Watch an exceedingly pleasant time-lapse video of a guy building an entire log cabin by hand. Canadian outdoorsman Shawn James shows how he did it, then explains more.
I'm glad he got the exterior done before winter set in! From the YouTube page:
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 offgrid, I have used handtools 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 woodstove fire place, which I also cook on.
The cabin is made of cedar fence posts, twelve feet long and the cabin measures 10 feet x 20 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.
If you are really interested in the details, James has plenty of other videos about the cabin at his website. -via Digg