Outdoorsman, photographer, and travel writer Shawn James has been building an off-the-grid balsam fir tree log cabin by himself without power tools. He edited together this time-lapse video to share his months of work, “from 1st tree cut to last floorboard laid.” He writes of his “real-life Minecraft” experience in the Canadian wilderness:
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.
Related shelter videos on TKSST include:
• How to build a grass hut
• Hexagon-shaped treehouse time lapse
• Patrick Dougherty’s Stickwork
• How to Build an Igloo
via Laughing Squid.
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