Log Cabin Cost - Build a Debt Free Off Grid Tiny House | Home Tour

Description

#logcabin #offgrid #DebtFree

I finally calculate the cost of the log cabin that I built over the last year and I give a tour of the off grid cabin and the wilderness homestead, talking about what things cost to build as well as ongoing costs to live a wilderness lifestyle. I built this log cabin with cash and it is debt free - everything here is owned with no loans or mortgages.

Thanks for watching! New videos every FRIDAY. Please subscribe.

My Other Channel: Shawn James https://bit.ly/2xzZHpB

MERCHANDISE: https://teespring.com/stores/my-self-reliance

Watch the ENTIRE cabin and Forest Kitchen SERIES here:

HOW TO BUILD A LOG CABIN: https://bit.ly/2nbof06

SEASON 2 - The Interior: https://bit.ly/2CIjPqr

SEASON 3 - The Sauna/Bathhouse: https://bit.ly/2AskJWP

THE FOREST KITCHEN, Building It: https://bit.ly/2M3syZE

SEASON 2 - Outdoor Cooking: https://bit.ly/2CFgQPQ

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/

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

My Mailing Address:

P.O. Box 20042

Barrie, Ontario

L4M 6E9

Canada

Links to gear used at the cabin:

Fjallraven Vidda Pro Pants - https://amzn.to/2rhEiMn

Tilley Endurables Airflo Hat - https://amzn.to/2Ia4xy1

Mora Knife - http://amzn.to/2BOiv35

Agawa Canyon Boreal 21 Saw - http://amzn.to/2BPV6OF

Axe - http://www.torontoblacksmith.com/

Moka Pot - http://amzn.to/2DEomvO Canada http://amzn.to/2ndmtw6 USA

Virtus Knife- http://www.virtusknives.com/

Canon 6D - http://amzn.to/2EdaZjs

DJI Mavic Pro - http://amzn.to/2DHuJib

Solar LED light bulb 15W - http://amzn.to/2BQvSQ2

Copper Fairy lights - http://amzn.to/2BCmF0X

Solar String Lights - http://amzn.to/2DvgU2n

Lodge Dutch Oven - http://amzn.to/2kHuxDQ

Bragg’s Sprinkle - http://amzn.to/2EdouzK

Tags: Self Reliance,off grid,log cabin,homestead,diy,cabin,tiny home,woodworking,woods,My Self Reliance,Shawn James,debt free,log cabin cost,cabin cost,what does it cost to build a log cabin,off grid home,off grid cabin,debt free home,affordable home,affordable house,log,build a log cabin,build an off grid cabin,build your own home,home free,home tour,tiny house,tiny house tour

Video Transcription

(country music)

- Hi everybody, welcome back to the cabin. I'm finally answer a question that a lot of you have had from the beginning, and that's what does this place cost? What did it cost me to build and I guess what did it cost me to completely set up this lifestyle? So I'll try to answer both of those questions. There's a lot of variables. A lot of things that can be changed by somebody else doing this and that maybe I would've done differently or could do differently. Or if I was to rebuild, would I add more things? Would I have spent more money or would I change the materials and stuff? So I'm gonna answer all those questions as concisely as I can. Going at this was a little bit differently, what I did was I walked around the cabin and looked at every single thing that I did here, every item, and then itemized that in this long list. Put the quantities beside it because like I said, if I just bought say 50 two by sixes and then used them for random projects around here, which I've done, that was not as accurate as actually walking around the cabin yesterday counting all the things that I actually used. So this list is exactly that. I walked around, I itemized everything, I put down the unit price, multiplied of course the quantity that I actually used by the unit price, came up with a total of what I spent or in some cases what I would've spent if I had have purchased that wood and also I'm gonna show you what I could've eliminated or what I did eliminate in some cases because I got it for free. But that you could eliminate too if you could find it from somewhere else. So I guess let's start with the bottom line. What would it cost for somebody to exactly duplicate what I've done on the cabin up to this date. So not including any extra stuff I'm going to add after this. So the total figure is $5,637. So I think it would be fair to round that up a little bit in case there's anything I did miss. And also maybe taxes and stuff like that, so 5,637, so round that up to say $6,000. So somebody spent $6,000 to recreate this pretty simple in our area to make $6,000. There's lots of jobs available. There's a shortage of skilled tradesmen and laborers in the area, in most of Ontario. So the average starting wage, like entry level job, is around $15, I think the minimum wage is 13 or something for even a student, like basic entry level retail job. So you should easily be able to make $20 an hour here if you're resourceful or you have some skills or if you're a hard worker. So the average work year is 2,000 hours, so if you were able to make $40,000 just imagine you had a house that was $6,000. Now of course, that's not including the land. Land is so variable, it's hard to factor that in. I can tell you what I paid for this and then I can tell you what else was on the market when we bought this. So this is 20 acres in an unorganized township which allows me to do this because you can't get building permits in this area and therefore there's no inspectors, there's nowhere you can apply for a permit other than sewage and road but I don't need those things so I didn't need any permits. So for me, I was able to pick up this land, my wife actually found it, 20 acres in an unorganized township backing onto literally, look at a map, it's like 100 miles to the next development west of here. There is some development half an hour, 40 minutes east of here, but in this area there's nothing so I have access to all of this public Crown land, we call it here in Canada. All this Crown land I can use for hunting and exploring and fishing and all that kind of stuff. So it's basically like I have thousands of acres at my disposal, but it's a 20 acre parcel that we actually own. We paid $50,000 for it exactly. On the market at the same time, the next property that we were seriously considering was five and a half acres and that was actually south of here but on a really remote road as well, very little traffic, but also difficult to get to in the winter because the road would be the last road that would be plowed in that area. This one is too, but it's kept in pretty good shape actually. Anyway, that property was $22,000, I think it ended up selling for. And that was also surrounded, there was no other development there, surrounded by Crown land as well so you could have access to all that but you could also have your privacy. So $50,000, you could pay as little as say $22,000. If you went further north you could pay less. The challenge of course with a smaller acreage is that you might not be able to get enough building materials for the property. So there's a lot of things we were looking for in a property that were really not negotiable. One was the unorganized township. One was access to water. So water was primary so we have the stream, we have snow, we have the dog well, and then we have another pond at the south end of the property at the highest elevation here. So lots of water. We wanted access to lots of Crown land. We wanted privacy and quiet. And materials, building materials, so land that had a lot of trees on it, which this one's fully treed. It was logged last about 15 years ago, so it's not old growth, but there's a lot of firewood and a lot of wildlife habitat. Alright, so the things I spent money on or actually start with the things that I didn't actually purchase. So for the total of $5,637 that we're rounding up to $6,000, the logs I cut down, all the trees, enough to do at least two cabins from my two friends' places, properties, so I have a whole bunch of cedar. I cut a whole bunch of cedar, spruce, red pine and white pine. A lot of these logs for this cabin and for the sauna actually are 12 foot cedar fence post, which his why a lot of them are debarked. I did have to debark a lot of them myself. A lot of them were debarked and then I picked them up in trailer so then I cut down some balsam fir. A lot of the trim work is balsam fir that I cut down here on this property, just right around here. And some cedars as well. So the logs I didn't end up paying for for this cabin in other words, so these fence posts though, if you were to buy them, and I did buy a few for the sauna, they're $24 each and I used 80, eight zero, to build this cabin with. I spent $586 for 244 two by six by 10 foot, which is what I did the roof with. A lot of those I had sawn. I had taken to a mill to get sawn from the red pine that I cut down. Others I purchased from a rough mill that actually has really cheap lumber. I mentioned that a couple times at the time when I was building, how cheap it was. It ended up making more sense for me to do that than to try to hand make them. It would've taken me forever because I wasn't using any power equipment at the time. So 244 of those, which sounds like a lot, but the roof is a double layer of two by six by ten and it's a full 10 foot line on either side, so 244 of them, which is what, 44 times 88, 176, just to do the roof. And of course the floor is done with them as well. And the floor of the loft. So $586 for those. I used 80 one by 10 by 10 feet and that was for the roof that I charred. I ended up charring those boards and made a board and batten roof. And that was $176 dollars. Plus that includes also some that I used for the interior as well. You got steel spikes. I could've got rid of those if I had used a wood doweling, which I intended to do. I did some wood dowels, but I found that I just wasn't able to bore the holes fast enough, I didn't have the right tools at the time. I do have an auger now that I'm using on the sauna that I wish I had back then that would've eliminated the spikes, that was almost $200 worth of nails and spikes that I could've taken out of the equation. The roof membrane, its almost impossible to build a water tight roof without it. Even old trapper's cabins, other than the real old ones use some kind of roof membrane underneath even the sod or whatever else they roofed with, whether it was metal, shingles, cedar shakes like I did on the kitchen. You need some kind of roof membrane even if it's just tar paper underneath so that was $120. What you would replace that with traditionally is birch bark, but there's not very many big, huge, mature birch bark trees around anymore that you can get flat sheets off of that are thick enough and high quality enough to be considered a roof membrane, but if you did, you would overlap them just like shingles all the way up the roof. I used 20 bags of cement for the floor underneath the stove. The back splash of rocks behind the stove and some of the mortar. A lot of this is mud basically so it's clay with sand and straw or moss mixed in, so I could've eliminated the cement. In fact the worst cracking spots are actually where I used the cement, so that can be eliminated completely. The windows we got from somebody online just getting rid of them. You can always find windows cheap, either free or cheap. I could've gotten free ones. I had a whole bunch of offers for free ones after I started, after I already bought some, but the windows were 10 bucks each, not even. We got 14 of them for $150, or 15 of them for $140. And I'll be using those in the sauna and some of the other buildings. But the additional cost, I'm rounding that up to $30 each because we had these screens made actually from a manufacturer in the town that's closest to here. The most expensive thing was probably, other than the logs if I had to pay for them, was the stove, the heating system. The wood stove itself was really cheap, it was $160, and we bought that again used online. It was built in 1986, but it's doing a fine job for me. The more expensive part of that system is the whole chimney system. Black pipe, ceiling kit to hang it, and the stainless pipe is the most expensive. Double walled, six inch stainless insulated pipe that goes up through the roof and then of course higher than the peak with a rain cap on it. So that was over 800 bucks. Got miscellaneous screws, some stain for the counter, the copper sink and copper back splash in the kitchen and the copper behind the stove, that would be over $300 for that. I didn't pay for it, thanks David again for donating that copper sheet. He's a sheet metal worker in the area, he owns a sheet metal company and he donated this copper, which was so nice of him to do. I ended up using it for several things as you can see around the cabin. So you wouldn't do that typically, but we find a used sink for free or we spent like 10 or 20 dollars on it. An old stainless sink. Some wood glue, some caulking. Vapor barrier and floor insulation. I didn't fill much of that underneath this floor. I actually put a layer of poly vapor barrier on the ground and then put bad insulation, R-20 fiberglass insulation, and then another layer of poly vapor barrier on top of that, so we've got a sandwich layer to keep the moisture out of it. That was $350 just for that. My plan was always to do a sawdust insulated floor. In fact, there's a lot of things I wanted to do that would've been free and more rustic but the project was just getting out of hand as far as the labor was concerned and as far as procuring materials and making materials so I ended up going that route to get proper insulation otherwise this floor would be very cold. And I had some propane that I used. I did a lot of the burning over an open fire to char those roof boards and these floor boards, but I ended up using about $100 worth of propane to char that wood. Them hemlock beams, that's something I actually did have to buy. These six by six hemlock beams that go across the cabin tying the walls together to stop them from moving in and out and also I used those for the foundation. I made pine tar, I waterproofed them and I put a little bit of roofing membrane underneath them to separate the foundation from the ground, to stop them from rotting or slow them down at least. So that's the answer to people that are wondering why I built this right on the ground. It's actually not, the cedar logs are sitting probably a good six inches off the ground on top of those hemlock beams and the hemlock beams as they rot, I can just pull them out even a section at a time or entirely, just keep the cabin jacked up or leave enough of the rest of the thing in place and then fill that in with rocks or build cement footings or something so that's why I wasn't too worried about it. Got some miscellaneous two by fours. Again, all cheap, like a $1.70 each, the two by sixes were $2.40 each. The one by 10 was $2.20 each. So all extremely cheap. And that's pretty well it. So basically all of the wood can be eliminated. Now that I have a chainsaw mill, I'm actually cutting almost all of my own boards and this wood I've been cutting down or the trees I've been cutting down are now seasoned enough that I can use those for all of this year's building projects so I still have 100 logs or more that I can cut into lumber and that I can make logs out of or walls out of so that's why I say any of that stuff can be eliminated because essentially I did have the materials, I just switched them out in order to be able to do the project on the timeline that I wanted to do it on. The outhouse I spent $181 total in materials on that for lumber Again, just one by 10's, two by sixes. It functions amazing. I have lots of cedar sawdust that we use to throw into the outhouse. There's literally no smell in there. If there's any smell, it's almost a pleasant one of cedar shavings, so it's not offensive at all to use that outhouse and it's not inconvenient even on a cold day like this so it didn't bother me to throw some boots on, warm coat and a hat and go out there. So yeah, it's $6,000, plus whatever land, so if you can work hard or work doing what I said, an average of $20 an hour, you're talking about 300 hours so you're talking about six weeks you can have all the materials procured to build a cabin like this. And of course if you factor in the land, if you're able to find land like this. Some of the other pieces of property that were on the market, there was one down the road and across for $76,000 I think it was for 40 acres with the stream and a pond and everything on that as well. Lots of trees, thick forest. I'm not sure what you can find right now. It's difficult to find an unorganized township property but it depends where you are of course. But there's your range. The reason we didn't buy waterfront, even in this area, the unorganized township, is that as soon as you get waterfront the price jumps up to to $300,000 dollars for a small piece of property that's got neighbors right next to you so you don't have the privacy and the solitude and the wildlife and all the stuff that we have here. So there you go, so total if you round that up to $60,000.

I make when I'm working a lot more than $20 an hour, but worst case is I work a 50 hour week for 50 weeks, that's 2,500 hours and make say, 20 bucks an hour, you're talking just over a year of actual labor. Of course you have other things you have to spend your money on, but within a matter of two, three, four years if you're frugal and live somewhere cheaply that you can save up money, you can have a house like this, debt free, operating costs are next to nothing. Our property taxes are under $300 per year, so again for 10 hours of work for somebody, even doing some local handiwork around here. And no electricity costs, no water costs, food is always additional, but with all this land and all this wildlife around here and the plants and the fish and the water and everything I can reduce my food costs down extremely low and I'm gonna try to get it as low as I can this year and document that as well and hopefully by this time next year I'll be able to give you an accounting of a full year's worth of food costs and other expenses. I think I forgot to mention this morning what it actually costs me and how much you'd actually build this cabin for if you were getting all the materials yourself from the land. So if you had access to all the trees that you needed mostly. So what I ended up spending was $3,222, so 3,222, let's say worst case that was $3,500, so that's what it cost me. Some of the major costs, actually a couple things that I could have done to knock the cost down a little bit further, one was to keep searching or search earlier for stove pipe, because often you'll see it on Kijiji or Craig's List or whatever, people selling it as they remove wood stoves from their garage or from their house. So ironically this past summer there was some pipe for sale that was really cheap and there was enough to do the cabin and I should've picked it up at the time. It was before I decided what I was doing with the sauna, so now I'm gonna be searching again for sauna pipe for the stove and I could've picked that up for next to nothing. So that was almost $1,000 so I could've eliminated that, or reduced that down by let's say half. So there's about $1,200 I could've eliminated in wood cost if I had done everything with the trees I cut down. I don't regret doing what I did because I had a timeline that I was trying to meet. Trying to get the roof on before winter last year and I just barely made it so if I had been cutting all of my own lumber I just would not have made it but with a smaller cabin, especially a single story cabin, would've made sense just to hue all of those roof ports and leave them thick. So essentially it would've created the structure and the sub straight for nailing whatever roofing material directly to it. So really, you could build this thing then for about $2,000 I would say if you still bought things like spikes and stuff. And if you were able to get used materials, I don't think you'd have any problem doing that. Like I said it cost me roughly $3,500 and I know I could've knocked that down at least another $1,500. So there you go. You want to build a cabin in the woods, that's how cheaply you can do it. So that was the basic cost of building the cabin itself, what I tend to call the infrastructure, so getting the building up, getting the outhouse built, outdoor kitchen and sauna I consider part of my overall homestead and infrastructure and the wood pile and any other projects I have like the wood shop, but those things aren't really necessary if you're living a wilderness homestead life. If you're trying to find a way or figure out whether this lifestyle is as cheap as you envision it to be then I think you would eliminate the luxuries and decide if you want to add those over the years or not. I think if you're the type of person who is resourceful enough to do this to begin with, you're probably restless or never completely satisfied and you're going to continue to improve and develop, which we tend to do. And that could be what I've done, adding these more comfortable buildings that are useful or continuing to improve inside, but anyway, what I've shown you so far is the basic cost of the building itself. Now one of the additional costs in this day and age is the cost of electricity and any electronics that you want to continue to operate. When I did this the first time, when I built that first cabin on a property near here in 1991, so when I was 21, I bought that property when I was 19 to kind of use it as a weekend retreat, just sleeping in tents and stuff on the property. Then I built that log cabin. Back then, there was no cell phones, there was no internet, so I didn't have any other costs once I started. I had no need for electricity, let's put it that way. Now I do, because I'm sharing all of this with you, so if you want to stay connected with the world then you need to find a way to do that. I'm in an area here that's not extremely remote. I don't know where the cell phone tower is, I think it's in that direction. I'm on a bit of a high point here where the cabin is. Down in the valley and back here, there's no cell phone service. Up on the higher ground over here there's pretty good service. And when I get back down towards the road there isn't again. So not completely reliable, but at least I have it. Now I have no internet here, and if I wanted that then I would need not only to install and pay for satellite internet, and up here it's Xplornet, but also then the power to operate that or to keep that running. I don't know how much that would cost, how much power that draws, and whether there needs to be a consistent source or not. The problem with what I'm using here is electricity is sporadic because I'm generating the power with the solar panels charging the power bank and then when I don't have enough sunlight I have to fire up a generator to charge that power bank. Nevertheless that's one of my issues. Now one of the other things you're going to want regardless of whether you're operating cameras and internet and stuff like that is lighting. You can get away with just natural light, or daylight and firelight, that's one of the reasons we chose a wood stove with a glass front on it. Besides the cheap cost, as well as the fact that we can cook on it, they were the main drivers and the main criteria that we were looking for. A flat surface that could get hot enough to cook fully and that had glass doors to light up the cabin. Other than that we use these lanterns. The lanterns are fairly efficient, they don't burn through that much fuel, so it's fairly cheap to operate them, but again that's something that you have to keep in mind that you have to bring in and pay for fuel to operate those lanterns. So you're in a position where if you want lighting more than candlelight, even candlelight, you need to buy candles or make candles, so there's always some cost for light and probably the cheapest cost is actually using rechargeable lights like I am here. Headlamp for task lighting is a really good option so you don't have to have lighting throughout the cabin or through the outdoors if you have a little headlamp and it operates off of one rechargeable battery that can last you a long time, years, without any additional operating cost. But for me, like I said, I'm filming, I've got light on the camera right now, I've got some overhead lighting. I've got this task lighting in the kitchen area which is really helpful because the back side of the cabin being the north side, I didn't install any windows because I didn't want the cold north wind buffing up against the cabin and the windows and cooling down the cabin. So I left it dark on this side on purpose. But what that does is it creates darkness where I want light to operate to do things like work in the kitchen. So I've gone with Goal Zero system. It's not the cheapest. There are other options, especially if you're going to do a do it yourself solar electricity system. You can just get batteries, an inverter, charge controller and as many panels as you need to generate electricity. So that's going to be an initial cost, an upfront capital cost and it's going to run into the thousands. In fact this solar system is worth almost as much as the whole cost of building the cabin. So you'll have to keep that in mind that if you want to go completely wilderness, old school, back to pre-electricity days then you can eliminate all of that cost which is good, because the other thing is that it also has operating costs. Batteries do die eventually, say six years, you need to replace them. And you may have other failures in the system that you need to maintain and pay for. So that's one of the highest costs of doing this kind of lifestyle unless like I said you're going more rustic. If I could do that I would do that if I was single, if I were younger. I would've liked to at least try that for a year, I would've liked to try that for a full year, living with no modern conveniences just to see how well I could do. As far as cleaning, I get that question quite often. Both for personal hygiene as well as dishes and stuff like that. I've shown it in several videos. This two piece turkey roaster. Two pieces.

So you put a turkey in typically and cook it like that. I've had that for decades. It's enamel, holds up, lasts a long time. I've been using that, I started using that for carrying all my dishes for camping and then it just ended up becoming a wash basin. So fast forward many years and here I am still using it and finding it more valuable than ever. So I have one hanging here and one hanging by the fire. If I have room on the stove, I often have one of these filled with water just simmering away on the stove. It's helping for humidity, adding humidity to the air because the wood stove radiant heat can get quite dry, and also of course then it's available all the time for washing. So I find that extremely helpful. Very simple, easy and efficient. Now the same thing applies to personal hygiene. I think we're spoiled to have running water and hot water on demand. And the shower is nice, but it's not necessary. So what I found is this sink that I made out of copper is nice and deep and in fact it's so deep that I don't like filling it. I wouldn't fill it, I don't think I've ever fully filled it. Instead I do use those a lot of times for washing dishes right in there. I'll just rest it here, take the dishes and let them dry in the sink. Sometimes I will put water in the sink and do that. But what I find it most useful for is something like washing hair, kind of sponge bathing here, and that's the answer to the shower question. So nothing wrong with sponge bathing. So I get hot water on the stove. I can either stand in front of the stove right there, which I often do. I have that big brass pot in the winter last year and the summer but mostly in the winter and spring, I guess. Just stand in that and sponge bathe in front of the wood stove. And the of course once summer rolls around, a nice, hard rain, go out there and stand with a bar of soap or shampoo or something and wash off doing that. Jump in the lake, you've seen me bathe down in the creek here behind the cabin when the water's flowing and it's clean, clear. All this rain water I'm collecting off the roof now. That's easy to wash with. So there's a lot of ways to wash. It's not as big an issue once you start doing it, or as you think it is. And you get used to the cold water and it's nice. Now with that being said, that's easy for me, I don't mind that and I've always done that, but as far as my wife is concerned and even for myself now, I'm starting to get spoiled and this idea of a sauna bathhouse is kind of exciting because we'll not only have a hot sauna but hot water in there as well coming off the wood stove that we can use to pump through a shower head or just dump a bucket of hot water over you. It's a lot easier to wash your hair or just get rejuvenated with a nice hot shower and sauna. So we're looking forward to that. Now another fairly significant challenge is food and how do you store food and preserve it. So this solar electricity system has allowed us to add this little fridge. The little fridge is handy for smaller items and there's a small freezer at the top to freeze some stuff. What I'm finding most efficient, most useful, is anything that needs to be frozen like meat, put it in that little freezer in the top and put some ice in there with it and then I can turn the fridge off so it barely draws any power. That and it's also the coldest spot in the cabin being the furthest from the fire, up against the outside wall, so it tends to not actually come on that often. For the same reason I've got the icebox thing in the floor here, the food storage thing in the floor. That's far from the stove, it's low, north side, that's also very cold all the time, even in the summer. A little tip I picked up, I think it was on a Netflix program, I think in Colorado or something, so vinegar will come in these, or cooking oil, windshield washer fluid and stuff like that. But if it is windshield washer fluid, just make sure you never drink out of this container. In fact, we don't use this for drinking water at all. Just continue to freeze it. So in the summer, you can put one of these, cracked open so it doesn't expand like this one did, cracked open, put it in the freezer of that fridge. Turn on the fridge for a day, freeze these, then turn the fridge off and let these keep everything cold. If you pack food tight, like a bunch of meat for example tight in the freezer, just fill that space up and try to keep it filled with frozen items all the time, you'd be surprised how long it lasts. In the winter, of course, I just put these outside and let them freeze, bring them in, and drop them down into the icebox in the floor to keep the temperature a little bit more cold and stable. And same thing with the fridge. One of these can go in the fridge with the refrigerated items to keep them fresh. So that pretty well eliminates or substantially reduces the cost of refrigeration. My long term goal is to have a whole bunch of these containers, say 50 of them or more, freeze those in the winter and then store them underground covered in sawdust in a fully insulated cellar that will keep that ice from melting all summer long. Of course that's not a new technique and it's not trial and error, that's something that's been done throughout history. Iceboxes were common until not that long ago. So that cellar that I need to get built underground is going to have good drainage in case of meltage, and also big enough that I can store a lot of ice, not only of these containers, but also that I can cut from the lake, big, huge chunks that I'll cut directly from the lake. That'll get stored in sawdust so I'll need room to have all that sawdust to cover it and probably put straw bails on top of the building and on the sides, but most of it's going to be underground. So that's a solution and it's a way that if you were starting planning on building a place like this in the wilderness or semi wilderness then just digging into the north side of a hill where the sun never hits it in the summer is going to provide pretty good refrigeration and food storage. If you've seen the north sides of cliffs, so on the south side of a lake if there's a high cliff and all the ice and everything and snow that accumulates over the winter gets dense enough, deep enough, you'll find that even in late May the sun doesn't hit that and there'll still be ice on that north side of the cliff in the middle of, sometimes into June even. So the same principle applies. I've got a good north slope here right beyond the cabin so the cellar's going to go down in there. So if you've been following along, watching my videos throughout the process for the last year and a half, seeing me building stuff, you'll see a lot of materials come from here on the land including everything from this staircase. So handrail's a piece of hard maple, so sugar maple. The stringers and the treads are from an ash tree that had died actually, probably two years ago, but it was still standing, dry and sound, so not rotted at all yet. I made hardwood dowels out of ash, maple and birch. Had to go into the sides to support these treads as well. And through the sides here, what I didn't show is that I've got pins going in through the sides here, just smaller dowels and in some cases screws. So essentially very close to free to build this staircase. So that's what a lot of the stuff in here is, essentially free.

Just as long as you have access to trees, forest like this. So to continue developing and adding things to the property, even furniture, inside and out, things like that, the more time you have on your hands, of course you have time to make things like that and you have time for projects that are useful and entertaining. So a couple of luxury items like this camp mattress that we had made by a company that manufactures mattresses for a number of things, but they make camp mattresses. So the kids camps, it's foam, four inches thick, and it's covered in a vinyl that you can easily wipe clean. Of course that's helpful in a camp where you've got kids making a mess and mice and stuff like that. So that's why we did it, we figured there would be more mice in here and it would be easier to clean this up and take the linens off and just wash those separately. And of course pillows and stuff like that are a bit of a luxury as well. This area here gets used mainly for eating at the table, but the reason this bench is so wide, it's three feet wide or 30 inches wide, the reason for that is that this doubles as a single bed and in the summer I found, that I actually slept on this quite often because it got warm up in the loft. Cali has also claimed this partially as her bed, but if any guests stay over that's also where they would stay. Now up in the loft we have a double mattress, same specifications, so four inches thick and six feet long and whatever the width is of a double mattress and it's quite comfortable actually and we've got a comforter and blankets and stuff like that up there. The furs are what I originally always wanted to do, was just have more furs and that would be the bedding. That's still the plan I just have to continue to harvest enough animals and preserve the hides in order to do that. So again, wilderness living can be done without hunting and fishing, I suppose, if you're able to provision yourself quite often so have somebody bringing stuff to you or you're able to get out easily to some kind of civilization. I'm only about a half hour from the nearest village here, so that I can provision and then about an hour or two to bigger towns so we can get food there as well. So at this stage I'm still doing that. Now of course, I haven't had time to stock up food here, I don't have a garden yet. This is my first year hunting this property really. Just did a little bit of small game hunting here last year. So I'm still learning the lay of the land, still learning the wildlife habits and their ranges and everything. So next year I'll be a lot more self sufficient from the actual land so in the meantime I have to provision in town once every week or two. Of course I have to upload videos as well because I don't have internet here. Now I typically go to town to do everything at once, so I'll check the mailbox, I'll buy groceries, any supplies that I need like building materials or fuel or whatever else I need and then of course uploading the videos. I'll try to have enough ready to go, like a week or week and a half worth of videos so that I can upload all of those at once. Of course my family's not here with me full time, so that's my opportunity to spend time with them. My daughters are in secondary education so they're off to school. But my wife, when she's up here with me, and I go and visit with her of course down in the village. So the furs that I'm using here, I've got caribou hides hanging on the windows. I'll put those on the wall here when they're not on the windows. That's primarily, a couple things, one's for privacy when I'm not here in case somebody wants to come onto the property. I have those hanging on the inside like curtains but the primary reason is to help with insulation. Windows are the least efficient part of any home, including a log cabin. No R value and the heat passes right through and the cold comes in so the fur on the window helps with that so I'll generally just put those up at night when of course there's no daylight to help provide lighting inside the cabin. It's dark outside, I might as well put those on and retain heat. So the fur that I hand collect around here will include moose, rabbit, got a couple rabbit hides here, got some whitetail deer hides, furs that I've collected over the years and I'll continue to do that from now on. I usually donate my hides to the First Nations program. First Nations make things out of their furs or use the furs for their own use. Instead of donating those for the next few years at least, I'll start keeping hides here. Bear, deer, moose, rabbit, and maybe some raccoons and stuff like that, whatever's on the property. And everything's harvested for food, not just for furs. And then once I can get enough I'll go back to probably donating them to First Nations. So one of the other major costs of course, is keeping warm. And in this climate up here, you've got a long heating season so typically first frost is the first week on average of October and then the last for us is around the third week of May. So you have all of October, November, December, January, February, March, April and part of May. So really June, July, August, Septemberish, is about your season where you don't even want to have a fire inside pretty much ever, because it's nice to have a cool space that you never heat up. Now this last year I noticed that there's times if it's really damp out and there's a lot of humidity that it got damp in here so I think what I'll do next summer is to light up a pretty hot fire maybe once every two to three weeks or something like that just to dry the place out sometime when I'm not needing to come inside at all or when I know it's going to be a cool night or something like that I can do that. But the point being that heating is going to be a major, continuous cost and I'm fortunate that I have 20 acres here and I also have permission from other people around here to collect firewood. I have about a year and a half of supply right now. I've already identified trees and source for other firewood that would last me, let's say I've got six, seven, eight bush cords, something like that, and I don't think I'll go through three bush cords this year. So that comes at some kind of cost. Either an energy cost, a fuel cost for chainsaw, because I'm just not at that stage yet myself that I can cut enough firewood by hand with a handsaw to provide enough firewood, so I'm still using a chainsaw. Probably after next year, I'll try to eliminate a chainsaw as much as possible and just use a handsaw because I'll have more time on my hands. So the cost of firewood, if you can't buy it locally, or you can't source enough of it on your own land or anywhere you get permission to do so, then the option is to get a full load of logs in, a full load of firewood logs up here is anywhere, I don't know how much it is, I heard this year it's going to be closer to $1,500 and from that you should get about six or seven bush cords. I think last year it was $1,000 for a full truck load. So like I said, let's say that truck load will last two years, you're talking about $500 for a heating season per year. Plus your gas for your chainsaw, so maybe another $100 bucks. Well it wouldn't be more than $100 for oil and gas. But that's a cost, right? So you have to factor that in as well. Now if you can cut everything by hand, you can eliminate that cost all the way down to zero if you're living fully in the wilderness and don't need to work and don't have to spend time building places like I had to build them. So while we're on the subject of fire and heat, I would say that probably right near the very top of the wilderness skills that you need to do this type of thing is starting a fire in any conditions and as nice as it feels to start a fire with a bow drill or a hand drill or a striker or flint steel or even a Pharaoh rod. All of those things take a lot of practice and a lot of energy actually, even when you're well practiced at it, you're efficient at it. Some of those things are very tiring, like the bow drill and the hand drill are very, very tiring and can be very frustrating even with a Pharaoh rod to get a fire started. So yes, you should know how to do those things, but in this day and age, a cheap Bic lighter in your pocket at all times, in fact, I have these things planted everywhere. In all of my gear, every pack that I own, including my camera case, in pockets all over, my bottom pockets in my pants, in jackets and stuff, I've always got lighters and some of them, always at least one is in a plastic bag, like a Ziplock bag that's waterproof and that's in my pocket or close to my body to keep it warm. In the winter, these lighters do freeze up and you won't be able to operate it so by having it in my pocket, it's always going to light. And when you're cold, when you're really cold or maybe even in an emergency situation you can't be trying to rely on your primitive fire making skills because you may not make it. You may not get a fire going before hypothermia sets in to the point where you can't even function enough to build a fire. So that's the other thing about fire is your hands are way more valuable than I think you give them credit for in that situation. You assume that you're going to have the dexterity if you say, fall through the ice when you're ice fishing, I'll be at risk coming up, especially in the earlier part of the season, if that was to happen, you're going to be very, very cold, very quickly and you're going to lose not only mental capacity, but also function in your hands and your dexterity is going to be so poor that even operating a lighter is going to be difficult, so lighters, in addition to other primitive fire making methods like a Pharaoh rod or the flint and steel I recommended before relying on a bow drill. Keep some watertight matches as well, keep some watertight Bic lighters. If you can as well, have some other kind of fire tinder or a spark holder, birch bark is good, of course, shred it in your pocket or in a bag ideally. Vaseline soaked cotton balls are efficient. Wax, fat wood, which is resinous wood from a pine tree, a red pine in particular, we have a lot of that here, so have a candle, that's another good thing to have in your kit, several of them if you can. Little Esbit fuel tabs, so many things that make lighting a fire and maintaining a fire easier that it's foolish not to have that on you. It's not a game when you're in a survival situation. It's serious and you need to be able to get a fire going quickly and a big fire typically. A drying fire needs to be a big mound of whatever, so the other then about your hands is to have some way of warming your hands up. I always have a down jacket or vest like this bound up tight in a dry bag on me as well as in a kit, so typically I'll have two of them. And I would suggest either big fur muffs or big mitts, not gloves.

So I would always have something like this when you're traveling in the wilderness. Something at you can get your hands in that's really, really warm. Your fingers are together, they're not separated in a glove or even like I said, just a tube or something you can put your hands in to warm yourself up and ideally if you also get that close to your body to warm your hands up, you're going to need to continue to do that if you ever need that in a wilderness situation. So that's just a quick thing you need to keep in mind if you're doing all this, those are small costs, but your skill is going to be the number one thing that you need to do this kind of thing, to live this kind of lifestyle. So of course you're going to need tools to build this place but also to live that wilderness lifestyle as well, so again, a bit of a cost associated with that. A good ax, mandatory of course, if you can afford it and if you have room and resources, then more than one ax is nice to have. We've got a splitting ax, we've got different building axes, but I would say for everyday use, continuing to just live in the wilderness, ideally you'd want just a camp ax like this, which is essentially a slightly bigger hatchet, but a hatchet would be fine as well and then a bigger ax for cutting trees down, for splitting and stuff like that, which you've seen me use lots of outside. If you're living the kind of wilderness lifestyle and you're trying to collect food cheaply, living off the land up here is impossible. I don't think it's even debatable. I don't think there's anyone who would suggest that you can live off the land as a vegetarian here in Canada. Look at it outside, it's November, I haven't seen the ground for a month, bare ground, and therefore no fruits and vegetables, that's for sure. Anything that I was able to collect earlier I wasn't able to get in large enough quantities other than maple syrup to live off of, so living here means harvesting fish and game. I have several different firearms and methods that I hunt with, including archery primarily actually for big game. And then for big gaming with more insurance, I have my rifle, 30 odd six rifle and shotgun. Shotgun, you can basically shoot everything with a shotgun, if I was to have just one firearm and something I knew I could harvest anything with it would be a 12 gauge shotgun. This is an old side by side that my Dad gave me. I think he got it in 1971. It's cheap, its an Ithaca model 1100 or something like that. 100, I guess it is. Side by side, there's nothing to go wrong with that. Just hinges open and feed a couple of shells into it, I can harvest anything from rabbits, squirrels, ducks, all the way up to, I've shot bear, deer, never shot a moose with a shotgun, but it's possible so it's a very good all around gun if you can only afford one gun or only want to have one or only have the time and space for one, then a 12 gauge is what I'd recommend. The 30 odd six for me is the ideal rifle because I have shot caribou, moose, bear and deer with that rifle and it can easily handle any big game. There's lots of arguments about different calibers but for me after doing all the research years ago, that's what I've found to be the most efficient gun for me because I'm not a gun collector. I just want whatever tools I need to do the job as cheaply and as efficiently as possible. And speaking of archery, I've been making my own arrows for years. Some of these arrows are probably 15, 20 years old. I'm going to get back into making them again, and making more right from scratch like I used to do. So all that dead ash that I made this out of, nice straight grain some of it, and some of it's pretty tight, so slow growing, very, very strong, dense, it's a heavy arrow, so you have to have a bow strong enough to shoot that, but it's a very efficient weight for the arrow, so a very efficient weight for harvesting big game. So I'll be making those again, probably next summer it'll be one of the projects I work on. Then I fletch them with turkey feathers, there's one. There's an arrow that I made years ago, so that's feathers from a turkey that I harvested, wing feathers.

It's a self nock, so I just cut the nock in to the end of the arrow. I need to wrap these, typically what I do is I'll wrap that with sin-you from the animal, so that that doesn't split because once the arrow is released when you pull back, the string transfers a lot of energy to the arrow and because it is straight grain, it'll actually split the arrow, so you have to wrap that. I made that dowel with the little doweling jig that I made. So free arrows, essentially this a free arrow except for the tip. I ended up buying traditional steel tips for these an those will last forever if you take care of them. They're very efficient as well. So again, another way of cutting costs. I can harvest small game and big game, for essentially free, except for the cost of the tag. So here, I don't know how much it is anymore, because I usually buy my license three years at a time. General hunting licenese costs you $30 a year which allows you to hunt small game and on top of that you'll have your big game tags, they're around $40 for deer, bear, moose and things like that. So you can probably, for $200, have enough. And waterfowl is another tag you need for game birds. So let's say $200 a year would give you all the tags you need to harvest enough meat to provide for at least you and another person. And if that other person got tags as well and the game is available, then you could live pretty well for say $400 a year as far as meat is concerned. Now fish is another thing entirely. Fishing licenses are fairly cheap, I think $25 dollars let's say a year here and we have over 250,000 lakes here in Ontario, so there's always something to fish for. There's always some season that's open and there's always species that are abundant in almost every lake and river that maybe aren't sports species but they still taste good and they still provide lots of protein and fat in some cases. Catfish, a good example, suckers, panfish like sunfish and stuff like that. Long seasons, generous limits, so you can harvest and possess. You have to check the fishing game regulations every year to make sure there's no changes. Get to know the fishing game regulations for the area that you're in and then try to take advantage of those underutilized species instead of targeting the bigger, more popular species that end up becoming scarce or underpopulated because they're harvested at too high a rate. So that's the nice thing about Ontario, we have so many lakes and rivers that you can always find some lake that hardly ever gets fished, especially if you have way to get back to it, like canoeing, take a lightweight canoe out, you can carry far into the bush down rivers, down across lakes, get in far, far away from civilization and from roads and then in the winter same thing applies for the snowmobile, which is one of the things I did this year, I finally bought a snowmobile so I can access all those back country lakes. That's what I'll be doing a lot of this year, number two. Ultimately it does cut down my cost for fuel for wood but also of course the cost of fish. Fish is very expensive, so if I can harvest enough fish and game and firewood with the snow machine then it'll pay for the initial cost of that thing as well as the maintenance and fuel for it, which is a trade off. If I was living in an area that was very rich with fishing game and I was living alone, I could probably get enough food right from the immediate area but I'm in central Ontario, it's not far, far north wilderness and it's not south where there's a lot of plants to eat as well so I do need to get out beyond what I can walk, especially in the winter here in order to harvest fishing game, so there's another additional cost. It's the capital cost of buying a snow machine in this case and then the cost of maintenance and fuel and the ability to get that fuel. So you have to be, again, provisioning ends up being a major cost and a major consideration for location, where you choose to be. In somebody like Dick Proenneke's case, he ended up having somebody who could fly his provisions in every week. Sometimes quite often, sometimes he'd have planes coming in every day or two or three for different reasons but he was able to capitalize on that. There's very few people that can live without provisioning and depending on your location that may just mean that if you were in a more inaccessible place that you have to create inventory of all the things you need from maintenance items to food to fuel and maybe you can't get out or maybe you don't see anybody for six months depending on where you are. You just need to have a plan in place for that. When I first moved out of the city, we moved to our first house, my wife and I, in the country we were 40 minutes or so, 35 minutes form the nearest town and we just had to get used to not leaving our vehicles empty of fuel, for example. When you're in town, you fill up and you don't ever have an almost empty vehicle in the driveway. When you go grocery shopping you buy enough to last at least a week and you always have enough other food on hand if you couldn't get in for reasons like snow, which we often get snowed in up here, that you have enough food on hand that it's not a big deal. And a way to cook it. If you have no electricity, then if you have a wood stove, propane, a camp stove or something like that, some method to cook your food and provide some heat if you have no electricity. Last week there was, I think, no electricity here for I think three days in a lot of places, I heard. Especially in the village close to here, I think they were out for two or three days and you have to be prepared for that at all times. I think this may be one of the bigger questions or more frequent questions I get. The biggest concern that a lot of people have is using the outhouse. Anywhere from people asking why I didn't put bathroom facilities inside the cabin to why didn't I at least attach it to the side of the cabin or put it closer and of course the main reason for that is odor. I don't want to have the outhouse, the bathroom, that is not flushable. You don't flush your waste away here. I don't want that in my living quarters. So this distance, what are we 15 yards, maybe 50 feed I'd say from the cabin is this outhouse and I dug a hole about four feet deep and built this outhouse over top of it. Now I haven't found this to be an issue at all and actually neither has my wife, using an outhouse. When you're inside the cabin, you put a warm coat on and a hat at this time of year, and you walk out and do your business and you go back in the cabin and you appreciate the heat that much more. I haven't found it too cold. In the summer, there doesn't seem to be any insects that come in here. I was concerned about the spaces, like a big ventilation window I have above the door here and I haven't put battens on the inside yet. So there's lots of air gaps. Bugs don't go in there. You're not in there long enough to attract them and it's ventilated well enough that the odor doesn't accumulate. Now the other thing we do for controlling the odor is in the side compartment here. That's where all the ash from the wood stove goes, the charcoal and the sawdust, especially cedar sawdust. These two boxes on either side of the throne are full of sawdust, so when you're done your business, you scoop some of that sawdust or ash or combination of the two, you dump it down there and there's no odor in here. In fact, it's actually a pleasant odor, which is the first outhouse I can say that I'm not offended by. So not bad at all, like I said, even my wife doesn't have a problem with this, summer or winter. With privacy not being an issue too, the door stays open most of the time when it's being used and it's not a bad view of the cabin. So as far as the sauna is concerned, the bathhouse, that's immediately behind me here. It's only about 20 feet from the outhouse here, so maybe 70 feet from the cabin. So that's not a long distance and if you've used a traditional sauna outside, like in a separate building like this, then you know that you get so hot in those things that coming out to the cold is actually refreshing. In fact, that's typically what you do. You jump in the sauna for 20 minutes, 10 to 20 minutes, come out, roll in the snow or stand in the snow or jump in a lake even, and then go back in the sauna to warm up again and just do that cycle. It's actually very healthy for you, it's a heart strengthener, and there's other benefits as well, but that's the method of hygiene that we'll be using here. The bathhouse will have a shower. There's a hot tank on the back of the wood stove inside the sauna for scooping water out of or pumping it through a shower head. And then there'll be a little change room in there as well and it's big enough that I might come up with some other purpose. And then it'll also have a sink for brushing teeth and shaving and stuff, so fully functional bathhouse. They're separate.

Some people would think it's inconvenient to go from the cabin to the outhouse to the bathhouse or straight to the bathhouse if you're just having a sauna or shower, but again, just what you're used to. Once you get used to this, it's not inconvenient at all and it's actually something about living like this that I find, I just like it. I think living a more simple, rustic lifestyle is, you're just more in tune with everything I guess. The temperature matters, the season matters, the bugs matter, all of these things matter and you pay more attention to them. So your mind is working and you're being more innovative and I think more in tune with yourself and in tune with nature and I think that's a good thing. Now the outdoor kitchen, there's the cabin, there's the outdoor kitchen, there's the wood pile. So again, the outdoor kitchen is maybe 15, 20 feet from the cabin. Not inconvenient at all. I wanted the cabin to be visible on its own without having to look at especially in photograph or film and get both of those in the same thing. So I offset the kitchen far enough away and off to one side so I could still see the cabin clearly on its own and it's close enough that any fire hazard there is not likely to become a hazard to the cabin itself, to the main cabin. So in there I've got the oven and the grill and the little rocket stove, of course. So that's summer cooking, not using it this time of year except for grilling the odd thing. Firewood pile woodshed over here is there for a reason. People ask me why I put it so far from the cabin. Well first of all, I don't get any firewood from this direction behind the cabin, because it drops into a valley there, it's soft wood. It's creek, it's buggier in the summer and then it's Crown land, public land beyond that so I don't actually, I hunt over there, but I don't get firewood from over there. All my firewood comes from this direction. This is where the majority of the property is, where all the hard wood is. Down the driveway and out to the road, when I bring in firewood from there, again all in that direction. So I have to pass this woodshed every time I bring firewood in, I cut firewood. So it's not like I'm passing the cabin to put my firewood further away and then have to bring it back again. So that's number one, for efficiency. Second thing is that it creates a mess, splitting firewood and cutting firewood, so I want the mess further away from the cabin accumulating there, and also there's a fire pit right there so I can burn scraps and wood chips and all that stuff and sit around a campfire over there away from the cabin. Again, no fire hazard to the cabin or the kitchen and it's kind of just a little get together spot to just enjoy a campfire away from the main cabin a little bit. All the wood, like I said, ends up getting split, cut, stacked over there, kindling I cut up, any woodworking projects that's making a lot of sawdust and wood chips and stuff, I do all of that over there. So the woodshed cost me about $80 for all the wood on top of that and for the roofing tar paper. And I'll put another layer of wood on that in the spring. The posts were all just cut from the property or cut from my friend's property, so no cost for those and it holds about a bush cord and a half of firewood. Or about two bush cords I guess of firewood so I'm starting to take enough out of there, I need to start replenishing it, so I'll go and bring some more up in the next few days. But that's fairly essential to have a covered area for your firewood. You can bring it in if it gets wet like I did last year, or just tarp it over as well to reduce costs or if you don't have time to build a shed like I did and keep it under tarp and then bring it in at least a day before you're going to use it so it can dry inside the cabin. The outdoor kitchen here, I think it was more of a luxury what I ended up doing. First of all, I really wanted an oven mainly for cooking bread rather than pizza so baking sourdough bread and then big joints of meat like a turkey, I'm probably going to cook a turkey in there before Christmas in the next week or two. And nice to have, when you do an oven out of earth, out of mud, you need to keep it dry otherwise it's just mud, it just washes away eventually, so I had to cover that with a roof. I covered it with that roof, built this pavilion and built it big enough that I could put the barbecue under there and it's high enough that sparks weren't gonna catch the roof on fire and all the countertops became pretty big. Got wine barrels for collecting water and all that stuff. So the cost of that ended up getting quite high and I didn't mind that just because it is so functional. It's basically a pavilion that I can do other stuff under to keep me dry and also of course the cooking. So the cost there was cement and the cedar shingles which was several hundred dollars, which I would've started making them on my own but it was just too much work and time, mostly time, to make those all by hand. So again, a lot of these things aren't necessary in order to start, so it's things that you would add over time if you feel inclined or if you have enough money to do that, not necessary to have them. So I don't consider this outdoor kitchen a cost in setting up a wilderness retreat that is essential. I would call the outhouse pretty much an essential although when I first built it it was just a thunder box, it was uncovered, which was next to nothing and you can just build that out of pieces of wood if you want. Dig a hole in the ground and away you go, but for a little bit more comfort I would say the cabin and the outhouse are your essential buildings. So that's basically it, that's the tour of the property, tour of the cabin, the little homestead area here at least and the cost, so like I said, about $6,000 for somebody to build this cabin exactly, paying for all the materials. Less than $2,000 if you can cut all the wood from the property or somebody else's property. Ongoing costs are going to be food, which is just a given no matter where you are. You'll be able to reduce your food costs substantially and man, you get it down to, you wouldn't spend more than a few dollars a day if you do it right by buying things like rice and potatoes and vegetables in bulk or growing as much of those things as you can. Buying grain in bulk, that stores well, like whole grain, whole wheat kernels for example, wheat berries, that you grind as you use it for flour so it doesn't go bad. You can buy huge quantities of that for next to nothing. So if you can get your food costs down to let's say $3 a day per person by harvesting fishing game, growing as much as you can, so I don't want to become a full time gardener again. I've done that in the past and I found that it consumes all of my time and then I don't have time for other things that I want to do like exploring, hunting, fishing and just getting wild foods. If I spend too much time maintaining a garden, vegetable gardens and raising chickens and everything like that, I just can't leave and do what I want to do. I can't go on long canoeing trips or fishing trips or hunting trips or snow shoeing trips or visiting my family or whatever. I know lots of people that have done that kind of homestead and are still doing it. I've done it in the past and I've found that for me, it just wasn't for me. Yes, it saved money in some cases. In a lot of cases, it didn't. I'd hate to encourage or suggest that you can't live fully self-sufficiently and therefore use the system and pay people who are specialized to provide things for you like food but the reality is I've grown grain on a rented farm, a farm that we rented, leased for free essentially, eight acres that I planted buckwheat and wheat and rye and a couple other things, I forget what else, barley, and it's a lot of work and you have to stick with it. You have to do predator control and pest control and weeding, all of that stuff. I've raised chickens at the same time and beef and pigs and it's a full time job and it should be. You should be passionate about that if that's what you want to do. If you want to feel that self-sufficient that you've provided all your own food, it's very rewarding but it's a lot of work and typically it's a bit of a prison cell in that you can't get out and do anything else and again, if you like doing that, if that's what you're passionate about and you love spending time, and I do to a certain degree, but I just don't feel that for me being tied down to a farm is the right lifestyle for me. And good for you if you do that, I'm sure you love it and I'm sure it's very fulfilling and you have a meaningful life, it just isn't for me. So here at the property, I probably won't get too intensive with my gardening. I love the permaculture philosophy and forest gardening and that will be what I'll be doing mainly here. Planting stuff throughout the forest, things that aren't invasive. Not native and invasive, that still have a place in the flora and fauna that's already here, so I'll be responsible but that's the plan to encourage the things that already grow here, the mushrooms, the berries, the cattails and all the tees and other funguses and stuff like that. Lots of that kind of stuff, but there's lots of fish and game, so I'm not going to raise chickens here when I could shoot waterfowl and crows. And I'm not going to raise beef when I can harvest deer and moose. I guess that's the bottom line and that's my way of keeping my cost down and allows me to focus on the things that I'm more passionate about and more interested in and also to reduce the cost because I'm better at that than I am at farming. And there will be other costs like transportation costs of going to town to provision food and other supplies, uploading videos, collecting mail, stuff like that. My face is starting to freeze a little. It's cold out here with this wind chill. What else?

Food cost because I'm buying stuff, of course. I'm not done construction, so I'll have additional construction costs this year. And that's the majority. Have some insurance costs on the machine now. There's no insurance on this place. My property taxes are less than $300 per year. Because it's an unorganized township there's no hydro cost, I have solar, I have no water costs, I have no sewage costs, so I'm trying to think if there's anything else. I'm going to spend this year coming up, 2019, accounting for everything. So I'll be tracking my food costs every week. I'll be tracking my transportation costs. I'll be tracking my fuel costs for the chainsaw and snow machine. License fees for hunting and fishing. The cost of equipment for that type of thing, for outdoor recreation. Any wood costs if I have any. What else?

Candles and stuff like that, fuel I guess for the lanterns and things like that. I'll account for everything in 2019 and continue to share that with you regularly and then do a summary video at the end of the year so you get a handle on or a feel for what it truly costs to do this kind of thing. I think what I've provided in this video or what I've summarized has been helpful for me. I hope it's been helpful for you as well. It's been something I've been curious about actually for quite a while, is what this actually cost me, and what it's going to continue to cost me and what it could've cost me if I'd have been more proficient, efficient or less concerned about actually documenting the whole process. So I hope you found it interesting as well. If you have any questions, please, please comment below. I think this is going to be maybe an interesting conversation for all of us to have. I'd like to hear your suggestions for reducing costs further or what you think you would like to see added here and what the cost of that would be, what people consider a bare minimum for standard of living and whether this is an attractive lifestyle to you or something that you'd like to try at least. For me, I think it's something that would be amazing if everybody could try this for a year. Of course, we couldn't have everyone try it, there's not enough resources, but if you have an opportunity to either live somewhere where it's similar to this that somebody else has already built and all the infrastructure is in place, there's no additional resources being consumed to live simply for a year and see how you like that, how rewarding it is, but also to put the rest of you life into perspective. I tell ya, when I go into town and flip on a light switch or have a shower or something like that, there's an appreciation for that but also an appreciation for what that cost is for society to provide that and the number of people it takes to maintain those systems. I do appreciate, yet it makes me appreciate this even more. I think it's a great experiment for everybody to undergo or try out at some time in their life and then apply the principles of this simpler lifestyle to the modern lifestyle. Give you a better appreciation for frugality and for water, electricity, food, and what luxuries are not as rewarding as the actual cost of them are. So interesting to me and I'm having a great time doing this and I'm learning a lot and I plan to learn a lot more, or hope I learn a lot more over the next few years and that if this continues, if I'm able to continue and grow this lifestyle even more and make it 100% of my life with my family then that would be amazing and if not, then what have I learned from it? Well I was able to do it. So I appreciate you guys following along. I hope you're learning something from the channel as I am for what I'm doing here and you're inspired to go out and do something interesting each and every day of your life, regardless of what it is, so that when you look back and you reflect on your life that you don't have any regrets. So thanks for watching this again, I really appreciate it and I look forward to seeing you up at the cabin next time. Take care.

(ominous music)

(water flowing)

(footsteps walking)

(bird chirping)