"Bizarre Cabin Build...and what I learned from it"

For almost a quarter of a century, my wife, Brooke, and I have been building cabins. Vertical log, horizontal log, three-sided log, you name it. And through photographs and video, we've managed to document almost every one of those projects. But back in 2007, I built a house, a framed house. Framed house in a very, very different style, using a construction method that hasn't been seen in a hundred years. A relic of the past, a dinosaur. And that building project has almost no documentation. And I've never been able to share it on this channel before. This cabin taught me a lot of things, and I've had to do a lot of digging to find enough to share it with you. Stay tuned. To set the scene, the year's 2006. My wife, Brooke, and I are living in Fairbanks, Alaska, but we buy a piece of land in Delta Junction. We have some friends that had moved down to Delta Junction from Fairbanks, and we kind of liked the area. We bought a piece of land down there and cleared it out. In 2006, we sold our big log cabin in Fairbanks and moved down to the property in Delta and started over. We built ourselves a building that would ultimately be a shop slash garage, but for the first couple of years there, we furnished it out as a house and lived in it. Now in Fairbanks, Alaska, I was a cement contractor, but down in Delta, it was a completely different environment. So as opposed to trying to scratch a living as a contractor in Delta, where there was very limited opportunity and a ton of competition, I decided to build a spec house on a piece of land we still owned in Fairbanks. By spec house, what I mean is I built the house how I wanted it with the speculation that I'm going to sell it once the project is done. Like all building projects, let's start with the foundation. The foundation in this case was gonna be a post and pad foundation. The reason they call it a post and pad foundation is you have a pad that spreads the load, the load of the house, and on the pad, you have a post or a column. Generally, the pad's concrete and the post is concrete, and then the house will sit on this collection of posts and pads. The reason people do this in Fairbanks, Alaska is because there are areas of permafrost. The property we had was right on the edge between good soil and permafrost. To put in a simple foundation in a short amount of time, I decided not to bother coring the ground. We just put down a gravel pad, and on that gravel pad, I did a post and pad foundation. It's meant to be a foundation where the substrate does not have to be level. You can have tall columns on one end and short columns on the other. So you can see in this picture, I've set all the forms. I lined the forms up with a string line and staked them down into the gravel pad. The concrete was just delivered by a mixer truck, and I wheelbarrowed the concrete into the forms. Once all the pads were full of concrete, I took a great big tarp and laid it down on the ground, and I had the mixer truck driver dump everything that was left of the load onto that tarp. For the next couple hours, I would take those plywood boxes and set them on top of the wet concrete pad, put my rebar in, and then I would shovel the boxes full of mud, and I used a laser transit to get the exact height so that every single one of those pads, regardless if it was tall or short, they were all at exactly the same height. Couple days later, when the concrete was all set up, I started to build my ring beam. What I did is have a rim joist that was the whole size of the floor, and then I doubled it, and then I tripled it using construction adhesive and spikes. The reason that you'd want to build a floor like this with a heavy-duty beam on the outside is because with a post and pad foundation, you're spanning between each post, and if you just had a single rim joist, well, that's kind of light duty for a job like that because there's six feet or so between each column. This whole building was 20 feet wide and 30 feet long. Now, not only did I build a ring beam, but I also built a girder, a beam that ran underneath the floor in the center of the floor, and I could use a full-length, 20-foot-long floor joist and support it in the center with a beam underneath of it. The beam was kind of the same thing. It was glued together and spiked together, kind of a laminate on-the-spot beam. When I put the subflooring on, of course, I glued down all the subflooring, and then I nailed it. You can see also I put a row of blocking down the center of this floor, and there you can see the floor system is pretty much done, the foundation, the subfloor, all the floor joists. Now, I balloon framed this house. Now, what balloon framing is is it's a form of construction where your outside wall studs, they go from the bottom, like a basement basically, all the way to the roof, even if there's two or even three stories. You'll see in a lot of old farmhouses, all the walls are built with 20-foot two-by-fours, and the second-story floor is face-nailed onto the studs that run from the basement all the way up to the roof, even on a two-story house. I wanted to try this form of construction because I'd never seen anybody do it in my lifetime. I just thought it was interesting. Also, the other thing is when you balloon frame a house, this wall and this wall are tied together like a big H with the floor joists, and the floor joists keep the walls from tipping out. Like in this house, I basically had an eight-foot wall for the downstairs and a four-foot wall for the upstairs, and it's all one stud, but it keeps these short walls on the upstairs floor really rigid. So you can have an open upstairs with no partitions. These short walls upstairs, they're not going to bow out, and I wanted a really open upstairs in this cabin. Now, the upstairs in this cabin is gonna be a half-story, and the wall itself, the whole wall, is gonna be 12 feet tall. So I'm gonna have kind of a low ceiling on the first-story floor, like seven-foot-four, and then like a four-foot wall for the upstairs. Now, here's what makes balloon framing balloon framing. Ultimately, what we're gonna do is we cut this notch out of every one of the studs on the outside walls. In that notch, we're gonna put a one-by-four. Now, this one-by-four is known as the ribbon. Basically, it's a ledger that's set into the stud itself that the floor joists for the second-story floor are going to set on. Not only are the floor joists gonna set on this ribbon, but they're gonna face nail to the stud and set on the ribbon. So it's a very strong setup. Not only you have that face nail connection, but you also have the ledger, that is the ribbon, that holds the weight of the floor joist. Let me show you how you cut the studs for a balloon-framed house. I lined all the studs up, and I marked where this ribbon is going to sit. I used a skill saw to score the studs about an inch deep, because I was using a rough sawn ribbon, a one-by-four rough sawn. Speaking of building the wall, I built these walls in 16-foot sections, a 16 and a 14 to make 30 feet. I found out really fast that standing a 16-foot wall with much of anything to it is a man-killer of a job. These are two-by-six walls. You don't have much leverage to push a wall up that's that tall. And I managed to get it halfway up and prop it with a ladder and two-by-fours. And to be honest, it was a dangerous job. It was really hairy, and I don't think I'd ever try anything like that again. What I ended up doing is I would sheet the very bottom of the wall just to keep it rigid. And I would also only put in every other stud. That way I had a wall that was rigid enough I could lift it up and light enough that I could lift it up and not kill myself. Once the walls were stood up, I would get on the ladder. I would nail in every other stud, the studs that were left out when I stood the wall. And then of course I had to sheet the wall from the outside off a ladder, which wasn't ideal. So getting the walls up was a real trick, a dangerous trick, a trick that I would not recommend to anybody. But framing a 12-foot wall completely with the windows and headers and completely sheeting it, you'd need a lot of people to lift it up. And even at that, because it's so tall, it would be an incredibly dangerous thing to do. So the wall basically had to be put up just as a frame without any sheeting on it, and only half a frame just to cut down on the weight. Once our two side walls were stood up, putting in the floor joists for the second story was super easy. You had that ribbon to put them up and set them on. So you could put them all up at one time and then just lean them up and face nail them. Now these are 20-foot floor joists and I cut them exactly 20 feet. So I knew that my walls were exactly 20 foot from the outside of one wall to the outside of the other. It was quite simple. For headers, I built box headers for everything. And a box header is just two two-by-sixes inside and outside, and then a two-by-six for the top of the header and a two-by-six for the bottom. That way you can insulate the inside of the header. It's a good strong header. It's simple to build. And there you can see what it looks like to start putting in the window openings with the header inside of the stud wall. Now, once I had the two long walls up, I started piecing in the end walls, one stud at a time. Kind of a backwards way to go about it. I probably didn't need to use the full-length studs on the end walls. I probably could have just built a 12-foot wall. And then for the gable, you know, the triangle portion at the end of the wall, I probably could have built that after the fact. This also brought up a whole bunch of extra problems because the studs needed to be completely plumb and then they needed to be angle cut to get my gable rafters in place correctly. And the angle cut had to be the right length and they needed to remain plumb. It was just, it was kind of a nightmare. I don't recommend that to anybody. One thing I should mention about balloon framing, the reason why a lot of people stopped using balloon framing in the 1800s, almost everything was balloon framed. One of the problems with that is people didn't insulate their walls back then. And when a fire would break out somewhere in the house and it gets inside the wall, it has a passageway from the basement all the way to the attic, just like that. And of course that cavity in the wall, it kind of acts like a chimney. And if you did get a fire in the basement, the roof would be on fire in minutes because of that chimney effect. So in modern balloon framing, which is kind of what this was, I put a wooden block, a two by six block at the eight foot mark up in the wall as a fire block. If you ever intend to build anything like this, there needs to be fire blocking in the wall at eight foot intervals at the very least. All the floor joists were stood up and I did leave an opening for a stairwell. And the stairwell I chose was gonna be kind of a short up and then a landing and then a turn and then another short up. Remember I put that laminate beam underneath the floor. On the second story floor, I did the same thing. I built a two by eight laminate beam that would carry the load of the second story floor joist. And I built it, of course, on the ground level and I raised it up into position using ratchet straps. It was really the only way I could think to make that happen because I was working by myself. So I would ratchet one end up and I'd ratchet the other end up and a lot of times I would pick the beam up with my shoulder, take up some slack and then ratchet it. It took a little while but I got it right into place. Now once I had that beam in place, I put a post underneath that beam in the center section. Now I ultimately hid that post inside a wall that was the middle of the stairwell. Here's half of the stairway on this side of the wall and then here's the other half on the other side of the wall. So I ended up hiding that beam inside a center wall. And then at the ends of the beam, I put the beam on a post in the end walls to hold up the ends and of course, the post in the middle to hold up the middle. Now from this point, I finished the inside of the house, did all the insulation and wiring. My brother helped with the wiring. Now I use rough cut beveled siding for the entire outside of the cabin. This is also the first place I ever built that had that gingerbread trim for the fascia on the edges of the eaves. That's kind of been my thing since then. I've put that gingerbread trim on several different cabins because it just looks good. I use the same pattern every time and everybody that sees that always commented that they've enjoyed it. They thought it was nice. I thought it was nice. It's a nice little touch. And after that, it was just finishing out the entire walls. I did a lot of the walls in beadboard. I did a lot of the ceilings in drywall. Insulation is just like any other insulation you'd ever see. I hired a guy to put the carpet in because I don't know anything about carpet. The bathroom is a very simple bathroom, just a tub, a toilet, and a sink, a vanity mirror. There was power to this cabin and luckily I was close enough to a power pole that I didn't have to put in a yard pole. I dropped power right from the pole to the building itself. You could probably see it in this picture. I furnished the house with a Toyo stove for a heater. That is a Japanese made fuel oil, heating oil stove. They're extremely efficient. They're very popular in interior Alaska. And it's kind of standard. You'd expect that in a new house, especially a house like this. The kitchenette was just a simple build. I bought a brand new refrigerator. And for water, I put in a water holding tank in ground. The reason I did that is in this area, it could be 300 feet to water and you might get pollutants in the water that are naturally occurring. It's a crapshoot. You're really rolling the dice to put in a well. You might get good water, you might get horrible water and a $20,000 bill for drilling a 300 foot well. Neither of those things were interesting to me at all. So I put in a water holding tank. I just put in a very simple shallow well pump, a small pressure tank. And at this point I put the house on the market to sell it. The whole time I was building this house, I was staying in this little 12 foot camper on the property. And I don't know that I ever spent a night in that house being that I was working completely by myself. You know, when I got wore out, I would take a nap and just fold up in a corner somewhere. But I don't know that I ever actually spent a proper night sleeping in that house. I built it just to sell it. I built it because it's all I knew how to do. And I didn't really have a good way to plug into the economy in Delta Junction. So going back to building is just, it was what I thought was the most productive thing I could do with my time at that point in my life. Now I also built an outhouse on this property. And with the outhouse and the water tank, my intention was to sell the cabin as a dry cabin because there's a lot of dry cabins in the Fairbanks area. It's pretty common. And a bank will loan you money for a cabin like that. Problem was is with a dry cabin loan, I think the requirement was 18% down. And it's hard to find people that have 18% of a house ready to buy at any given time. So I had a really difficult time. I showed the house quite often. I had a lot of people that wanted it, but they couldn't come up with the down payment. At this time, I had basically ran completely out of funds. I needed to sell this house to recoup all the money I had invested into it in order to get this house set up so it could be financed by anybody. At zero down, which was the going thing in 2007, I needed to put in a septic system. So I installed a toilet in the house and I plumbed it to the outside, foamed all of that plumbing per instructions by the septic company. And I had a septic company come out and put in a conventional septic tank in a leach field. And at this point, I was pretty much dead broke. And I think I put $10,000 for that septic system, the septic tank and leach field. I put it on a credit card. I'd spent all my money. I'd maxed out all my credit. I was getting into the fall. I didn't have a buyer. And it was down to the point. If the septic didn't work out in that particular ground, I didn't have a plan B, but it did. Septic tank worked out just fine. It made the house financeable to the zero down crowd. The next person who looked at it bought it just like that. All this summer, the very end of 2007, it was doom and gloom. 2008 was just around the corner and people were already wising up to the fact the housing market was gonna implode. That September was a panicky September. I had all this invested. The housing market was on a crash course to implosion and I had maxed out all of my resources. But with the inclusion of the septic tank, it made that house financeable to people who had no money whatsoever up front. I sold the house to the first guy who looked at it after the tank was in it and everything was fine. So what can you learn from this building project? What are the nuggets of wisdom that can be gleaned from this whole experience? Well, for starters, if I had to do it all over again, I probably wouldn't do it all over again. I probably would have done something else with my time. Building by yourself like this was really time consuming and our kids were very young at that time. So I missed quite a bit of that summer. Our daughter was four that summer and our son was two. That's a fun age. And I spent that away from home because Brooke and the kids were in Delta. I was in Fairbanks. I wouldn't do that again in hindsight. As far as building goes, I like that kind of foundation because if you do have goofy ground, that's an adjustable foundation. I wouldn't change anything about that. The floor system was rock solid. But I will say this, I hand nailed everything in that house. And I mean everything. Time is really what's valuable. Money's not valuable, but time is. I would have bought one of those dual tank compressors with a Honda motor on it and I would have air nailed everything because it would have saved so much time. I don't mind swinging a hammer. I enjoy it, but on a project that size, it would have taken weeks off the project. Maybe a month, I don't know. It would have been a whole lot faster. Another thing I would have done is right from day one, I would have bought four sections of scaffolding. I rented scaffolding quite a bit to do all the siding up and down the building and to do all of the eaves and to do everything. I spent a lot of time on the outside of that building on scaffolding, which I like. I like working on scaffolding, doesn't bother me a bit. On the other hand, I was renting scaffolding all the time and I might as well have just bought it because you could buy scaffolding, use it all summer and sell it for a couple pennies less than what you paid for it. Scaffolding always holds its value. Other than that, I don't know what I would have done different. It's a simple build. It just made sense to me at the time. And when I look back on it, the construction methods, they seem to still make sense to me. I probably wouldn't change a whole lot about the build, but one thing I would completely do different is documentation. This stack of black and white pictures and why they're black and white, I don't even remember, were all taken with a point and shoot camera on black and white film. It was at the transition of film cameras to digital cameras. If I had a digital camera, which were around back then, I could have taken a thousand pictures. And if I would have had a movie camera, which I considered before I built this, I could have had video of this project and I didn't. I could have had photographs and this is all I've got, just this little stack of pictures. And in the last couple of years, I've got into journaling because I'm afraid of everything I forgot, everything that's been lost, everything you've done in life that has occupied your time, that's been a chunk of your life, something you spent your time on. It'd be like buying something financially and then forgetting where it was. It's the same thing with your life. You spend that time doing something, being some place, engaging in some activity with some people. And if you don't keep track of what happened, a lot of it just goes away. You're like, what did I do with my time? In doing videos for you guys on YouTube, it's kind of made me hyper aware of the fact that if you don't catch it, a lot of it just goes away. And then when you're gone, nobody will have any idea what you did with your time. And while you're here, you don't have any idea what you did with half of your time. So I wish I would have documented this process better. I could have made a better video for you guys. I could have showed you more of what I did that summer and remembered more of the things that I did wrong and more of the things that you could benefit from. But this is all I've got. Just 30 black and white photographs and six months of my life gone. In hindsight, I think I put $25,000 into that house and then another 10,000 for the water and septic. It's 35,000. I mean, after taxes and everything, I probably made $80,000 that year. It was probably one of the most... I think at that point, it was the most money I'd... Up to that time, it was the most money I'd ever made in a year. That's a lot of money. And I did it all by myself. And I did it on my own schedule. And that was fantastic. And I like working by myself. It was a good fit. But if I'd only got more of it, if I would have only been able to remember more of it, if I only could have shortened that time, because that's all we've got, really. It's just the days and the weeks and the months. And once they're all gone, they're all gone. Having a good record of what happened each day, going back and looking over the old pictures, the old journal entries, the old whatever you use to keep track of time. It's almost like you get it all back. And that's a worthwhile thing. You don't look back at a project and be like, yeah, I built this whatever. You look back and you're like, oh yeah, I remember. On this day, my buddy stopped by and we had this conversation. We talked about these things. And then we took this fishing trip on the weekend. All that could have been completely gone had it not been for just a little memory prompt. So in hindsight, I hope you've learned something about balloon frame construction. I don't know if it's gonna be of any use to you whatsoever. But the big picture is always more important than the small picture. The thought behind the thought is always what really counts. Keep track of your time. Keep track of what you did. Don't let things slip by and just vanish. Because all we've got here is the people that we know, people that we hang out with, the things that we do, the time that we spend, and the more of it you can hang on to, you'll never be sorry that you did. Thank you guys so much for watching Bush Radical. My name's Dave Whipple. Be radical, eh? See you soon.