole lot of work but once you get to this point you start to feel a little human like you're getting things set up getting things dialed in time to finish these walls up move on with life [Music] each one of the four walls is missing logs that's just kind of the way it worked out i start from the corners and work towards the center of the wall and when i get to that last log i know it's going to have to be a real custom fit [Music] no matter how you build if you decide to build an off-grid homestead the process is going to look something like this all the bits and pieces of your life are going to be scattered all over your property nothing's going to be in its place because that place hasn't been built yet and it's up to you to build it the cabinets the buildings the sheds places for you and your stuff well it's all a dream until you wrench it into reality this last piece is going to require something a little special so i'm just going to have to measure the opening that exists and get that sucker to fit sure feels good to put these last few logs in building a vertical cabin like this has allowed us to put the roof on while the walls were yet to be finished it's kind of an unsettling feeling having giant holes right in your wall getting these last few pieces in sure does feel good [Music] just a couple more logs to go and these walls will be complete i'm not going to lie to you doing two-sided logs with a chainsaw jig is really hard work this is cause for celebration i'm almost down to the last log the last log in the last hole in the wall that needs to be filled time to move on to other things i'm trying to get this storage shed built one of the biggest things of building a homestead is you're building places to live in you're building places to put your stuff in when we bought this property we pulled in with an old pickup truck and a 16-foot trailer full of all kinds of stuff and it's all got to go somewhere we parked on the side of the road because we didn't even have a driveway now we're building places to put things away that feels great while i'm working on the storage shed i'm also going to finish these kitchen cabinets because putting your food away and having it organized that's a big step towards getting this place dialed in [Music] first thing i'm going to do is work on the kitchen cabinet drawers i'm just going to use materials that i already have i've got some one-inch boards i've got some osb i've got some sidings that i cut off the logs they're going to be the drawer faces and just a little bit of glue a little bit of screws pretty soon i'm going to have what i need and just like that i've got a nice homemade drawer put the face on it beautiful [Music] i love it [Music] now these two openings by the sink of course they're not going to have drawers because the sink is in the way but they are going to have false fronts so i'm going to screw these false fronts on it's going to look awesome now on to the cabinet doors we're just going to use one inch boards some sheetrock screws some cheap hinges from the hardware store nothing fancy but it's going to be practical it's going to be easy to make it's gonna look good and it's gonna work we're not building the piano here we're just building a box a box to put our groceries away in now i probably have eighty dollars into the counter top the sink was free the plywood i bought for the cabinet frames it cost about twenty five dollars it's just three quarter inch cdx everything else is just cheap local hardware store boards hinges i probably have a hundred and fifty dollars into the entire setup if that turned out pretty nice [Music] brook and i are to a point with this cabin project that we can start moving things in the walls are all finished everything has been sealed up on the inside the outside needs a little bit of love because we've been through a lot of rain this summer so the logs need to be cleaned up and then they need to be finished [Music] and just like that the cabin portion of this homestead is livable and that's a big deal [Music] now we can move on to other parts of the homestead that we need to get finished but what a game changer what an absolute revelation to have places to put your stuff have a good place to sleep we can take the wall tent down and we can move on to a shower house [Music] whether you live in a tent on the side of a mountain or you live in an apartment in new york city we all have the same needs you need some place to sleep you need someplace to cook you need someplace to go to the bathroom you need some place to take a shower you need some place to stay warm and be out of the elements here on a homestead like this we're taking care of our needs one building at a time we already have an outhouse we already have a storage shed we already have our cabin done now it's time to move on to a shower house now this shower house doesn't need to be anything fancy it just needs to be a small simple building now unlike the cabin that's made out of natural materials i bought all of this building material at the local lumber yard and i think i have about eight hundred dollars into this building from the ground up [Music] just like the sink that went into the cabin this bathtub came from the fairbanks dump now a bathtub as long as it's not bent up just like a sink is just as good as the day it was new so i grabbed this bathtub for free threw it in the back of my truck and just incorporated it into this showerhouse project [Music] now for the shower surround what i'm going to use is just roughing metal because it's cheap and it's waterproof and it's easy to get a couple little plumbing fixtures here and i'm going to hook up the shower head and the pump shower [Music] now what we're going to do here for a shower is we're going to have a pressurized water tank and then just an on off valve so when you want water you open the valve when you don't want water you shut the valve and the water is going to be one temperature not a hot and cold because that's complicated it's going to be whatever you pour in the tank you can see the tank here in just a second [Music] now in this area there are a lot of old gold mining camps and i think this metal shower surround it's kind of got a gold mining camp look to it the old gold mining camps used a lot of corrugated galvanized metal and i think it's got a nice look [Music] i'll give you one guess where i got this vanity cabinet it was at the dump i'll give you one guess where i got this chunk of vinyl flooring yeah you guessed it it was from the dump too [Music] like i said there's the fantasy version of an off-grid homestead and then there's the reality and i think the reality is much more interesting [Music] now i'm no professional when it comes to vinyl flooring but i think that turned out okay the pressure tank i have came from a yard sale and it's a zodi brand but you can use any kind of a pump sprayer type of a tank and here we go water the only downside is here on the side of the mountain we're about 400 feet down to good ground water so drilling wells out of the question what we're going to do here is we're going to use rain water for all of our showering needs that storage shed building we built earlier we're going to put a single rain gutter across the back of it and in a good storm that should top that barrel off that's going to be plenty of water for showers [Music] do one thing i love about this kind of a lifestyle is the simplicity you want a hot shower heat up some rain water and pour it into your pump sprayer the shower house is a hit it works just perfect just the way it was intended to all the water runs down into a gray water drain pit and just like that we've taken care of another one of our homestead needs fantastic now the weather is cooling off enough it's time to give our wood stove a try now i paid 100 for this wood stove it's an old one but it's in good shape i used a piece of corrugated metal roofing for the heat shield behind it and it's working just fine routing the chimney out through the wall is simple and it's easy to do it only requires one section of insulated pipe now the downside to that is if you're farther south where there's wet heavy snow you're probably going to get your chimney knocked off the side of the cabin but here where the snow is light and fluffy it doesn't bother it a bit like i said before homesteading is all about systems it's figuring out how to take care of the things you would need no matter where you live in the summer time we just stick with a cooler a cooler and ice keep groceries to a minimum every couple days pick up a bag of ice on the way out of town that's all you need and in the winter time in fairbanks alaska the world is your freezer now in my personal opinion i think it's very important to have a wood stove and a cook stove you can always cook on the wood stove but you don't always want to use the wood stove in the middle of the summer when it's nice and warm the last thing you want to do is build a fire in your house to make a sandwich brook picked up this old propane cook stove for 50 at a yard sale a propane stove like this is about perfect for a off-grid homestead it doesn't take any electricity you can light it with a pilot light that stays lit underneath the stove top or you can screw in the pilot jet and light it with a match if you want that'll save a little fuel [Music] what a wonderful thing to be to this point take a hot shower if i want one cook a hot meal if i want one you can keep the place nice and warm with the wood cut right off the property it's a wonderful thing in today's modern world the question is always how much is enough what do you really need well everybody has the same needs you need a place to put your food you need a place to prepare food you need a place to go to the bathroom you need a place to take a shower you need a place to sleep you need a space that you can heat you need a little bit of storage just so the things you own are organized and they're ready to use when you need to use them the freedom and simplicity and independence of having a small efficient off-grid homestead is a dream for so many people myself included with how crazy the world is right now the idea of an off-grid homestead is more popular than ever so many people are noticing the world's moving too fast things are too complicated too expensive building an off-grid homestead isn't easy but it is worth it and it is doable i just wanted to show you what that looks like from start to finish and thank you for visiting my homestead my name is dave whipland you've been watching bush radical be radical eh see you soon

Channel: Bushradical

Views: 3,534,276

Rating: 4.9173541 out of 5

Keywords: off grid, off grid cabin, off grid homestead, tiny house, tiny cabin, homesteading

Id: AiCGM7n79VU

Length: 35min 5sec (2105 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 10 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Twelvey]

This thing will look and perform like dogshit in two years... Halfassed homeowner special.

Edit: My wife would divorce me in a heartbeat if I told her she had to shower with a repurposed fuckin bug sprayer... These people are kooks. You want to live off the grid this isn't the way. Look up amish or proper log homes. There are ways to live without power that don't involve wasting a bunch of good logs like this.

[u/AND_THE_L0RD_SAID]

Nice video. Could do without the preachiness, but still good.

[u/amberfill]

Appreciate the can-do spirit, and the author obviously knows something about building and fitting framed structures already, but a "learn as I go" attitude is foolish when spending that amount of energy (time, money, work).

[u/EtsuRah]

If there ever becomes a way for me to live remote... But also have fiber internet, then I will do it immediately.

But the thing I require the most in a home is good internet.

[u/schnauzage]

That was really cool to watch. I wonder where he gets his money from though

[u/notjawn]

Like I get having a nice little farm house outside of town in some rural area would be but 25 miles just to get food or medicine? It's a damn chore just to take a hot shower? You have to freeze your ass off to use the toilet? Have to constantly reload your heat and cooking sources? Come on man. That's just some sort of anti-social behavior.

[u/Fabled-Lagoon]

This couple competed on Alone, they had a great home but 0 food

[u/turt547]

Step 1: have land.

[u/Workal]

I didn't see it, but I'm assuming the bed is in the attic? or is it a separate place as well, like the shower and bathroom?