Canadian outdoorsman and woodworker Shawn James built an entire log cabin using hand tools. And he filmed it in timelapse - condensing the entire building process into a five minute YouTube video. Check it out above.
James even shou sugi bans the wood in the roof.
If you want to build a rustic log cabin or tiny off-grid home alone in the wilderness and you haven't seen the rest of my videos, this is a good primer.
At the beginning of the video, I show a winter drone photo of the cabin in the snow in December. Then I flashback to the first balsam fir tree I cut down with a saw and axe near the cabin. I drag the trees into place and clear the cabin site. All summer, I cut the notches in the logs as I built the cabin up, offsite. Once I was finished notching the logs with a log scribe, saw, axe, adze, and wood carving gouge, I loaded up the entire cabin of logs and moved them to my land near Algonquin Park, Ontario, Canada.
Once on site, I spent a month reassembling the cabin on a foundation of sand and gravel. Once the log walls were up, I again used hand tools to shape every log, board, and timber to erect the gable ends, the wood roof, the porch, the outhouse and a seemingly endless number of woodworking projects.
For the roof, I used an ancient primitive technology to waterproof and preserve the wood - shou sugi ban, a fire hardening wood preservation technique unique to Japan and other areas in northern climates.
Because the cabin is off-grid, I have used hand tools for most of the build and without power, I have no options on site regardless. The tiny house will continue to be operated with power, not even renewable energy for now, so I'm heating the cabin with a wood stove fireplace, which I also cook on.
The cabin is made of cedar fence posts, twelve feet long and the cabin measures 10x20 feet inside with a one hundred square foot sleeping loft on the second floor. The floor is made of two-inch thick pine planks, torched to help repel water and to give them a rustic barn board appearance.
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