Mortise & Tenon Sawhorses at the Log Cabin, Is This Really Off Grid Living?

Description

I finally spend some time building a set of sawhorses for the off grid log cabin using mortise and tenon joinery, a simple woodworking technique that is well suited to my rough carpentry skills and primitive life at the wilderness homestead.

I really didn't take me long since I had cut the red pine log in half almost a year ago and I cut the balsam fir legs last March, 2017. Cutting the tenons with a knife, axe and draw knife took very little time since I didn't need a precise fit and did not need it to look like finished furniture. I cut the mortises with a 1/1/4" auger, a simple hand tool traditionally used for drilling deep holes through wood in timber frame structures. Cali, my golden retriever, did slow me down a bit as she is constantly asking me to throw her training dummy for her to fetch, which she does with a lot of energy, eventually burning out and falling asleep at my feet despite the noise that I make with the woodworking tools.

The pair of sawhorses, which are about four feet long and thirty-four inches high (I'll cut the legs down a bit and even them out once the snow melts) came in very handy while I worked on the rest of the log cabin this week. I used them as a base to cut the pine logs to trim the west window, to cut short lengths of pine for floating shelves between the window and the woodstove and to plane smooth the flat side of the balsam fir logs splits, the wood that I'm using as the stringers for the staircase to the loft of the tiny house.

The weather this week is a little unusual - very sunny but cold, quite a bit colder than is typical for mid March. In fact, the sap in the sugar maple trees has not flowed since the day I tapped the trees and installed the spiles and buckets, more than two weeks ago. Judging by the forecast, sap won't start running for another week or so (maybe by the time this video is live). However, even though it's cold this week, February was a record year for warm temperatures, which really cut back the amount of firewood I burned this winter. In fact, I burned less than a cord of wood since early January, which means I have a good start on next year's wood.

My meals are relatively simple in this video. For dinner, I make venison stir-fry and bannock, using the bannock as a wrap to make fajitas with venison, onions, leeks, garlic, tomato, hot and sweet peppers and mushrooms. Click on this link for my bannock recipe.

https://myselfreliance.com/my-self-reliance-bannock-recipe/

For breakfast the following morning, I have leftover bannock with butter and peanut butter and oatmeal with blueberries. Instead of coffee, I drink black tea sweetened with maple sugar.

At the end of the video, I talk about what off grid living means to me, both as a literal definition as well as a way of life. Off grid literally means living disconnected from the utility grid, which in Ontario Canada means the Hydro One electricity transmission and distribution utility. I'm definitely not connected to the grid at the cabin, but to me off-grid means more than being independent for electricity. It also means being free of other dependencies, including heating fuels such as coal, gas or propane, phone service, internet service, transportation fuels, and more. In this regard, I am far from off the grid - I'm just as connected as most people living in developed countries. It's something that still bothers me and I'm doing the best that I can do to disconnect and become more self reliant, but I acknowledge that it's unlikely that I'll ever be truly off grid and independent, and I'm okay with that.

Links to products I use at the cabin;

Solar LED light bulb 15W

http://amzn.to/2BQvSQ2

Agawa Canyon Boreal 21 Saw

http://amzn.to/2BPV6OF

Copper Fairy lights

http://amzn.to/2BCmF0X

Solar String Lights

http://amzn.to/2DvgU2n

Banneton 12" round

http://amzn.to/2ByxwsF

Lodge Dutch Oven

http://amzn.to/2kHuxDQ

Flamen heat resistant gloves up to 500 degrees

http://amzn.to/2l1mRMm

Rocksheat baking stone

http://amzn.to/2kF6eql

Mora Knife

http://amzn.to/2BOiv35

Lamp OiI

http://amzn.to/2qz0nZ1

Wall Lantern (candle lit)

http://amzn.to/2Dpa0MK

Moka Pot

http://amzn.to/2DEomvO Canada

http://amzn.to/2ndmtw6 USA

Canon 6D

http://amzn.to/2EdaZjs

DJI Mavic Pro

http://amzn.to/2DHuJib

Bragg's Sprinkle

http://amzn.to/2EdouzK

Axe

http://www.torontoblacksmith.com/

To see what I’m up to during the rest of the week, please follow me on my other online channels;

Website: http://myselfreliance.com/

Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/MySelfReliance/

Personal Facebook Page (Shawn James) – https://www.facebook.com/shawn.james.msr

Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/myselfreliance/

Mailing Address:

P.O. Box 20042

Barrie, Ontario

L4M 6E9

Canada

Tags: Self Reliance,off grid,log cabin,wood,cabin,woodworking,My Self Reliance,mortise,mortise and tenon joints,sawhorse,sawhorses,sawhorses diy,tiny house,log,solar,building,off grid living,shawn james cabin,my self reliance cabin,tenon,grid,diy,mortise and tenon

Video Transcription

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stay down

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watching me make dinner [Music]

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so whenever I take a break inside when I'm working on the cabin interior and I prepare a meal or sit down and have a coffee or something I open up my cellphone and I'm check up on my social media accounts including your comments here on YouTube and of course there's some irony with that being that I'm supposedly off-grid and I thought it'd be a good time to address the concept of what off-grid means what the youth what the term means and what it means to me so off-grid of course the true meaning of it the basic meaning of it is that you're off the utility grid and typically that means off the electricity grid so here in Ontario we have hydro one distribution which distributes our electricity so it's a massive utility grid and parts of it are quite old so so there's failures and brownouts and blackouts and things like that throughout the system and one of the reasons people typically put in the backup power sources to deal with those those times of shortages those outages such as when we get an ice storm or a wooden storm or something like that or major snowstorm we sometimes lose their power so typically in Canada and in Ontario in particular where I'm from in the GTH Greater Toronto Area utility grid doesn't go down very often so it's not that important to have a backup system now a lot of people do it'll have a generator hooked up so they can run their some of the basics like fridge and freezer and stuff like that and heat well that's fairly uncommon if you live in the country you're more prone to brownouts and blackouts because the grid is it's longer stretches it goes through trees forested areas that can fall down on the transmission lines and so on so there's a lot more blackouts or outages in the country so typically most people in the country do have a backup plan so that's the electrical grid now for heating the most common form of heating in Ontario at least where I am is natural gas it's cheap it's widely distributed it's reliable rarely goes down in fact I don't remember it ever going down the system going down and it doesn't rely on electricity so even if you have an electrical outage typically you can still run your gas appliances even though you don't have a fan electrical fan to blow it around you can still use the gas source so why go off grid in at least a southern and central Ontario there actually isn't a very good reason it's much more expensive to go off-grid it's actually less reliable and not only is it capital and not only the capital cost expensive and cheaper typically to hook up to the grid but the long term costs of maintaining those systems is typically more so of course there's other reasons to go off the grid other than expense or cost and all that it's self reliance just not relying on on the grid not relying on the government not relying on government rates that can change and they have been going up quite dramatically in Ontario lately so there are some valid reasons to go off-grid but like I said even here I could get electricity brought into this property probably most definitely for cheaper than I can install a solar system and even advertising the cost of that system over a number of years probably wouldn't recover the amount of the initial capital costs in savings from a hydro one or Ontario Hydro and then I have maintenance issues and I have outage issues because of lack of sunshine if I go solar lack of wind if I wind power and so on so there is a lot of challenges to going off grid typically in the summer we have lots of sunshine we can generate more than enough electricity with a system that size exactly for your needs but throughout the rest of the year you need a way to bank or store that power which means you're getting into big battery packs big battery banks and that's not reasonably priced and over time you need to maintain those typically five to eight years you need to replace those batteries now from our self-reliance perspective yes I like the idea of going off grid just so I have complete control over my own systems and nobody bothers me

I love this remote property as you know it's an unorganized Township so I don't have government oversight I can't get permits even if I wanted to to build systems other than my septic system and driveway culvert system now those things you have you you legally need permits although it doesn't look like anybody in this area actually gets them unless you have a bank involved if you have Nina mortgage then bags want to see that you have all the proper systems in place all the permits that are required or that you following the Ontario Building Code or Canadian Building Code now that doesn't apply to me and I don't care because I'm not not financing I'm not mortgaging this cabin okay so what does off-grid mean to me I know there's some controversy and there's people on other channels that are accusing each other of not living off-grid I don't know what that means I don't think it applies to me I don't think they're talking about me and I don't know what they're accusing each other of exactly but what I do know is that there's some dispute I think to me other than the very basic definition of off-grid meaning you're not connected to the utility grid which is typically electrical grid that means a lot of people are living off-grid who have a renewable energy system or generators even now to me living off-grid means that you don't have any services that are monthly cost when I started the first cabin when I moved into that first cabin when I was 21 it was because I was poor and I didn't have any money and I didn't want to get into the typical work force I wanted to be able to live as cheaply as possible which meant first of all I had no credit so I couldn't get to mortgage or loans or anything like that and then the second thing is that I didn't want to have regular bills that I had to pay in the event that I didn't want to work I want to go off adventuring or building more things on the property or something so the idea back then of having it utility bill was just not economically feasible to begin with and it certainly didn't fit into my idea of living off-grid now and I was able to do that for a short period of time

now this is completely different so now here I am much older a lot displaced cash my wife and I bought this property cache built this cabin with hand tools without bringing in electrical tools or gas for things like chainsaws or or ATVs or stuff like that but there's other things that I'm using right so I have my batteries that I have to charge so I have to leave to charge those batteries I have to have cellular service which I do have a weak signal here at the front of the cabin so I'm able to upload and download and check on social media and things like that but I have to leave again to go into town to use public Wi-Fi system in order to upload a video so that means I'm reliant on the grid to some extent time of reliant on other services I need it and it I need a monthly cell phone bill and need a big data plan in order to to run what I have to run I need fuel for my truck so I can go out and charge things and upload videos and I have of course chargers that I have to plug in my batteries so my solution is going to be to bring in some battery bring in some renewable energy solar I will have to have a big bank of batteries that I can maintain and continue to rotate I'll probably quite often have to actually go out off the property and have those charged or I gonna have to get a generator which means I'll be running gasoline which is to me basically being on grid so what does off-grid mean to me it means being off all of the things that cause you to have monthly bills in order to pay them that would include gasoline that would include propane natural gas or heating oil to heat your home it even includes firewood to some extent if you don't have enough property to cut your own firewood so these are all the things that mean I'm still essentially in my definition still attached to the grid I still will call this cabin off-grid and I'll still use that term referring to what I'm doing here on some of my videos but truly to me I'm not living off-grid and it probably will never live completely off grid because they'll continue to have battery systems they'll continue to have things now that being said I want to reduce that as much as possible what I was younger as well as now a big part of building a place off-grid and reducing expenses to as little as possible is just to reduce that stress that's always there that financial stress that we all have that and to varying degrees that just eats away at us and to me if I can get my life down to a point where it's so manageable that I can live so minimally that no matter what I go out and do whatever chances I take that I can still return to this and be secure and safe and comfortable then I don't have that stress and to me reducing stress is I mean I don't know many things that are more important to me in my life to live happy healthy and and free so that's part of why I'm doing this so anyway that's a long-winded answer to what living off-grid really means and what it means to me so thanks for watching I really appreciate it have a great week take care

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