Bushcraft Log Cabin Camping in Rain Storm - Repairing and upgrading my survival shelter with my son

Oh, there it is. It's been a while. Let's see how it's doing. Let's see. Oh, yeah, it looks in good shape. Oh, that's where my flashlight went. I forgot I left it here. Look at these spider skins. They're huge. Look at this. These are where spiders have been molting out of their shell to get ever bigger. Look at that. Here's another one. Yeah, those are spider skins. Look at that. Oh, must be some big spiders up here. Oh, there he is. I found him. He's been getting bigger and bigger. There's his old skin. Oh, yeah, he's big. Let's see how we're gonna do this. There we go. Got rid of him. Come on, yeah. Oh, there's another one. Come on. Come on. Out you go. Oh, you found a little baby one? Yeah, let's see. Oh, I bet there's just tons of them in here. Look at this. What is this thing up here? It is huge. The size of that. It's a chrysalis. It's where a woolly caterpillar turned into a butterfly. Well, I gotta say I'm pretty proud. This thing's holding up really well. It's been almost a year since I started building it. It looks great. We've been gone all summer long. We did the longest road trip in the United States where we drove 10,400 miles, all basically from Key West, Florida to Dead Horse, Alaska. And yeah, so I haven't been here in months, but things look good. All right, let's check out the toilet. Oh, looks in good shape. Yeah, doesn't seem to be full of snakes or raccoons or giant spiders. So that's good. Daddy built that toilet. You think that's funny? Yeah. Well, this has been a pretty awesome project, but we're getting pretty close to done on the list of all the things I wanted to do. But I've got a few little repairs and improvements we need to accomplish here in the next few days. One problem we have is we've got sparks coming out of the chimney and melting the tarp. That's not good. So we need to fix that before winter comes. Also, we need to repair some of the chinking in here. There's places where the mud is particularly thick and it's fallen out after it dried. So I think we need to go ahead and repair that. And there's quite a few places where the mud has popped out. Additionally, I'd like to insulate the roof somehow to really make it nice and toasty warm in here. Another thing I'd really like is a workbench or a counter because whenever I cook or I'm working on projects, I'm having to lay on the ground and bend over and it kills my back. So I'd really like to have a way to be able to cook and work with a countertop. And finally, I need to chop up a load of firewood. I should have a stack of firewood that goes all the way to the roof here to get ready for wintertime. Well, before I get to any of these chores, I've got to do one thing for Jacob. We've got to roast marshmallows, don't we? Why don't you go find a good marshmallow stick and I'll get a fire going. Let's get some sticks going. Thanks bud. One chocolate marshmallow coming up. Okay, give that a go. All right. I think the first project I want to tackle is getting a workbench because that'll make doing dinner a whole lot easier. And I think I want to put it right here. It's nice and close to the fire. Well, there we go. We got it done. They're not at standard height, but I'm not a standard man. So yes, this'll work perfectly. Awesome. Well, I'm hungry. So we're gonna get dinner started. I'm going to use my brand new countertops. All right. We're going to be making some pizza tonight. This is going to be awesome. This is a fun little recipe. Got a little yeast, a little water, and let it sit for five minutes. Once the yeast is activated, then we're going to knead it into dough. Yeah. You think that's going to make yummy pizza? All right. All right. There we go. We got the pizza sandwich between two cookie sheets. Now we're going to bake it. All right. Let's see what we got. Oh, you want to eat that pizza? That actually turned out really well. It could be I'm so hungry, but that tastes good. Oh, that was so good. You like your pizza? Yeah. That's good stuff, isn't it? Are you pooping? We've got full bellies. We're tired. It's late. I'm going to get to bed because we've got a lot of work to do in the morning. I'll see you guys in the morning. Well, good morning. We had an okay night's sleep. Got a little cold this morning. We're going to get some warm breakfast in us, and that'll help warm us up a little bit. Starting a new fire on old, warm coals is really easy. You take a big bundle of sticks and place it over your coals, and it traps that heat. You put your tinder underneath and just let it sit for a few minutes. The heat from the coals dries out your tinder, makes it even better. Then after a few minutes, just blow it on a little bit. It lights up so easy because it's been preheated. All right. Let's get some oatmeal cooking. If you guys haven't seen these before, these are shelf life milks. They don't require any refrigeration until you open them, and they last months. I take these out camping when I'm with Jacob because he's still really little, likes his comfort milk. That'll be for his breakfast. Ain't fancy, but it is a classic instant oatmeal. There we go. Hey, Jake. Good morning. Are you ready for some breakfast? Yeah. Here. Use some oatmeal. Spam and oatmeal. It's a good combo. All right. Now that I've finished breakfast, it's time to get to work. I love my countertop, but it's not just a countertop. It's a place to store firewood and keep the snow off it and try to keep it a little bit drier. We need to fill it full of firewood. It's going to take a lot of elbow grease. Got a lot of small and medium sized firewood, but I need some big stuff. Good pine. Got a lot of dead pine trees here. Let's start pulling them over and chopping them up. We're going to haul them back and chop them up over by the cabin. Oh my goodness. This is killing my arms. Should we go stack all this firewood up? There's a fair amount of firewood. Not as much as I was hoping, but a good start. Well, me and Jake got a lot done today. Look at that. That is a healthy pile of firewood, but two things have happened. One, Jacob's pooped like a bazillion times and we kind of burned up our entire allotment of diapers, so we need to go get more diapers. Two, Jacob has been saying he misses mommy and wants to go home. Is that right? Yeah. I think what we're going to do is go home, get Jacob changed, let him see mama, and then tomorrow we're going to come back and finish this project and do some more camping. Does that sound like a good plan? Yeah, and your camera broke. My camera broke. Yeah, my tripod broke. Look at all those mosquito bites though. You have so many mosquito bites on your face. And in my eyeballs. And in your eyeballs. Yeah, let's go home and get you a bath, shall we? All right, we're going to head home, change poopy diapers, resupply. I'm going to get back at this. Well, we're back at the house and it's another day and I'm heading off to the cabin to finish our project, but I don't think Jacob's going to come with me and mama won't let me borrow her baby again if I bring him back in this condition. Look at that. Oh no. Actually, Jacob's got a playdate with some friends today, apparently, so he's going to stay and hang here and Tommy and Nathan are at school, so it's just daddy. Hey, babe. Hey, sweetie. Hey, leave your bag of food and your repellent on the kitchen table. Oh, I left all of my food at home, didn't I? It looks like it. Love you, Becca. Love you. Sorry. It's a little more than two hours each way to get to the log cabin and I'm already an hour and a half away from home. I think I better swing by a grocery store or something if I can find one. All right, guys, we're back and I'm starving, so I'm going to try to get some lunch going. I found this tiny little country market and grabbed a few supplies real quick. Some yeast, some honey and butter, and I've got peppered pork jowls. My splurge item was they had a Virginia dried country ham. Oh, it's been raining all morning and everything's absolutely drenched. I need to find some dry kindling. Try to find stuff that's off the ground. Dead briars burn really well and they stay pretty dry even in the rain. They're just a pain to harvest because of all the thorns. I got these big pieces of fatwood in my fire starting kit. Basically, fatwood is pine wood with loads of pine resin in it and pine resin burns really well. Smells super strong, that pine smell. You get it from harvesting standing deadwood. The tree dies and the sap drains down into the stump and so on the bottom of the stump you can get all this fatwood. Kind of technique here is hold your knife still and pull the wood towards you. Keeps your shavings from flying all over the place too much. When you hold a piece of fatwood, your hand warms it up and starts to get sticky. That's when you know you got a good piece. I have a cotton ball here soaked in a little bit of Vaseline. Go and wrap that around the end of a stick. Make a little teeny tiny torch and I'm going to ignite it with my blast match. I'm throwing a load of fatwood on this fire. I'm hungry. I ain't messing around. All right, got a little yeast, a little water, a little bread flour. I'll let that sit for five minutes. While the bread's doing its thing, I'm going to go ahead and work on the chimney and try to make a spark arrestor. So when I build a fire in the chimney, every once in a while a spark comes up, lands on my roof, and melts my roof. Additionally, I'm getting a lot of rain that's coming down in between the tarp and the chimney and getting onto my stove. So I'm going to try to solve two problems at once. I got this little chimney cap at the hardware store for a few bucks and it's got this little rain shield on there and that should help deflect the rain a little bit and keep less rain from going down along the chimney pipe. I also got this little piece of mesh here that'll help screen out some of the sparks. It won't be perfect, but hopefully it'll help. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to slide this down over the chimney like this and test it out. And if the chimney seems like it's being smothered, not getting enough air, then I can raise it up a little bit so there's a second gap in between the chimney and here and that'll allow even more smoke to escape. So I can kind of adjust it without having to recut the mesh. And if I don't need it at all, well, then I just got a little bit of mesh over my pipe. It's not a big deal. Well, it's up there. We'll see whether it works or not. All right, I got some warm water here. We're going to add that to the dough. If you want nice fluffy bread, you've got to have wet dough. If the dough is too stiff, the bubbles can't make it expand. After about 10 minutes, the dough is starting to feel just a little bit rubbery and a little bit drier. So we're going to let it sit and rise. We'll let that sit for one hour and it should double in size. While the bread's rising, I'm going to go ahead and seal up the holes in the roof. And I've got these little squares of flex tape that I bought. And supposedly you can put this on wet surfaces and it'll still adhere. So I'm going to go ahead and stick it over all the little burn holes I can find. There we go, peppered pork jowls. All right, time to grill our jowls. Got a cooked pork jowl and our bread. Oh, it smells really good. There you go. There's the bread. Oh, that's hot. That is so good, but it is so hot. Let's get some butter on that. That is so good. It's like salty peppered bacon. If you've ever eaten bacon and thought to yourself, I love this, but it needs to be bigger and fattier, pork jowls might be just your thing. In case you're wondering what pork jowls are, it's the cheeks of a pig, but not his butt, his face. Just trying to enjoy my dinner and the rain gets started for realsies. Gotta get out of here. Well, I guess I'm finishing dinner in here and it's really coming down. There's some thunder going too. That is so good. Well, we got thunder and lightning and heavy rain going on. I'm going to sit here and hunker down and see if it passes, see what happens. We only have a few hours of daylight left. Well, it's been raining for about two hours now and it's cozy. I mean, if I had my little buddy here, I would be curled up with Jacob and we'd be watching movies and it'd be no big deal, but this is lame by myself. So I'm not going to be able to get everything done before sunset. So I think I'm just going to go home, wait till the weather gets a little better and come back and finish the cheeking later. Well, I didn't get much done today, but I'm going to call it. Hopefully you guys enjoy this. Make sure to click subscribe if you want to see more camping and outdoor adventure videos from the Outdoor Boys YouTube channel. We're getting ready to do some really extreme winter camping this year and I think you guys are going to really like the camping videos that are coming up. At any rate, thanks for watching. See you guys next Saturday. If you like this video, don't forget to check out the Outdoor Boys YouTube channel where we have hundreds of videos just like this. And don't forget to click subscribe so you can see other great videos every Saturday morning. Hit that bell button. You'll get notifications. Thanks for watching.