- Well, that was stupid. Oh, I can't see in the camera. (sighs) Well, that's it for today. I gotta go and ATV outta here. And get my wife to take a look at this and see how bad it is. I can see out of it, which is a good sign. It's blurry. But (chuckles) driving through the bush is not gonna be fun. Anyway, I'll come back tomorrow and grab these two logs, here. It would be good probably to, well I already did some work to 'em. I was gonna say, start from scratch first thing in the morning and see how long it takes,
actually, to do those two. Oh, man. Nose keeps running
because of this injury. Yeah, so, well anyway. Even getting it to this stage
and knowing how long it takes. The next logs, these
two end ones, are what, they both have a door in the middle only, so they're gonna be two
ten-footers, kind of like this. They're shorter because
of the shorter walls but, you know, I'll see right from scratch from slacking the log and cutting it and getting it into place, how long it's actually gonna take me. I think probably, the way
things are going, I would say it's probably gonna end
up taking me most of day to scribe these two, but probably not quite, but anyway, getting there, two logs
up on the two ends, getting one done on each
side, including cutting it and then putting, placing
it and scribing it, taking it off, giving it a final cut and then put the moss
down, get it in place, drop it in place permanently,
is probably a day. That's what I'm thinking,
a day per wall section. That's probably gonna accelerate and then as I get into
sort mid-level walls or mid-level logs, say
three feet off the ground, I'll probably get to the point where I can do two logs
in a day, two walls. So that's my goal. As long as I don't injure myself. All right, I think I'll just put my tools under this shelter that I built. It's gonna be handy for that too as long as I hang them up high so the snow and waters don't
blow and rain in on them. Try to keep everything dry. Everything's damp, regardless of whether I put it downstairs in the box or hang it on the wall like I always do at the workshop or the cabin in the past. Tools, you'll see a lot of moisture so I have to continually
put that cream on them, oil and waxes to keep them from rusting. Anyway, that's it. That's the way you take
off an eye there, Kelly. All through it. (scraping tool) I'm sure you're wondering
why I'm parging this and what the long-term plan is. To be honest, I just don't
wanna look at this blueskin for the next six months. And I do plan to cover
the foundation in stone. I've been collecting
rocks, whatever I can find like the ones that I'm
using at the fire pit there. And I'm gonna split them in half a do a veneer, stone veneer on this. That foundation, but here,
this is the breezeway. I'm gonna do stone all
the way up, actually. That's not for sure. I
haven't decided that for sure. But if I do, either way, I guess, I'm putting like a two-inch
or a three-inch thick lintel across the whole bottom of this mesh where the parging stops. And that's gonna carry the weight, or at least carry the weight of the first row of
stones until they adhere and I'll make sure that's
well-burnt piece of timber that I'll put on there 'cause
I'm not gonna use steel. I'll just use wood. So I'll put that across
there, parge it again, do a deeper scratch coat horizontally here and then adhere the stones to it. So yeah, it'll be at least this deep and eventually what I'll do is from that two by or three
by four or whatever it is down, that will fill
in that with insulation so it'll be fully insulated and then I'll backfill up to that level so there's more of a slope
away from the foundation. Hopefully this lasts for the winter. I'll tarp this each night until there's walls and
roof on this section so that the water's not spilling over and eating at that edge
and getting in behind it. It's either that or I have to caulk it so I think a tarp over there
is the easiest thing to do. So that's what I'm doing. That's the plan. It's taken longer than I thought, but now that I'm using this trowel and the wider open spots, I don't have much detail left, in fact not really any detail until I get around to that far corner. So I can just scratch
it on thick with this and make some progress. It's a lot of nails, every six
inches essentially, each way, so that took some time, but
I want it to be adhered well and I want it to still be waterproof which is why I need to
get this parging done right after I nail it on. The nails are pretty decent
self healing in that membrane but still a whole bunch of them, and wherever there's some air gaps where it's not fully adhered to the wood is potential for leakage. I guess I can address that by doing this. (tool scraping) Perfect weather, staying
above freezing tonight and it's, what is it? 12 or 13 degrees Celsius now
today, probably right now? It's not bad. (chuckles) She fits perfectly! That's good, good to work
it out at this level. As I was rolling that
one back, or into place, I was thinking how hard
it's gonna be to do that when it's a full length log on top or even log this size up
four feet off the ground. I'll have to build some kind of scaffold to roll it 'cause I'm, say this log, but four courses up or five courses up. If I was to roll that
onto here for working, this end is supported,
but that end, you know, being five feet in the
air, would fall, of course, down to the floor or down to the deck. So I'd need a five-foot scaffold to roll that onto at that end, support it and then, like I said, the wall at this end
would support this end. So that would work for these short ones and then the full-length ones will be fine because if it's up here
and it spans like even you know, let's say above
the window, two headers, spanning full length it's actually hanging over here by
about 16 inches, right? Nine and two. So I can just roll it over to here and then it's sitting across right here and then I do all my notching and scribing and then roll it back
into place, not scribing, scribe into place with a full notch along the whole log and saddle. And then flip it back right into place with the moss pre-installed in it. It oughta be less likely to
do a rough fit at that point because it's gonna be
harder to keep rolling it back and forth, of course. Especially once it sits down like this, it's actually hard to
roll it out of that place. Actually, I need to deal
with that right now. I'm gonna have to put a log on this side, have to roll it out, and then I'll put the moss in between so that the moss is
compressed between the layers. What are you doin'? (chuckles) Right in the water puddle. It took like three or four hours. I'll definitely, I'm speeding up already. I'm figuring some stuff out that I can do including some of the notches
I can do with the chainsaw. And then all the rest of it's hand tools, but like I mentioned in another video, I can't do any brushing
with it or any chainsawing where I have to hold the
trigger down for very long. It's just too painful. And I can work through the pain, but I don't wanna cause long-term damage or damage that's gonna take
like a year to heal afterwards. So doing what I can with the hand tools which I prefer anyways. Anyway, I'll finish the other one here and then move on to the next wall. Come on up here, pup. (chuckles) Perfect fit, again, so
these two, perfect fits but I discovered a problem. I have no idea how I did it but first log on the
second course over there, I reversed it somehow. I gotta figure out if I'm
gonna be able to correct it course by course. I've basically got a small end at this end when I shoulda had a big end at that end. So I either have to reverse that log and there's no way it'll work now, took too much out of it. Awfully close, actually. If I reverse that log and
then rescribed it, recut it, it's possible that that could work, but either way, this
has too much meat on it. The mistake that I made was
actually at the first course of the sill logs, these two logs over here ended up making 'em
pretty much even in height from one end to the other. They should have actually been tapered, should have had, what, big end shoulda been a few inches thicker at this end than that end
and then vice versa here. Because I did not do that,
this one has too much meat above the saddle which
means, I mean it looks good but it means the next log
that's coming this way is it's small end at this end and it'll be buried within
like an inch of the top so then I just getting
completely out of control as it goes up I'll end
up having no saddle. So I have to do one of two things. Well, the thing I have to do is, even though these fit perfectly, I have to sink them into the bottom log, probably at least another two inches. What a shame. And then figure out what
I'm doing with that log. Gotta be done. (squirrel chattering) It's gonna be fun doing that. (brush rustling) It's probably not bad for this pup. Did you get the bird?
(water gurgling) Is there a bird there?
That coulda been lunch. Lots of grouse around this year but I did see a fox, actually, just by the cabin in that valley there. Well there was a fox
sitting there at the end and then later I saw
it actually cross back with a grouse in its mouth, so they are. You know fox will be the primary predator
of the grouse actually. And I've got at least one fox that I always get on trail cam here. So it's his, probably doing a pretty good dent in the population. There's at least two families, two families of grouse that bred here. I used to see them in the summer. (chuckles) How can you be hot? What are you doin'? Anyway, between that
and the varying hares, the snowshoe rabbits,
and the red squirrels, the foxes eat well, but
it definitely takes away from game that I can hunt, small game. I did see a great big
coyote on the trail camera right there across the meadow too, right where the fox was. He was there two nights, just kinda looking back at the cabin, keepin' an eye out, I guess checking to see if we were gonna be there if he wanted to hunt nearby. So they're keeping the
deer away, actually. There's not many deer here right now which is not good for deer season, but the moose aren't afraid of them, so there's lots of moose around still. This will be my last day
to collect moss this year. That's why I'm focusing
on it this morning. It's still a little frozen. It's still below zero right now, but it's gonna be a lot
worse starting tomorrow. Periods of rain, then the
temperatures drop down to freezing and below even
at night or during the day. So this is definitely the end of the good weather, predictable weather. Mid-November we start to get
a pretty good chance of snow. The temperatures are there consistently, so we'll get some warm days, obviously, but for the most part, we're gonna be in the freezing and below temperatures which means any time
there's any precipitation, it's likely to be snow, so I bet by the next video,
you'll see snow the ground here and hopefully that melts a couple of times so I can still get some more work done. Conveniently done,
better working conditions since you know I'll be
working all winter long, but it's better when
everything's not frozen so covered in ice. (chickadees chirping) This is all just going
into the greenhouse to dry and to not be frozen when I need it. This will all grow back in the spring because I'm not removing all of it. Lots of roots here still. I thought it would take
some work in the greenhouse. It's been challenging this year with all the other stuff I've got going on so the greenhouse is
obviously not as far along as I would have liked, but once there's somewhere
for my family to sleep here, then I'll get a lot
more help in the garden so next year, probably later this winter, it'll be fully finished in here and I can get stuff planted
early for next year. So if not fully utilizing it the way we normally would
for this time of year, we'd still have things growing. I mean there's still some things, still got the last of
the peppers, cucumbers, still a few tomatoes over
here behind the camera. Got some celery, herbs, cabbage and I'll go to dig up
the last of the potatoes. So I gotta prune all these
peppers back actually and treat these as a perennial, get them to just grow
from this stage next year instead of starting over with new seeds, so whichever ones are
healthy, I'll prune them back and probably get some mulch around them so they don't have to keep wasting water on something that's dormant and them come February, probably, there will be enough sunlight that they'll start growing again. So that's the real thing
we're looking forward to is just getting a really,
really early start on the gardening season next year by starting stuff in here
to transplant outside but also to start growing
these things inside that we want to like peppers. We had a ton of peppers, sweet and hot. My wife made hot sauce with a lot of the peppers here this year. And it's really good, so that's the plan is to keep doing that. It's kind of a higher priced item, too so it's worth growing, especially indoors in this heated environment. The figs are still doing well, too. They're not dormant yet,
haven't dropped leaves. I have a couple that are outside that have but I'll have to move them inside so that they don't
completely freeze and die. So I'll bring them in here and just leave them as dormant plants. These, same thing, will
drop their leaves soon and then they'll come
back in probably February and start growing again. The water system's worked out well just with the drainage
pipe from the eaves trough coming into the water tank. I haven't need a well, which I never did really finish. I mean, it has some water, but I think I must have hit
a rock or something solid and it just started
mushrooming the top of the pipe where I was pounding it down and it's not going any further so I think what I'll do, I'll fill that back in, cut that pipe off and I could put an
electric water pump down, a hose down through that pipe to pump any water out of there, but I'll try repounding one over on this side of the greenhouse and I hope to not hit anything so I can get down deep enough
that I have full water. The other thing I've been doing is just getting water from the stream and filling up our
water in here as needed. You know there's that peak evaporation from the heat of the sun. Anyway, I'm looking
forward to spending time in here in the winter. It's an awesome structure
and it's already quite warm. Like I was pretty cold out there. That's why I'm sniffling.
It's below freezing. Below zero celsius, 32 fahrenheit. But in here, I'll check the temperature. It feels like at least 10 degrees even though the sun's not
even really shining on it. (chuckles) I can see Calen's
tail wagging through there. So this moss will dry out in here before I utilize all of it. I'll just keep spreading
it around and fluffing it so the air can get at it and the sun, once it beats in here,
that will dry it out. Anyway, I'm gonna get
up there and get to work and I'll take some of this moss back and use that for between the logs that I'm working on right now. (rustling wood) Let's make up for lost time yesterday. I'm using the chainsaw for
a lot of this work today. I've got this last good day of weather and I'm gonna take advantage of it, get as much done as possible, then back to my slow pace (chuckles) for the rest of the season, I'm sure. Got rain coming in tonight
then it turns freezing, so getting some snow this week, for sure. The other main advantage to
doing that with the chainsaw, I'm actually gonna use
this sawdust as traction. This blueskin can get pretty slippery and it is every morning
when it's got frost on it. I can imagine when we get snow and ice, so what I'm gonna do is leave a one-inch layer of sawdust everywhere. When that rain comes tonight, it's gonna soak that and then freeze, so the floor level will be basically at this inch that I'm
leaving at these thresholds and from then on I can just
shovel the snow right out, right over top of this
threshold, on three sides. (ax chopping) I'll get this nailed down there. Nail these two ends. Good news is this is, these
are the longest, I think, no, those two are the longest, yeah. The two front ones are the longest. The cabin's 20 feet wide that way and it's just a doorway in the middle, but the thing is there's
only two more of that size and I already have them
up on the front porch. They're easy to get into place. Here I've got two more. I've got one more row this size and then they get slightly
smaller as I get higher and then once I get to seven feet, I get to the full length one, but those are gonna be fairly easy shortly because just one more and then I've got windows in the middle so each section's gonna
be only like three feet. So that's gonna be easy. I've got two long ones there,
but the cables are situated so I can easily just lift straight up and basically shimmy it on and then I get into
two windows there, too, so I end up with short sections. I forget what the, I forget where I was
thinking for the windows, but there won't even be
a 10-footer in there. So anyway, point being that, even though I'm struggling with these and it's taking a long time, it's probably the hardest
ones on the cabin. Although the ones over there
might not be great either 'cause I'll have the breezeway in the way, so I'll do that next and
see what that's like. (vice cranking) This is actually isn't quite this way. (vice cranking) What a day, beautiful
day but tiring (chuckles) moving these logs around, getting them all into place this week has been exhausting but I'm happy that all of the logs are out of the forest that I need for the cabin. And they're all piled in spots completely around the
cabin, as you can see, so this is what I call the east side. All the logs are piled
there for the east side, including a couple spares. North side, which is a lot
of long logs right there. You have front, south side, have, what do I have, three
courses up on the porch. They were easy to get up to that point and now they're gonna be easy
to get up to this point too. That's the nice thing about the cables all running in that direction. West side's probably gonna
be the most challenging, but I might be able to put
some kind of ramp system, maybe even just wench them
up onto the breezeway there. And then they'll be
easier to get into place. I have cables right above that. Yeah, I'm happy with the, not necessarily the progress
on the building of the cabin, but as far as being prepared for winter, I'm pretty satisfied. The wind is really picking up. This is the transition from
the warm spell that we've had to a cold front coming in
and then the next week or so it looks like it's calling
for a chance of flurries pretty well every day, so
down around freezing mark, so that's probably it for the nice season, it for the natural vitamin D. If you're not getting your vitamin D, don't forget to take supplements if you're living in a northern
climate, northern latitude, because we're about to enter a period where we just don't get much
sunlight the next three months. Yeah, February starts to
get sunnier but it's cold so people are outside a lot less. I'm outside all the time, so
I get plenty of vitamin D. Well, speaking of health,
the update on my eye. So it's been a week? Yeah, I think a week since
I hit myself in the eye with that chunk of wood that
came out of that threshold. It is still tender on the eyeball. See, the thing is, I
didn't go to the hospital or a doctor or anything. Part of making the
commitment to living off grid is to not overreact to
every small health issue and go and seek medical attention. If it's something that I
don't feel needs attention, or that I can deal with myself,
or family can deal with, then that's the first line of defense. That's the first action and I was right. So actually that's still tender. So basically I think what happened is the chunk of wood, because
it was irregular in shape, hit here and there on
the white of the eyeball, missed the pupil and the iris, so my eyesight wasn't affected at all. Right away, I could tell that. And that would be one of the things. If I had have had damage
and have blurry vision I would have probably
got medical attention, but I didn't feel like
my vision was affected and the pain wasn't so bad
that I couldn't deal with it. Anyway, that's the update. It's a little, like I
said, slightly tender, slightly more red than the
right side, but it'll heal. Um, what else? Yeah,
that's pretty well it. I'm expecting this weather to roll in. I'll probably spend a couple of days just getting tools and stuff sharpened and ready for making progress. So I'll spend a couple days maybe just sticking around the workshop and just doing tool maintenance
and clothing maintenance and stuff like that. And then as soon as I get
another break in the weather, I'll get back on this
and make some progress. I worked out that problem I
was talking about back here. I went through the
total design of my walls and the dimensions of each of the logs and I figured I had enough
clearance at both these ends to go ahead and just continue
with what I had started. Even though that log is backwards, the logs are fairly uniform,
not dramatically tapered. These bigger logs like
15 but this one's 15 down to like 13 or 13 and a
half, so that's pretty good. So it allows me to, in that case, flip the log the wrong
way, but then make it up so that I'm still in the upper proper size saddle everywhere. So that's gonna stay. The only reason I'm
wrapping it up right now is I ordered some indelible pencils, pencils that write in the
rain or write when it's moist. I can't get the markers
to show enough of the line on this wood, because it
is damp, that I can see. And if I scribe that and
there's a spot that's missed and I turn the log back over, or turn the log over to notch it out and I see there's sections
that I can't read. I can't see the line. You
have to redo the entire thing. You can't just flip it back, because you'll never get
into that same place again. So it's critical to get the
entire scribe done at one time, so I don't wanna take a
chance, so I'm not gonna. I could be working and taking
advantage of this weather, but I'm not gonna
continue for that reason. I need to go into town
in the next day or two, check the mailbox, and
hopefully the pencils are there. Once I'm speeding up the scribing process, I think I'm gonna go
pretty quickly, actually. Two logs, short logs to come up there. And then, oh the other thing, is I need to spend some
days at the workshop to make a dowel. I never did do that because
the weather was pretty good. I didn't wanna lose the
advantage that I had getting all the logs and everything in. (coughs) So I haven't stayed working inside so I'll do that this week
and get the dowels made so that I can start
pinning these logs down. You might have noticed as I was moving these logs into place, these two on the second
course, were actually moving. So I had to shimmy them back in place before I start getting these
other ones ready to scribe. So I gotta dowels, get those done. So it's a lot of dowels,
lot of hard dowels. I think that's it. Greenhouse, I mentioned earlier, I think or in another video,
back to working in there on some cold weather days as well. With my wife's help, I'll get it planted. Well, cleaned up, planted, finish off all the
planter boxes and stuff. Still have to meld those solar panels. Lots of work. (chuckles) A little overwhelming
maybe, this time of year. Anyway, that's it. Thanks for watching, appreciate it. And I'll look forward to seeing
you at the cabin next time. Take care.
