Building Log Cabin By Hand - 9 Days Winter Camping with 3 yr Old in Bushcraft Primitive Shelter

Well look Jacob, we're at the shelter. It's got a little bit of a saggy bit. Well welcome back to another episode of the Outdoor Boys YouTube channel. For those of you who follow my channel, you'll recognize this shelter. Me and my oldest son Thomas, we spent eight days camping and building this shelter by hand and I want to finish it off. So that's what we're going to do today. And I've got my youngest son Jacob with me. Well it's January and it's a lot colder than it was last time I was here at the shelter. I definitely want to do some improvements to make this place a little bit warmer, a little bit more pleasant and it's going to take more than one day to do everything I have in mind. So we better get cracking. Oh you are stinky! Now in the last video I told you that the bow saw I was using was getting a little bit beat up. So I went and bought another bow saw. This is made by Agawa and it assembles a lot quicker and easier than the other one. But it goes something like that. And there you go. Let's go find a big dead straight tree that we can use. Hey Jacob, do you want to build the fire? Yeah. So let's get some firewood. I'm going to chop up a bunch of firewood. Okay. For dinner tonight we're going to be eating Peruvian style rotisserie chicken. I even made up a bottle of ajeverde sauce. This is cilantro, jalapeno, mayonnaise, mustard and a few other seasonings. And that's going to go on our chicken and our french fries. Oh yes, we're making french fries too. Yay. You ready for daddy to make some dinner? Yeah. There you go. We got some green sauce on the side. It smells amazing. I'm going to polish this off with my favorite drink ever. Hawaiian sun lilikoi strawberry. Oh that's good. Look what I got. Flan. I love flan. Jake, are you having fun camping? Yeah. I think I might have to start working on breakfast here in a little bit. Good morning Jacob. Hey, did you sleep well? Are you hungry? You like bacon? Yeah. It's an unwritten rule of father-son camping that when little boys wake up their dad should have a fire and breakfast ready for them. You know, keeping little kids warm is a real challenge in the winter. So you can see what I've done is I've taken Tommy and Nathan's sleeping bags and stuffed one inside the other. And did that keep you warm last night? Yeah. Well first on today's agenda is finishing the roof and to do that I'm going to need four to six long thin saplings. Well it's actually nice and warm out so I think we should go get some mud and start doing some chinking. That'll do. You see right here we're at the toe of a little bluff and all here is a flood plain. So this is where silt and clay is going to get deposited when the river floods. Want me to help you? Well it's taken me five hours but I've got the front and back of this wall completely sealed up. I used one and a half buckets worth of mud. It's not too physically demanding and it doesn't take all that much mud. It's just very very tedious. Well Jacob has been very patient while I've been chinking this wall. We skipped lunch and so he just ate some leftovers. I think I need to make him a good dinner. Should we go get some firewood and make dinner? Yeah. All right guys I have a buboge tinfoil dinner here that we're going to cook up. Now in case you don't know buboge is marinated beef Korean style and I've got big piles of buboge on top of carrots, onions, potatoes. It's going to be pretty awesome. Look at this. Is that good? Well the sun's about to set here on our second day and I think we're gonna go home. You know Jake's only three years old and he's done really great on this camp out but I think it's time to go see mama. You want to see mama? Well it is a cold wet winter day and a perfect reminder that we need to do something about our heating situation in that cabin. I want to be able to build a fire inside without burning the place down so I am going to make a wood stove from this 55 gallon drum. All right we're gonna get this thing roaring. We're gonna test this thing out and we're gonna burn off as much paint as we can. You can see all the smoke and those greenish flames that's from the paint catching on fire. Once we burn off all the paint this thing shouldn't smoke as much. There we go burned all the paint off. All right I got some of this Rust-Oleum high heat spray paint meant for barbecues and stuff. Tommy's helping me spray paint all this. Well the mud chinking on this wall has been drying for two weeks and it looks really good and there's a few places where you can see sunlight. We should be able to plug up those big cracks really easy. Yeah this chinking is gonna work great. Well in case you're wondering yes I am wearing a brace. Turns out I jacked up a bunch of tendons and muscles in my arm. I'm sure this is exactly what my doctor meant when they said rest. All right let's see okay none of the metal's touching any of the wood. So when I build a fire in that fireplace that stove pipe's going to get hot and that tarp around it is going to get hot and melt. So I'm going to build a little fire in there and try to get the tarp to melt back a bit. I'm going to put some clay up in there and we're going to see what happens. Later on I'm going to build a better stove jack to make a better seal and a more safer roof but I just want to get this for tonight so that we can be warm. We got a pretty decent fire in there and the tarp is melting a little bit but very slowly which is what we want. We want a controlled melt but it's pretty warm in here isn't it guys? Yeah! It's like 27 degrees outside Nathan's gone shirtless in here. Let's get our sleeping bags and everything set up okay. All right we need to get some dinner going here. You guys want some grilled cheese sandwiches? Yeah! Awesome. Oh that's looking good. Okay who wants a grilled cheese sandwich? I do! Perfect. Rosemary and olive oil bread with good sharp cheddar. I'm going to make a whole bunch more so you guys eat up as much as you want. I might need to take my fleece off it's getting warm in here. You guys having a good time? Yeah. Good. You want some dessert? Yeah! Let me reach under here into my cupboard. Whoa! All right we're going to turn off the lights and I'll see you guys in the morning. Are you guys hungry? Yeah. All right I'll make breakfast. This is a cinnamon raisin brioche loaf. It's kind of like a cinnamon roll without the frosting. The eggs are kind of frozen. That's ice in the eggs. They are so frozen. It's like an egg slushy. Here guys you want some french toast? Yeah. You guys like that? Is that good? Here's the perfect dunker. Well it is a cold beautiful day here and I was planning on doing more chinking and taking that mud and shoving it into the rest of the cracks but the mud's frozen and so I have to thaw it out piece by piece to get that done and I don't want to do that. So I want to get the roof really secured and I also want to get lots of firewoods. There we go. Got a little bit of firewood for our next couple trips. Ready for some delicious steak. The butter. Put it in the bag there. Take a thing of rosemary. Put it in there. All right we're gonna take these steaks and we're gonna put them inside the cooler. Pour that hot water right there. Leave the cooler right there for a couple hours. It'll add a little water to it as it cools down. So if you're into steaks you'll recognize what I'm doing as a technique called sous vide. I'm soaking the steaks in hot water and it's cooking the steak and then after they've spent about two three hours in this hot water bath I'll pull them out and caramelize them over a really high heat. Well I want my backpacking tarp back so while the steaks are soaking the sous vide bath I'm gonna go ahead and take it off the roof and replace it with one of these contractor tarps. All right well we got the new roof on. Let's check out those steaks and get those frying up. There we go. All right who wants some steak guys? Yeah. Well we got a lot done but my arm is killing me. I gotta go home and ice some joints. Over here bud. Oh there she is. Yeah looking good in here. Well we're gonna get the camp set up. I'm gonna get a fire going and I'm gonna start working on the door. Got a little milk. Got a warm fire. Not too bad huh? All right Jacob we're gonna make a door. I need a long straight tree that's about four inches in diameter. All righty. Well we've made some good progress but time has really gotten away from me. It's already past five o'clock. The sun's gonna set in less than half an hour and my right arm is dead. I have done bad things to it. But I'm gonna stoke up the fire. I'm gonna get some food cooking and me and Jacob are just gonna have a good time. You want some hamburgers today? All right. So I forgot all the lettuce and tomatoes and onions and everything. But that's okay. It's still delicious isn't it Jacob? Yeah. Well me and Jacob have full bellies and a warm fire. We're gonna snuggle up here, watch some cartoons and I'll see you guys in the morning. It was nice and toasty in here. Kept the fire going all night long and it was so warm I ended up taking my sweater off and all my hand warmers off. It's really smooth and surprisingly square considering. Let's see what it's like inside. A little bit of a breeze has kicked up and the door makes all the difference. Oh man this is perfect. I am so pleased with this. I need to put a latch on it. I need to put a handle on it. I need to put a little more trim and make it a little bit more airtight. But I am super pleased. But it's a good stopping point. I think it's time to go home. My thumbs have been smashed so many times with that axe and my right arm is just killing me. I think it's time to play in the mud. What do you think? Is that a good mud snake you think? I've done all the chinking around the fireplace and my fingers are cold and I am very hungry. So we're gonna get a fire started, make some lunch and warm up a little bit. I have done something to my back. Oh I think I might need to go home and take it easy. I don't want to seize up out here with Jacob. It's a good thing I got out of there when I did because my back seized up as soon as I got home and I have been laid out for two days now. But on the upside my elbow feels a lot better. So you know there's that. Well for the first time in two days I'm on my feet. I think I should go lay down some more. Not sure it's a good idea but I'm on my feet and I'm back here at the cabin and we're gonna see if we can't get some work done. Well I'm gonna try to take it easy today. So one of the things I'm gonna do is go check a bunch of motion activated game cameras I set up before we went on our trip to Alaska last month. You want to go check the cameras? There's some deer in the water. Well I've spent another five hours chinking today and we got a lot done but it's time to make some dinner. You hungry? Yeah. All right. Holy mackerel it is warm in there. That chinking is making a huge difference. Oh that's good. We've got cupcakes for dessert. You like your cupcake? It is so warm and cozy in here. I might have to sleep with my sleeping bag unzipped. I'm gonna go to bed and I will see you guys in the morning. You want some sausage buddy? Should we have cupcakes for breakfast? Yeah. Well I finished all the chinking inside the cabin and it only took me 18 hours and one back injury. So there you go. This looks pretty good. I want a latch. Okay all right there we go. Okay it's a bit fidgety but there you go. Got a door latch. Nice and tight and uh not a lot of air coming in through there. Oh no it's a Jacob zombie. One little problem we got to deal with is this big dead tree right here. I don't want that thing falling on my shelter so we're going to take it out. When you drop a tree you cut a notch and then you saw the back side and it falls in towards the notch. However this one's really rotten over here and while I was sawing it started pinching my blade which means it's falling this way. I think what I'm going to do is I'm going to try to notch it on this left side to get it to fall that way. That was all sorts of sketchy. I didn't drop it where I was aiming but I didn't drop it on the cabin so... Oh I had some grand aspirations about cutting this all up into firewood today but technically I'm supposed to be resting my back and arm. I think I better call it for today. I'm just really thrilled with how this log cabin's turned out and the more I work on it the more plans and ideas I come up with. I think I might want to make some whitewash and whitewash the outside of it to make it last longer. I want to put some shelves inside and I got to build that latrine but that's all I think I'm going to do for this video. I got to rest my back and arm for a week or two. But if you guys want to see the initial building of this I'll put a link in the description to the first video in this series and if you guys want to see what I do next make sure to click subscribe. I put out new videos every Saturday morning. Thanks for watching guys have a great day. 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