Man Builds Dream House from Recycled Timber

hey my name is jeff i'm a designer and builder i've designed and built all this myself behind us is my home and the place i share with lots of people from all over the world [Music] this video is sponsored by dylan mcgaster check out our new channel by clicking the link and be sure to subscribe i had just got out of architecture school and i bought this piece of land thinking okay i'm going to try to get some experience learn my craft and actually build a home up here moved on to the land lived in a tent basically created this sort of tool shed and so i lived in the in the loft above then i built the house i did actually quite a few designs before i could stomach the idea of actually building it basically all the wood in this building is is from old buildings and so that's why i suppose why it's taken me 14 years the main structure was built from these curved glue lamps basically that came from the super value it was a big convex arched building that connected in the middle they came covered in nails and paint staples i bought a floor sander and i just like went back and forth and back and forth backboard i stood up these posts and whatnot first with plates on them already and then all i had to do was call a crane truck in for an afternoon and put all the beams on top i've actually only have two thousand dollars in crane time in the building i guess the point there is that when i called the crane i was ready totally ready it's like 5600 square feet there's actually 6 300 square feet of roof on the building because the overhangs are actually quite large so this is the grotto over here this is a natural bowl that is completely rock when i dug out for the footings and everything this was dug out a little bit and then in the spring the water came in and it filled up this whole area and it and the water like never disappeared and i thought that was a bit strange so i dug it with the machines and then we ended up with buckets and just spent two months pulling mud out of this bowl and now it just holds water there's no liner we have like a hundred koi that are in here but it was freezing last night so i think they're they're hiding did a tint on the glass too that really helps for some of the solar gain and whatnot and i mean each of these panels is probably 600 pounds we glazed everything in this building by hand so anything we had to get to the second floor we figured out a ratcheting system and worked the glass up there as you can see there's no frames on the glass whatsoever everything is dadoed straight into the building so i put the building up and then i went in with a router and actually carved all these grooves for the glass to fit in there and so they would have to be deeper at the top and the side so you can put it in and then move it over and then at the same time have everything lining up perfectly so you've got the spacer bar you've got the you know the edge of the beam and everything just like seamless part of the reason i could do this was because these are old old beams these beams are like 70 years old so they're not gaining or losing moisture really anymore they're just old fur and fur becomes like steel pretty much when it's at that age and it's not going to twist or crack or create problems so that's that's how i managed to be able to do this building like this these doors are the first set of doors i ever built actually these are all sort of live edge fur these pieces of glass were actually rejects that they had sent me from another corner and i built them into the doors i haven't actually put an opener system on it because the glass comes actually really far into the door and i can't put one through it so i'm gonna do a latching system from the other side but the balcony over top of the front door and whatnot is actually held up by that tension member which is an old drill rod so that just eliminated us having to do any kind of a post in the center here that's rammed earth there that we did that heats the place quite nicely also sort of divides the room up so your dining room on one side and living area on the other it's kind of a great room but then i've also kind of created these divisions within it that's why i did the sort of sunken living room i know it's somewhat of a 70s program but you got to kind of stick to your instinct and see what works for you so this was one of the last openings that i did and one of the most challenging because of the building permits and everything which is sort of a garage door system you know you can sit here and it's sort of like a bar situation you're indoor outdoor and you see there's like there's a hard lady profile on the sides up at the top there i put the bearing plates directly into the beams um so i had to actually feed the bar at the top through the outside the building just to sort of bring all the springs and all that sort of stuff to the outside and keep this sort of as minimal as possible this was the stainless countertop you know along the way we came up with some ideas like you know stainless can be expensive especially if you wanted to like weld the front edge you know but instead i was like well what are we just not weld it why don't we just run the sheet long all you're dealing with is a cut and a bend and then we attach the rail on the front you know it turns out it's actually quite a cheap thing to do this is all local applewood on these fronts this is a mahogany ply on this side you can see they're kind of like really nice details i'd like to say i built this i helped install it but i did not actually build these my friend dean evans put these together for me this is the penny floor that i did the day they got rid of the penny i went down to the bank and picked up a bunch of pennies and there's 12 584 pennies here under and over top i did like a laminating epoxy resin i'd spread out a bit and i'd stick it down and then i just took a squeegee and squeegeed the epoxy straight over the top and it left like just a micro film over top of it bathroom is through here this is the steam shower john russo a friend of mine did the tiling he's a master and some things you can leave to the masters and then this goes into my garage and whatnot this is a bit of a disastrous mess at the moment but this is my garage and workshop so this is the wood boiler kind of obscenely huge and to be honest i think there's probably a better way you're burning piles of wood you get to go split all that wood you got to bring it in it makes a mess in here too i'm looking at different ideas as far as a air-to-water heat pump to heat the floors or also you know maybe going to propane or something so this is my studio and flex space that i've created i think it's important in a home to have the ability for it to be flexible and like you know if i wanted to manufacture something i've got a huge space that i could do that in as you can see i've put like cables in the ceilings in all different directions so that if i want to say you know close it off you know we could close off a little room or whatnot and i could do that i could have like five rooms in here and lickety-split with the curtains that i've created i made these benches for our wedding actually so we got married up against the glass and you can just put the benches underneath the beds so like in each room you could have five benches under each one and we've got like 25 of these benches that we can use for whatever sort of event or whatever it is that we want to do in the original building there would have been a bracket that went on there and so it would have attached to a post or something like that this is where these would have been this is a timber washer just meant to distribute the load of a bolt over a greater area these would have been all in the original building if you see this really long beam that holds up this whole floor system that we're on there was five of those beams i cut them into pieces and used them as floorboards and so this floor that we're standing on is like nine inches of solid fur it's pretty heavy each one of those beams was ten thousand pounds so this part of the building is completely insulated from the other half you know it's just kind of considered a garage on heated garage actually but what this does is it sort of in the summer it'll be 40 degrees outside it'll be like 20 in here super nice because the rock really helps to keep it cool the roof there's seven inches of foam it's polyurethane foam there's a company up in kelowna that builds these fire doors when they make a fire door they chop out a chunk for the window and then there's actually a lot of off product which is the foam so we did seven inches of foam with breathable area above it so we're dealing with like an r 50 or 60 roof probably four thousand dollars i think i insulated the whole building for so that was a super good thing to do this is the time machine so this is a three foot diameter sewer pipe that was almost 600 pounds actually it was next to impossible to put here and the whole thing was actually very challenging uh because like to get it smooth and nice on the inside we just like sand it with 12 different grits and then cut polish in and but in the end it's actually really worth it [Music] i had walls across here and i had actually bedrooms that were separated uh upstairs and then when i built it i stood in there and i went like i can't build any walls in this space i want to be able to see everywhere i don't i didn't want walls with little windows or any of that sort of stuff and then afterwards i built three off-grid cabins sort of reminiscent of the original building i built up top which have no services but really amazing views and lots of glass and then we thought well maybe we should try this airbnb thing so we you know we threw it up for like 50 bucks and we had like couple rentals already signed up and i'm like oh my gosh here we go so now we had to actually finish them and get them sorted like really fast under the building code you don't need a building permit for anything under 10 square meters that was why i went for that size but then of course i ran it on airbnb for a couple years and then all of a sudden the district arrived and so it took me two years to get past the bureaucracy and get it resorted out so we have a little ventilation uh up here [Music] and just nice place to look at the view but this is my favorite cabin because it was actually the simplest thing to design and also kind of the coolest and it's like not on the ground and that's you know that's cool it's supported from above with tension members and then underneath there's just angle irons that are actually attached to the rock so the rest of it just is self-supporting this is cross-laminated timber as well you can see this is like a five-layer panel these were probably off cuts from a project or something and they ended up in this big pile out at the beam plant or whatever and they were just garbage to them so they were all reclaimed yeah the lordco became the kia dealer and the kia dealer didn't want blue glass in there anymore so i grabbed all that glass so all the cabins all the glasses actually reclaimed so we kind of figured out a cool layout for the glass and then we built the whole building around that we didn't really want to you know cut the wood to this shape and it's kind of nice to have the natural ventilation anyways so we cut a slot all the way along and then fed the mosquito net into the rock keeps the bugs out but really clean lines [Music] you got to make decisions and you got to go forward and if you don't make the decision the thing will just never get done you can spend half your time just thinking about what you're doing but like the reality is that if you have just started in a direction and actually just done it you know you're going to adjust and you're going to make changes along the way and you will learn a whole bunch more going through it but if you just think about it and dwell on it forever like you're just wasting your time you're not actually getting anything done it's like sitting in a rocking chair you're you're moving but you're doing nothing i think that it's really good idea to try to build a model or build something small first you know you're not gonna don't start with something huge start with something that isn't gonna cost you your livelihood when if things go wrong and it's not quite right or whatever like you should probably learn on small projects it's a little victories and being able to stand there at the end of the day and look at what you've done and go wow that looks awesome you know that's definitely one of my favorite things thanks for watching this week's episode if you enjoyed it please consider subscribing and i wanted to let you know if you haven't heard that we started a second channel so if you're interested in seeing more of what we've made things along the lines of adventure travel philosophy click the link in the description below or click this link right here with my face on it and check out our new channel dylan mcgaster and if you enjoy it consider subscribing so big love have a great week

Channel: FLORB

Views: 2,025,540

Keywords: Travel, tiny house, van life, van dwelling, simple living, van tour, tiny house tour, tiny house on wheels, van conversion, florb, dylan magaster, architecture, recycle, recycled, timber, eco, eco friendly, sustanable, dream house, real estate

Id: hCsESI-DuxA

Length: 13min 12sec (792 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 10 2021