Its Beginning to Look Like Home. The Abandoned Tiny Home Project. Lot32 Destination Adventure.

This week we have made the great migration to the upstairs, which is incredibly exciting, but we have also entered into what is probably going to be the most challenging stint of the winter. We're on day five of a pretty aggressive cold snap here that's supposed to last the next couple of weeks. Our coldest night so far has been negative 35 celsius and it's warming up to about negative 15 during the day. As well this is our first proper cold weather test in the cabin and I am very excited to say it is toasty warm in here. In fact at negative 25 outside I can get it up to plus 25 in here pretty easily and that little wood stove is not even burning that much is a huge confidence booster and a huge win because at minus 40 the coldest that we really see here I should be able to heat this place without any issues. The rig on the other hand is not doing quite as well. Let's head over I'll show you. Living in the rig while building the place doesn't feel like anything out of the ordinary for me because I live in the rig all year anyways and I have it pretty outfitted for winter conditions and I'm good till about minus 25 but this many consecutive days of minus 25 or colder we're starting to see some system failures. Nevertheless I think I have some pretty impressive heat systems in the rig so I'll run you through it. The whole thing is powered by this 400 amp hour lifeboat 4 battery. You'll see there's a diesel air heater there in the middle. I have two diesel air heaters in this rig. One is inside and it heats the rig as well as the propane furnace but I almost never have to use that. This diesel air heater in the pass-through has a nose cone on it that instead of just one outlet has four. Two of them blow into the pass-through and it keeps the whole pass-through warm for the battery so it can accept a charge and it has a longer lifespan. Two of the lines go down underneath they connect into an insulated piece of pvc two inch pipe that runs back. Right about here is an inline forced air duct fan and that pushes the air the rest of the way because the diesel air heater itself doesn't have enough power to push that air all the way back to the tank's compartment which is at a very comfortable 12 degrees celsius so you'd be surprised to hear that we do have still a frozen water line. I have running cold water just no running hot water. I do have a workaround for it so I can still shower and everything but obviously we have an exposed line somewhere that is freezing and not allowing water to travel through the rest of the system. I did have this on the list to fix this winter but the home build has kind of consumed all of my time. Nevertheless running the pass-through heater on level four and the inside heater somewhere between level one and level three 24 hours a day is consuming about 12 liters of diesel daily and even with solar gains we are at about a 35 amp hour daily loss for the batteries so having to run the generator not really a big deal. Life in the rig is still pretty comfortable but I certainly can't get into any more work without telling you a little bit about this freaking Fraser River. Last week we saw it just starting to ice up and jam up and it was mostly slush with this cold it is frozen solid and it is just unbelievable to watch this thing. I mean nothing much is happening right now but in the early days when this thing was freezing it was crazy because it would all pile up and pile up and pile up and not move and then it would finally break free and the whole river would drop about six feet and drain in about five minutes and then it would pile up right there at the corner again and then it would all lift right back up to where it is and you can see it's gone up at least 10 feet from what we saw last week. It's all open water here last week now it's running on the other side of the island. Last winter I spent quite a bit of time staying out here and it was also really mild winter so we've seen some of that ice jam up and slush up. This is the first time I've seen it freeze like this. I came down yesterday and took just a brief look but I really want to explore a little bit down here. You are going to be so amazed at how much this water has come up. First challenge is getting down this icy little hill. I didn't crash you crashed. In last week's episode you saw this engine block and this rear end. I'll put a shot in so you can see just how much the water's gone up. This was way way up from the water line last week and today here we are right level with the ice. This is just crazy to see. I filmed a lot of glaciers and some really neat natural phenomenons. I never imagined that I'd be building the house right beside something like this. This was not a factor in my purchase of the place but holy smokes is it ever a bonus. Crazy. Not gonna mess around out here too much because of the heavy danger but I had to come out here and see this line when this all breaks free. That's the separation. It all slides and you can see. Now let's get a little bit closer. Here's what I'm thinking. We're gonna stay on the high points follow the ice bridge over up onto that. Well that is about as far as I am comfortable going. When I tell you I'm comfortable with it that's just a bold-faced lie. This is where the river breaks free and moves. This whole piece breaks and goes. Flying down river and as far as I know this is all just ice that's been piled up from all the force and I bet it's about 20 feet thick. So we'll see what happens here with the temperature as low as it is for the next like week. I'm not sure if this is going to break free again. If it was gonna it would have just now but I'll be keeping my eye open for it. Hopefully I can catch at least one good one on camera. It's much different now than it was before because when this breaks free it starts it happens and it ends really quickly. Check it out. Made it out to the rock bluff. A piece of my property I've not been able to access before. I won't be going any further because it's sketched to the max but imagine if this thing let free right now. What I would pay for that experience. I've been sitting down here for like 20 minutes waiting for it and it sure is fascinating the amount of noise this thing pops and groans and creaks like a glacier. I keep thinking oh it's gonna break free but I think that's just the ice settling. Last week when this was just starting to slush and freeze the more it built up the greater the pressure and a break free was just inevitable. I'm really curious now with this much cold for this much time is this thing building up pressure consistently on the end or is it actually building strength the longer it sits here freezing. I'm just not sure but I can't sit here freezing much longer. I didn't dress adequately for this little adventure. I thought we were just going to come down and look at the freezer. I didn't plan on walking all around on it waiting for a break free so I'm going to go up and get to work but last night when I just started putting up walls I did manage to catch at least a little bit of a break so let me show you. I just started putting up this second row and I heard a big crack. Everything's starting to move. Let's see if I can get downstairs before it's gone too far. I should have brought a better camera down with me. The GoPro is not going to catch it but if you look on the other side you can see how much the river's dropped. Even here you can see. I can't understand where it's going because it breaks free. Always right here this section moves but that up there never seems to really move. When I was working upstairs the last couple nights I've been watching this thing every time it breaks the whole river drops down like six feet. Everything moves down and as soon as it piles up again the whole thing lifts right back up. This great big shelf you can see out there that's going to level out really quickly. Even now as the river's starting to slow you can see it pushing right back up. That just blows me away. As cold as it is I didn't think that was going to break free again so I didn't have the drone or anything prepared. Just grabbed the batteries. Probably not going to move again for another day if at all but I'm going to keep my ears and eyes open for it. Wow and just like that she's come to a stop. The big question right now is whether or not I want to make a thousand trips up and down in and out with the saw or if I just want to move things upstairs. I think I'm going to move the whole operation upstairs. Basic rundown. The saw is powered off the generator which is running outside. The compressor is powered off the battery and inverter. Should work pretty good. Well I certainly wouldn't call myself a professional at this tongue and groove but I think I'm getting pretty good at it and most of all really enjoying doing it. But I've learned a couple things over the past week I think worth mentioning. First of all some people intentionally space out each row so that you have a certain amount of room for expansion and contraction. I'm pulling each row tight together and in some instances actually hammering them together. I don't know if this is going to be an issue going forwards especially with the drastic temperature change that we're going to see in the building. As well you're supposed to bring all of the product inside to acclimate for at least 24 hours prior to installation. Everything upstairs has gone through that acclimation process. Everything downstairs literally went from the truck to the saw to the wall. So we're just going to have to see how all this holds together in the coming months or years. But being wood it's a pretty forgiving product so I don't expect any catastrophic failures. Maybe some cracking or something like that which I'm not too worried about. I'm saving these areas for when I get the ceiling in because I'm just not sure how this seam is going to go together quite yet. This also looks a little bit rough right now because a lot of this is going to get covered with trim. All in all a really good day today. I have been thinking and thinking about how in the heck I'm going to do this upstairs ceiling. I haven't figured out. I have all this left over tongue and groove pine and instead of returning it I figured maybe I could find a way to use it on the ceiling. I don't want this whole house looking like tongue and groove pine so I figured maybe if I put a dark stain on it and hang it vertically would look pretty good. The issue with this is I have to put up strapping so we're going to lose an inch and a half off of our already pretty low ceiling but compared to other products it's really only an extra three quarters of an inch and I think it should look pretty good. As a matter of fact I know it'll look good because I've already got a head start on it. Last night I stained up a whole bunch of boards and it looks pretty darn good. Here's what it looks like up on the ceiling and I am really really happy with it. Between staining drying and hanging this is a pretty time intensive process so let's just go ahead and get into it. When I stained the first board for this ceiling I knew it was going to look good. I had no idea it was going to look this good. This turned out absolutely spectacular. There's an awful lot of light coming through the windows today so it's hard to catch the natural color. There's a good look. It turned out really really nice. A bit of a challenge getting this angle. It's my first time doing some of these jobs so getting it nice and tight is pretty time intensive for me but it came out really nice. Still have to do this end wall. That shouldn't take too long and there's still a lot of room between me and the ceiling. I'm 5'11". There's a good foot there so no concerns about ceiling height. I'll tell you one of my favorite parts about doing your own project is you can do it any way you want and there's no better feeling than coming up with an idea and then seeing it come together as nicely as this did. Next week we'll be moving on to some of our finishing stages like trim. We'll start looking really nice in here but first let's get into our weekly cost breakdown. Well before we get right into this cost breakdown I really need to take a moment and tell you about something because we had a very close call in here last night. This ceiling took me a total of three days to complete. I was staining in the evenings and then installing throughout the day and last night I was working late on this end wall getting that angle just right and the chemical smell from that stain was getting stronger and stronger to the point where my eyes were just burning. I turned around to notice that the garbage bag was beginning to smoke. I opened it up a whole bunch of smoke came out and the rags that I was using to wipe that stain were about to combust. I rushed and got everything outside and laid out to dry correctly and I came back in and I read the can and it says to wash the rags in water and dispose of correctly. That's all it says. I don't think it is the fault of the product or the company or bad labeling. I think for whatever reason all of the variables just lined up in the worst way to accelerate that rate of decomposition. I wanted to mention it because there's a lot of DIYers that watch this channel and as DIYers I think many of us would take on a simple project like staining or painting without thinking too much and accidentally throw our rags into the garbage without disposing them or cleaning them correctly. And like my situation last night it can be catastrophic. Very thankful that I caught it before it got to that next stage but absolutely wanted to take the time to mention it. Now let's get into our cost breakdown. I did have to purchase some more tongue and groove to finish the ceiling and then a couple bundles to do these areas where the seams and stuff are going to line up and I hadn't finished yet. So tongue and groove $1575.88. The strapping I used just regular one by four $42.72. I did replace all of the plywood upstairs in preparation for flooring so $230 in plywood. Stain and rags $170. And one more job that I did and I didn't film is I filled all the cracks downstairs in the floor which made a huge difference for temperature in here. When the fire was going before even after the cold air intake was on you could feel that cold air vacuum pulling air in. Now it's nice and warm but I did use 15 of these tubes. 14 I suppose because I have the one left over. So that was $170 bringing us to a grand total of $2190.05 this week. Super happy with the progress and super happy the house didn't burn down. So if you're thinking about taking on a staining project make sure you dispose of your rags correctly. But most of all thanks for watching everybody.