Cabin with 24M views.....all the details

Two years ago, I built this cabin, not too far from Lake Superior. You know, building a cabin out in the woods somewhere is just a universal dream for so many people. And the video I shot building this cabin has 24 million views. It's by far the most popular piece of content on this channel. So today what I'd like to do is really go over what went on during this building project and answer some of the thousands of questions I've got about this process, this cabin, and all the minutiae involved in construction. My name's Dave Whipple. You're watching Bush Radical. Now I get asked a lot of questions about codes and permits. So I'm going to take that right off the bat. This building is 160 square feet. So it's under the required minimum size that you can build without a permit. So we're good there. Zoning is another issue. When you hear the word zoning, you want to think two things. You want to think setbacks away from the road, away from other people's property lines, and you want to think usage. A sewage treatment plant is not going to fly in a residential area, and you're never going to get that approved. Zoning is just basically meant to keep industrial applications out of residential areas. Now as far as setbacks go on this property, this is a private property that I own. I have about 80 acres, and this is about in the middle. So there's no setback issues. The other thing about zoning is you're never going to get the zoning guy to come out here. This property is not only difficult to find, but this cabin site is difficult to find on the property. And that answers a lot of questions right in a nutshell. People are always wondering, where can I go that's conducive to having an off-grid cabin? The truth of the matter is, the farther you are from the big city, the easier everything is to do without being hassled for it. Now I've had a ton of questions about this foundation, it just being a post-foundation. A lot of the questions revolve around, will the posts rot? Well, pole barns all over the country are built exactly the same way, and they don't have any rot issues with the posts. A lot of folks have asked questions about why I don't cement around the posts. Well, I don't need it for rigidity, and I doubt that it would help rot prevention. Now these are ground contact pressure treated posts, so they are manufactured with the intention that they are going to be buried in the ground. A lot of pole barns are built with these. Now there are a lot of things about this post-style foundation that I really find appealing. Number one, when you're only digging holes, you're doing very little to tear up the site, and you can put the spoils on a tarp or a piece of plywood, and then pack it back down in the ground or on the post. You can make a cabin look like it's always been there when you're done with it. All that being said, I still get comments every day about people saying, well, those are just gonna rot off at the ground. Well, let's just assume that 40 years down the road, some of these posts are getting rotten. I'd be almost 90 years old, so I'm not too concerned about that. Worst case scenario, if a post were to rot to where it failed, I would just cut it out, pour a concrete footer underneath the spot that a post went, and then put a post between the footing and the cabin. Simple. And then it would be a post and pad, not a post that's in the ground. One question I get asked all the time is about this fire pit. Now, you need a fire pit when you have any kind of a cabin. A cabin without a fire pit just doesn't make much sense, right? Just for the aesthetics of the thing. Now, I don't have any rocks around this pit, and that is one thing I've had a lot of comments on about fire danger. This is very fire-prone country, so when it's really dry, I don't burn anything. Ultimately, this is gonna get a nice stone fire ring around the fire pit spot, but there are no stones in this country. It's just sand. So I'll have to bring those stones in a future trip. Now, I'm laying this particular foundation out, 16 inches on center. Floor systems are always laid out either 12 inches on center, which is rare, 16 inches on center, which is common, or 24 inches on center, which is also common. The thing to remember is, if your joists are gonna be far apart, they need to be taller, thicker, you know, a two by 10 as opposed to a two by eight. And then, of course, if you're farther apart, you're gonna need a little stiffer subflooring. Let's say if you went 12 inches on center, you could get away with five eighths subflooring. Two feet on center, you're gonna need three quarter at the very minimum for subflooring. Now, one comment I've had a lot of times is, your whole cabin is basically resting on the few nails that hold the floor to the post. Well, that's not the case. The walls, the front wall and the back wall that are actually load-bearing walls that are gonna hold all the snow weight from the roof, they're actually sitting right on top of the posts. So when you stand a wall, it's sitting right on top of the posts. So the building itself is exerting no weight at all on the floor system. I was actually reading comments and questions while I was putting together this film. One question I got asked is, why in the world didn't I just use a drill and some screws to put this plywood up? The answer is, I'm stupid. That would have been much better than trying to nail it. Not that fun. But on the second cabin I built on this property, I dropped pieces of plywood in like drawer bottoms and that worked better. By nailing plywood underneath the bottom of this floor, I do get the full depth of the floor joist so I can use a thicker insulation, which is gonna hold more heat longer, more better, that sort of thing. But on the other hand, it's a tiny cabin, it's heated with wood, it'll roast you right out of there. It's kind of overkill. Now the plywood that I used here is a moisture resistant plywood. I kind of had intended of building this cabin on the ground on a treated wood foundation at ground level. And in that case, I would really want the moisture resistant plywood and of course a vapor barrier between the floor and the ground. A lot of details for something that never happened. I decided to build above the ground, which was the right decision. The reason it was the right decision is because there can be three feet of snow up here. So having the cabin a little bit elevated, it's just a better way to go. So to kind of recap and touch on everything, the floor system of this cabin, it's six by six ground treated posts. All of the wood in this system is green treated except the plywood. All of these floor joists are two by sixes. Now two by sixes are pretty light for floor joists, but because this cabin is only 10 feet front to back, well, it's not that big of a deal. And the free span of the floor joist isn't 10 feet. The building itself is 10 foot overall front to back. So take off three inches for the outside rim joist, front and back. Take off 11 inches for the six by six post front and back. You're at 14 inches. And then another three inches for that inside ledger, you're at 17 inches. So truthfully, 17 inches is one foot five inches. So you're only really having an eight foot seven span. And once again, for the deck, I'm using treated wood. I use treated wood for everything in the foundation. Not that everything needed to be treated, but I figured I'll just use one product. Everything is two by six. The floor joists are two by six. And then the posts, of course, they're just a four by four treated post. Now, for those who've asked what I used for decking, this is green treated lumber, like everything else. This is just a five quarter deck board. You can get this from Lowe's, Home Depot, whatever. It's not a one inch board, and it's not a real inch and a half board, like a two by four or two by six. It's kind of in the middle. Really nice for decking. Now, people have asked me a lot of times, why don't you just nail down the deck? Ah, it's kind of one of those things that's like, if you do nail down the deck, any shrinkage, you're gonna have to re-nail it down because the head of the nail is gonna protrude above the top. And every time you swing and miss at a nail, you're gonna dimple up your deck boards. Another question people ask all the time was why is there no space between these deck boards? Well, green treated lumber, a lot of times when you get it, it's quite wet. And even though it's supposed to be cured and seasoned and killed and dried and all that stuff, green treated will shrink a little bit. So I'm just leaving them right together. That way, when they do shrink, there will be a little gap between each one. You can do it any way you'd like. Interesting how taking out that notch, an old fashioned draw knife is the best tool for the job. Gets right down in there. And that's a nice fit. Everything looks good. Everything's fit together nicely. When you're doing your markings to figure out what needs to be cut out, put your material in place and mark it in place. You could always take a tape measure and measure every spot that needs to be cut out and make 15 different measurements, but it's so much easier to just put stuff in place, make a mark where things actually exist and then work from there. One question I get asked all the time is about plans. Now I'm gonna do a standalone video on the idea of building plans. People say, do you have a set of plans for this building? And no, I don't. I don't even have my own set of plans. I just know the general dimensions and then I'm using very basic, rudimentary carpentry knowledge to just put the place together. When it comes to a material list, I generally don't have a master list. I make lists for the part of the project I'm working on and then I buy those materials. Here's an example. Now the walls in this building are framed two feet on center. Studs are two foot on center. So if you wanna figure out how many studs you're gonna need, you need to figure out the perimeter of the building. This would be 16 front, 16 back and 10 on each end. That's 52 lineal feet to go all the way around the building. So you could figure at 52 feet, you're gonna need 26 studs, right? Well, not really. Figure one extra stud on each side of each window, one extra stud each side of each door, one extra stud in each corner where two walls meet. That's a good starting point. And once you got that number figured out, throw an extra five or six studs on there just for things you'll need, like that brace behind me. If you're framing a wall 16 feet on center, figure one stud per lineal foot. You'd be about right. You know, this video being my biggest video, I've got people commenting that have never watched the channel, don't know anything about me, don't know anything about this property, et cetera, et cetera. And you do get some people who are very environmentally minded. And they say stuff like, I can't believe you're spoiling a beautiful piece of wilderness by putting a cabin in it. You know, this is just as unspoiled, you know, virgin wilderness. Well, the truth of the matter is it's not. All this area has been logged right off to flat ground. And this has all grown back over the last 120 years. So where I'm putting this cabin today, there was probably big wheel logging 100 years ago. And when I'm gone, this cabin will probably stand for some amount of time and then it'll be woods again, or somebody else will buy it and build something else on it. It's funny too that a lot of people who live in big cities who have a problem with somebody building in the country, they don't stop to think that the city was country before they leveled it all down and put houses on it. But I digress. Back to the studs. On this back wall, this back wall is only gonna be six feet high. So you don't need to buy eight foot studs, you need six foot studs. So buy 12s and cut them in half. This wall is 16 foot long, two feet on center. That means there's gonna need to be eight studs. There's gonna need to be an extra one in each corner. So that's nine, 10 studs. Buy five 12 footers, cut them all in half. Cut them right down to six foot. There's your studs for the back wall. Completely different side of things. People ask me all the time, what do I do about bears? Well, I've had some bear footprints on the front door and I've had some bear footprints on the window, but I've never had any issues with a bear getting into anything on this land except my outhouse. I have an outhouse 150 yards from the cabin and I had a bear get into that and it tore the door off and then, you know, made a mess of everything. We've had some bears on trail cams. I was sitting in camp one day reading a book, I had a bear walk in on me. I just stood up and yelled at it. It was kind of oblivious to the fact that I was there until I moved and spoke to it. And it just turned around and peeled out of there. You know, it's not really much to worry about. You just spend a bit of time in bear country. You just kind of get over the thought of it. If I had problems with a bear getting into the cabin, I would have to probably put out some, what they call unwelcome mats, which is like a piece of plywood with roofing screws or drywall screws screwed through it. So you just lay it down in front of the window or the door. The bear comes onto the porch, to the door, to the window, touches the sharp, pokey mat of screws through the wood, and they leave the place alone. And they figure it out real quick. I've had a lot of people comment on this video from other countries, Europe, a lot of countries in Europe. And the question is always, do you own this land? Yes, yes, I do own this land. The idea of building on land you don't own, I don't think it's okay anywhere you are. One question I get all the time is how long did this take and how much did it cost? I'm gonna do a video specifically on the cost breakdown of cabins. That's a future video. I will tell you that this cabin cost me right around $5,000 to build. But I also built it when lumber prices were stupid. This was built in the fall of 2021 and the lumber prices were probably as bad as they ever got. Later on, I will do a standalone video about cost breakdown and material lists, that sort of thing. So look for that in the future. One question I've got a thousand times, why don't you use screws for everything? I don't know when that became a thing to like screw everything together, to screw the studs to the plates and to screw the plywood to the studs. I just didn't grow up in that world. Nails have been the standard for hundreds and hundreds of years. Nails are cheap. They're completely cordless. Take your hammer and drive the nail. That's one of the questions that just, I don't really know where it comes from. The whole phenomenon of everything being put together is structural screws, Torx head coated, you know, industrial strength screws. That's so recent. Not only that, but the cost of structural screws is so much higher than an equivalent amount of fasteners in the nail category. And then you're dealing with electrical and battery powered tools. And it's just a question that's foreign to me. And it's being asked by people who have an experience that's foreign to mine. I don't understand the screwing everything together thing. And I probably never will. Some people have asked me, where did I stay while I built this cabin? Well, they probably never made it to this part in the video where I'm sitting in this belt tent. Got a little belt tent here with a nice wood stove. There's a cot. I got some LED lights on a little power station thing and canned food, bacon, eggs, toast. That's pretty much how it went. But if you never made it to this point in the video while watching it the first time around, this is where I stayed. Kind of the same question as the screw question I get asked all the time, why don't I run a nail gun? I do have a generator. I do have an air compressor. I have a little generator and a larger air compressor. My little generator won't run my bigger air compressor and I don't own a nail gun. So those are all the answers in a nutshell. Another question I get asked all the time is where did I learn how to build? Well, I started out in concrete right out of high school and I did a lot of form work. You just, you learn the rudiments. I also took building trades my senior year in high school. I can't say I learned much from it. You know, I was kind of a screw off in school. So I wasn't paying a ton of attention. In concrete, doing form work, I learned the rudiments of just plum square level, that sort of thing. When I started building my first couple of buildings, that's when I really progressed in what I know about carpentry. One day of actually doing something, in my opinion, is better than a year of reading about it. But if you'd like to learn how to build a cabin and you don't have access to a job where you're gonna pick those skills up, or you don't have maybe a little project to do beforehand to kind of get the feel of plum square level and the tools and how things go together, I would suggest watching Larry Hahn videos. Larry Hahn used to write for Fine Home Building Magazine. He has a lot of videos and books and he's incredibly practical in the way he lays out just standard carpentry. Very highly recommended. Another question I get asked all the time is how long did this project take? I think it was about 23 days. Now a lot of that 23 days is spent moving the camera because shooting a video like this, I try to have two second clips. So every minute of video, you're seeing 30 different shots. That's generally what I shoot for. So I'm constantly, constantly moving the camera. If it wasn't for the filming aspect, I'm thinking two weeks. One comment I've got a hundred times, right at this point in construction, is why are you doing anything interior when you don't have the roof on? And I do explain that in the original video. I'm pretty sure I did. The idea is I left the roof metal off so I have good light to show putting this tongue and groove on. If you weren't paying attention the first time, that's the reason. Speaking of the tongue and groove, I don't think anybody asked this question, but I'm gonna cover it right here. This is eight inch tongue and groove, which is nominal. So it's really only like seven and an eighth. And then when you take away the tongue, it's only like six and a half. So if you're buying tongue and groove, figure it for about six inches of coverage and you'll be just fine. You'll end up with a couple extra pieces. But if you figure it for eight inch, you're not gonna have enough. Now, when I told you that my generator wouldn't run my air compressor, that's true, but this isn't my air compressor. It belongs to my sister. I gave it to my sister, but I borrowed it back from her for this project. I didn't need it. It was redundant. I already have an air compressor at home. And this is good for pumping up tires and bicycles and stuff like that. It definitely wouldn't be any good for running a framing nailer, but it's the perfect tool for running this little Brad nailer doing tongue and groove. One question I've got a thousand times is regards to metal roofing and screw placement. I put my screws next to the rib on the flat part of the metal, not on top of the rib. I've been told by a lot of people, put them on top of the rib. The first roof I ever did, I bought steel from an actual manufacturer and the manufacturer says, put it on the flat. So I've always done that. I've never had an issue. I've had lots of comments about safety equipment. Why am I not wearing gloves? Why am I, why don't I have a hard head? Why am I cutting wood with a chainsaw without the whole chap face mask, blah, blah, blah. Anyway, the one piece of equipment that I would recommend that I would never skimp on, wear a respirator when doing fiberglass insulation. The newer fiberglass is supposed to be a lot more biologically friendly than the older stuff. Your hands get tough when you don't wear gloves. And if you don't have safety equipment running a saw, you're going to be naturally more cautious, which is a good thing. When it comes to breathing stuff, well, you either breathe it or you don't. I have asthma personally. So I try to make sure I don't breathe in anything that's gonna make things worse. A respirator when doing fiberglass, absolutely. And you also get comments like this. It seems you could have insulated the floor by filling it with dirt instead of buying insulation. Wouldn't this work? No, the answer is no. I have got a few questions on stovepipe, chimney pipe and such. Menards is my favorite place to buy this sort of thing. They have metal bestest, they have the China tops, they have the black metal, they have galvanized. They have pretty much everything. The prices are right. I have bought stovepipe from Ace Hardware, but you pay three times as much. Now the square metal sheets that I use to pass the metal bestest insulated chimney pipe through the wall, which you're about to see here in a minute, I get these at Lowe's or Home Depot or Menards or any of the big box construction stores. They'll have a little steel section and they'll have some sheet metal. And it's just a two foot by two foot piece of sheet metal. It's really not that thick. I don't know the gauge off the top of my head, but it doesn't need to be super sturdy. Once it's nailed to the wall, it's quite rigid. The insulated chimney pipe. I've always referred to it as metal bestest. There's a company called Selkirk. I think they're out of Canada. They make that insulated chimney pipe. And when you're running the stove full out, you can put your hand right on it. So it has quite an amazing insulation property to it. Now I don't really get questions about what I stained the tongue and groove with because I show the bottle of Wattco Danish Oil. But I will tell you this, it's quite strong smelling and the smell lasts quite a long time. I love the finish. I love the texture of it. It's very natural. It's very neutral. You put it on, it just looks like wood, but the wood is protected. So if you get stained it or get a mark on it or something, it could clean it off. If there was something better, and I'm sure there is, I would probably use that something else because the Danish Oil does have a lot of fume to it. And it does take a long time for that to go away. Here you can see where I'm getting all set up to put my chimney plates. I don't know what this is called really. It used to be in Fairbanks, Alaska, you could go to, there was a place called Samson Hardware and you could get a set of plates, an inside and outside steel plate, and they were stamped. So they were a little more rigid and you could get them for any size of chimney pipe. And it was this exact setup. It was just two round holes. You build a box in the wall and you nail the metal plate over top of the box and you pass the pipe through it. What it does is it leaves a dead air space where the insulated chimney pipe passes through the wall. I don't find those anymore. There used to be a manufactured product that was the two plates of steel where the chimney goes. Now I just make my own. I have heard of people filling in that opening between the two plates with a product called mineral wool. It's basically like a fiberglass insulation but it's not fiberglass, it's more of a mineral product like a wood stove gasket. Once in a while I have seen comments about the kind of caulk I'm using for the windows. The truth is anything that fits in a tube and it says caulk on it, it's good enough. I'm just sealing the window screw flange to the wood and that's really not even crucial because on the inside of the house, whenever you put windows like this in, just a standard vinyl window, you generally spray foam around the gap on the inside so it's sealed anyway. The caulk is kind of overkill. It's really not even that necessary unless you have a window that's very likely to be exposed to a lot of water. And these windows, of course, they're gonna get some kind of a trim around them so you're not gonna see that flange when the cabin is finally finished, whenever that is. Now here's a pretty good view of what it looks like to install that inside outside plate. And all you really need to do is make sure that it's not necessarily supposed to be level. I like to have a little bit of a pitch down on the outside of the building. In case of a lot of snow or rain on that elbow, it doesn't run back into the house and into the wood stove, it just drips. One question I've been asked a thousand times is what about the kitchen and what about the bathroom? Well, obviously there's neither. In the wintertime, I've been cooking on the wood stove inside, you know, any kind of a soup or any eggs and toast. I've got a griddle and a pot, takes care of everything. Also, I've got a little table that I ended up putting on the end of the porch with a Coleman stove. So a lot of times I'll do my cooking outside. As for a bathroom, the very first video I shot of building anything on this property was building an outhouse. That outhouse is, I don't know, 100, 150 yards away from this cabin. So there's the answer to two questions anyway. One of the questions I've been asked more than anything else is what is the wood stove I used in this project? This is the Camp Chef Alpine Heavy Duty Cylinder Stove. This came off of Amazon. My wife, Brooke, and I have bought a couple of these just for different projects. It's really a stove intended for a wall tent, but it does great in a cabin. We line the bottom of the stove with firebrick just so it holds a little more heat. One oddity about this stove, it comes with a collapsible pipe that's five inches on one end and then whatever on the other. So the port at the top of the stove is five inches. You need to buy a five to six inch adapter. Now the chimney pipe that's gonna make the most sense with this stove is six inches, so you need a five to six inch reducer. You can probably find those online easier than in person. I've bought several of them over the years at Ace Hardware. But if you don't have an Ace Hardware, or if you go there and they don't have them on the shelf, might be a little tricky to find that, but they're out there. I've had so many questions on this cabin, but a question I always ask myself is this, at this point in the project, I had the wood stove installed, the windows are in, everything's good. This is where I decided that I needed to build a set of steps. Why did I spend two weeks jumping up and down off this deck and wearing myself out when I should have built the steps? Weeks ago? Well, honestly, I don't know. So that's the answer to that. Well, now that we're coming up on the two year anniversary of this video, and this video is by far the most popular on the channel, I hope you guys have enjoyed this kind of Q&A deep dive into some of the many, many questions that the viewers have asked about this cabin. Hope you guys have enjoyed this. My name's Dave Whipple, you've been watching Bush Radical. And be radical, eh? See you soon. ♪♪♪