Renovating Our Off Grid Tiny Home & Interior Tour (Part 1)

okay we are on a walk this morning taking the dogs out for a quick stroll before we get started on our next big project and the project we got working on is one we can actually accomplish in the winter time and we are putting new flooring in the cabin so first thing that we do we get back there we have to get our cabin all tidied up we made it back to the cabin and you've probably seen this backdrop before and a ton of our videos we usually do a lot of our filming in our kitchen today before we start putting in our flooring we're actually going to flip the camera around and we're going to show you guys around the bottom story of our cabin so like I said before you guys have seen this part of the kitchen the main part of it is our 20 inch propane stove we put in pretty much everything that is in here the only thing that this cabin had when we moved in was the cabinets we put in our own shelving we also added this table and our nice sink another thing we added in was we had somewhere to eat so we built this really cool birch table from local birch wood from a sawmill up the road and we've got a couple little stools and this is usually where we eat our dinner so this is our refrigerator we don't have just a standard refrigerator we just use an ice chest and one of our friends actually just gave us this really nice and his chest so we're loving this thing it works really well here is the big pile of flooring that we're going to be putting in and believe it or not this stuff weighs a ton so we had to kind of stash it in a corner where it wouldn't get in the way we keep one of our propane tanks over here and this runs our on-demand water heater which is a camp blocks and we also have our fuse panel our charge controller and our Zen tracks 2000 watt inverter over here and this is a really cool thing that Ariel stepdad gave us and it's just a road map of Alaska so I actually spend a lot of time looking at this thing it's pretty cool to find new cities and stuff I've never heard of so our kitchen is our kitchen but also since we don't have like legitimate bathroom this also doubles as you know a bathroom sink for brushing your teeth and things like that over this next section of the cabin we have our couch that we don't really like it's not that nice it's not very comfortable it's way too big so we'll probably be replacing that sometime who knows when this is where one of the dogs usually sleep we have two dog beds they kind of switch off whenever they want this is Bo and he's just sleeping today and this is our wood stove and this is an earth stove and it's from 1988 these things were made in Oregon this is a really cool wood stove obviously it's old it needs a little bit of work we're going to do some new fire bricks and we're gonna paint it and do a couple things to it this summer but it works really well and we always have a pot of water on here this usually gets used for filling up the chicken waters lately but as you can tell there's a ton of cooking surface on here so this thing comes in really handy and one thing we added on this season was a stove pipe damper it's just a damper that goes in the stove pipe and then we also have this really cool shelf or ledge that goes behind the wood stove so we a lot of times will set bread when it's rising back there and it's a nice hot area for that these are our water jugs they're drinking water usually we have one over in the kitchen but since we're kind of moving stuff around and do these floors it's sitting over here and then I usually always have the spare one here or filling up some hot water on the stove and then down here on the ground this is actually one of our newer generators we have two of them now and it's been really cold lately so this one has been staying inside for when we need to start it up equipment here has a really hard time starting when it's you know negative 22 negative 30 degrees Fahrenheit so that's why that's inside now and then the rest of this whole section is kind of just our entryway and our door this is usually where we keep our boots and our slippers so this other part of our entry section is kind of our little coat rack we made and then this is a really cool key rack that we had built for us in Oregon and that's usually where we hang our flashlights keys and things like that and this is where we keep our other public bed and this is bandit and he's just hanging around sleeping also right behind our staircase you might notice that I have a garden hose sitting in here and that's a 25 foot hose and I actually have to keep that inside during the winter because that's how we fill our holding tank from the well and even if I drain though all the water out of that thing and I keep it sigh it actually gets so cold here that that hose will just pretty much shatter so that's got to stay inside for the remainder of the winter and then on to the staircase that leads up into our loft and this is one of the things during our floor install that we're actually going to be getting rid of we only have a 320 square foot cabin and this staircase although it looks really nice and it functions pretty well it just takes up way too much room so this whole thing is going to get ripped out today and we are going to be replacing it with a ladder that goes up into the loft it's not going to be a real steep ladder but it's also not going to be stairs I believe they call it a ship ladder so we're gonna get to that in a couple days when we have all the flooring already put in and over behind the stairs we have a 55-gallon drum and this is our holding tank this is what feeds our shower and our sink and we keep a 5 gallon or a 20 pound propane tank right here and this goes to our propane stove this is where our water drug that was over by the fire will usually sit and that's seven gallons and that's our drinking water and underneath there is our 12-volt water pump and that powers our shower and our sink let's head upstairs into the loft and our loft is a hundred and sixty square feet we gave kind of a tour a few videos back on the upstairs of the loft so nothing has really changed again the loft is kind of like our office area along with all of our clothes this is where we sleep and this is kind of our little sanctuary to get away from the dogs one of the things that was not finished when we bought the cabin was the floor as you can tell this is just the subfloor that has been painted with a really tough flooring paint so that is the reason that we're gonna put it in our new floors and to get started we're the first things we're gonna do is rip out that staircase and we're gonna take all of our big items and put them outside we're eating a certain removing this staircase and this ladder to get up and down from the lot we got out the railing and the postal off and tell you what this actually looks pretty cool it's not sturdy enough to use so I'm gonna come down and just taking that stuff down has already opened up this cabinet a lot and that's kind of our goal is to get back some of our space so our staircase is only going to come about here so we're going to gain all this extra space here for walking putting dog beds stuff like that so what we're doing here is there's a big rod that's got a plate on the ground so I'm going to go with the ladder from outside and we're just going to be kind of sliding these steps one by one to the top till we get to the last line these steps are actually really cool so we have a couple ideas that we're going to be reusing actually all this wood for a couple summer projects [Music] all right the next day and clearly you can tell we did not have stairs or aloft anymore so it's been a little inconvenient getting up and down yesterday after moving the stairs we had a hot mess in here we had a lot to clean up and we spent a little more time designing the exact type of ladder we want so we're up really early this morning to go ahead and just get cracking on things and the first thing we have to do is fix one soft spot that we have over in our kitchen so we're gonna get that squared away and then we should be able to get the floor prepared so we can do half of this floor at one time and then do the other half so this is the soft spot we're talking about in our floor it didn't look like this before I started poking around at it and we're getting it ripped up and I think it's just maybe some water set there or something so we're gonna cut out this piece as big as we need till we get the solid subfloor and then we have a new piece of subfloor we're going to cut an exact piece to match it get it nailed in and then I think we're gonna have to do one more vacuum on that side of the house that we're going to start on and then we'll be able to start on putting in the floors so there's no current moisture down here and this is another reason we're going to be putting in the vinyl plank flooring is because we got a kind that is waterproof and this is the current situation with our animals [Music] so we're almost done with replacing that soft spot in the subfloor we got the piece cut out but we want to add an extra support underneath there since it was kind of weak when we were stepping on it but all we had was a 2x4 that's been sitting outside so that's drying by the wood stove we'll finish that when we get over there we're either the floor prep now to start putting it in the flooring we've we've swept and we vacuumed again and we've taken our level and we've kind of went over the ground and made sure that the floor was all level or the subfloor was level and ready to put our flooring on one thing I want to mention is these boxes of flooring they come with different designs in each box so this one has 2/3 of each design and why that's important is you don't want to put the designs all next to each other you kind of want to put them sporadically so you get a nice a mix of them all around the floor and another thing we did is you want to measure from this wall to that wall and make sure that you're not going to end up when you get to the last piece with just a small little section of this flooring ours is really good it's going to use pretty much a whole one of these once we get to that edge and you also want to measure the length wise of the house to make sure you don't end up with the same thing like just a 1 inch piece so we're good to go there I think we're gonna get started we're going to start in this corner and work our way this way come back and just keep working our way up so on this first corner we're gonna start with our full piece but by the time we get to where our cabinet is and it's going to end we're gonna have to cut a section off of it and then I think we're gonna use that section we cut off of that to start over here because you don't want the seams to be lined up with each other you want them to be kind of offset like that sometimes you might have to remove the trim to get a good fit but our trim sits up enough or the floor will sit right underneath it so that's good on our end that's one less thing we have to do I'm gonna try to get this whole first section put together and then kind of slid and tapped into place underneath so here I'm just making our cut for our first piece that we're gonna have to cut and these flooring are designed to click together so they will only install one way and they're it's arrows on the bottom what to tell you which way you need it so I flipped this one so I can get the measure and what I'm end up doing is cutting it right here I'm actually gonna use this piece flip it around and that'll click right into place there and this is going to be where our oven sits so we're gonna put hardwood floors underneath the oven but we're not going to do the hardwood floors underneath the cabinet since we don't want to rip all the cabinets out and then we're also going to be putting the hardwood floor underneath the sink [Music] we've bought a kit to put our vinyl flooring in and it comes with this block and the puller I think it's called a puller and this puller is used to kind of get it underneath areas or somewhere where you need to pull it towards you and the block is gonna be used for pushing them together so this is what we use getting that first section in and then I just used the puller to get this underneath and the way you do that is you hook on the edge you just pen tap it with your mallet so we've got that piece in now we're ready to do our next fold piece and as you noticed we started with a half piece so now the rest of these are going to be staggered so the first one of these we cut with the jigsaw it did the job but it kind of left a little bit of a rough edge which is fine because it goes under the trim so we've researched that you can use a razor blade and kind of just break it so we're gonna give that a try and and see if that does a better job I think that did a better job than the jigsaw but like I said these are always covered up anyway so see if we can get this one in get it to fit we've got two and a half rows in and it's looking really good and we wanted to go with the lighter floor in the cabin because we have a lot of pine in here and also because it's such a small cabin we felt that with a lighter floor it would kind of brighten things up and make it look a little bigger and luckily we went to Home Depot just kind of pricing out flooring and they had this one then they actually had it mislabeled for the price so we ended up getting a really good deal on it and this is a higher-quality waterproof vinyl plank flooring and this is the true cherry color we went with but it's turning out to look really good [Applause] okay we are moving it along we ate breakfast and if we did some more cleaning up it's an absolute mess in here and we're just working with a small space to do this we really don't have the space to put all our furniture outside and it's super cold so we've moved our dogs up to the couch and we moved our little collection of the wood panels down here and we're just going to keep moving along the floor we are at our halfway point our cabin is 16 feet wide we're just one plank shy of being halfway there so right now we are going to move all this big stuff over to this side and we're ecstatic about it because we do anticipate to be done today which will be great we'll get her up and hook back up in our water so far things have been great you know it's pretty much a cube Eric's been doing a really good job are the little areas we have to cut the planks in overall we're just really happy with it I'm happy with the look the plank designs have been fine we're just alternating those and I do think that it would hold up to water really well with that being said we're going to get back to work so we can get this set [Music]

Channel: Simple Living Alaska

Views: 265,935

Rating: 4.9546399 out of 5

Keywords: off grid living, living in alaska, off grid vlog, alaska vlog, homestead alaska, cabin life, tiny house alaska, off grid cabin, daily life off grid, off grid in alaska, tiny house tour, solar system alaska, living in a tiny house, cabin in alaska, winter cabin living, day in the life off grid, homestead off grid, tiny home bedroom, tiny home storage, tiny house remodel, loft tiny house, cabin loft, cabin loft bedroom, tiny house kitchen, tiny home kitchen

Id: Ca2q2Gp6JHA

Length: 16min 42sec (1002 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 20 2020