Building an Off-Grid A-frame Cabin - Narrated Construction Video

Welcome to my channel. My name is Jim, and a few years back my family and I built this A-frame cabin. I have compiled this build video from old footage and pictures we took along the way. This build happened long before I started my YouTube journey, and the footage is a little rough, but I hope you find this video informative and a tool you can use if you decide to build an A-frame cabin for yourself. We struggled to find helpful YouTube content when we built ours, and I hope this video helps others who want to do something similar. This video will cover the basics of the structure, including foundation, framing, roofing, end walls, insulation, and subfloor. I am not a professional, and this is not professional advice, so please do your own research. We are proud of the little cabin we built, and I hope you enjoy the video. This cabin was built based on plans shown in the book Cabins and Cottages, and I will leave a link to that book down in the description below. The basics of the cabin is that it is 20 feet wide by 24 feet long with two foot eaves on each end, making the total footprint 20 by 28. It is made from 15 20 by 20 by 20 equilateral triangles. It has a 9 foot wide by 13 foot deep loft. We built it all with common tools and did not bring in any heavy equipment to build the cabin. We began construction with the foundation, and every good build starts with a solid level and square foundation. We did a layout with stakes and string to mark out the foundation as well as the overall footprint of the cabin. I used line levels to get it all level. I then measured corner to corner in an X pattern, making sure both measurements matched. I also used the 3-4-5 method to check square. The 3-4-5 method is when you are measuring a 90 degree corner, you measure 3 foot on one side of the 90 and 4 feet on the other, then the distance between those two points should be 5 feet. If it is, then you are square. The string layout and leveling is a very important stage of the construction process and is worth spending a good amount of time on so that it is as perfect as it can be. We then marked and dug the holes for the pillars. These need to be below the frost line. The holes were roughly 16 inches around, and the first 6 inches of the holes were filled with gravel and tamped down. We then placed the 12-inch sonotubes and marked and trimmed them to be level with the strings as there were some variation in the hole depths. Once the sonotubes were placed, it was time for rebar. The rebar was cut to a rough length and pounded down into place. We then trimmed it to within a couple inches of the top of the pillar. Now we were ready for concrete. I was very proud of my family during this process. My boys mixed the concrete in mixing tubs while my wife and daughter and I shoveled it into the tubes and placed the beam brackets and squared everything up. The brackets were a little tough to get perfect, but all in all it went pretty good. It was a very long day of mixing and pouring concrete. We were all retired and worn out by the time it was all done. Here's how it looked after everything was poured and ready for the beams. The digging the holes and the concrete pillars took us two hard weekends working sun up to sun down. We let the concrete dry over the next week and went back the following weekend to place the beams. The beams are made up of three 2x12s and a piece of half-inch OSB to get to the required width for the brackets. Then we glued and screwed them together. I used pressure treated because of the deep snow that we get here. In some of the pictures and videos you will see a 2x6 under the beams, but that was just temporary while I spliced the beams together as 28 foot 2x12s were not available to me. Once the beams are assembled they need to be leveled to perfection. As hard as we tried with the pillars we were a little off in some places so we shimmed the beams to get them perfectly level and anchored them into place in the brackets with lag bolts. We always made sure to make time for fun while we built the cabin. Now we are ready to build the cabin structure. To make it easier to build this cabin on an off-grid property we pre-cut all the angles on the boards that were used for the A's on a saw down in town. This saved us a ton of time building the cabin. We also cut the three quarter inch plywood gussets for the top connection of the A's. We planned on doing a build week for the main cabin structure. We made a couple trips to the property to get everything staged. My dad decided to join us for that week and I was grateful for the extra help and his knowledge. The first thing we did was mock up one of the A's so we knew what we were dealing with and then unloaded all the lumber. My kids are great at making work into fun and the race to unload began. We then created a jig on top of the support beams so we could assemble all the A's and they would all turn out exactly the same. This saved us a ton of time. Between the jig and pre-cutting all the angles we were able to get in a rhythm and assembled all the A's in about half a day. The A's are formed by laying out two two by eights in a triangle and attaching them together at the top with a three quarter inch plywood gusset and then sandwiching the bottom of the two by eights between two two by sixes and bolting them together with two five-eighths bolts in each corner forming the A. The two by eights become the trusses and the two by sixes become the floor joists. We added spacers between the two by sixes to firm things up a bit. For the A's that form the end walls and the A's that make up the loft, additional two by sixes are added to form the door headers and the floor joists of the loft. For this cabin design we kept it simple and used 20 foot boards. 20 foot two by eights and two by sixes are readily available at most lumber yards. This helped keep the cuffs down and made the angles and layout easier as well as being manageable for just a few people to stand up. Once we had the A's assembled it was time to stand them up. We attached blocking to the support beams so the A's would not slide off the end and attached a rope to the top. We created a platform to stand on using two by sixes and OSB. We then lifted the A from the platform and my dad pulled on the rope to stand the first A into place. We then added support braces to keep it plumb so we could stand up the next one. Keeping the A's plumb and correctly centered on the support beams is critical and it all starts with the first one. To create the right spacing which is two foot on center I added a spacer piece of two by six using joist hangers. This was not part of the plans in the book but ended up making the top spacing easy and I feel like it created additional rigidity to the structure. The A's are attached to the support beams by brackets called hurricane ties. A's number two and three were stood up and braces were attached to keep them in place. As soon as we had the fifth A in place we were able to attach the first piece of sheathing. This process continued until all the A's were stood up. Then the sheathing began. A few of us worked on sheathing the roof with 5 8th OSB while my wife, daughter, and youngest son sheathed the bottom of the cabin with half inch exterior grade plywood. Sheathing the bottom was a dirty job and there was no easy way to do it but it needed to be done in order for us to insulate the floor like we wanted to. One tool that came in very handy that I didn't think of but luckily my dad brought was a pipe clamp. There are always some bows in the boards and we use the pipe clamp to adjust those out as we attach the sheathing creating near perfect spacing. The upper sheathing was hard to do but I was able to slide the sheet of OSB up the ladder and into place. The roof sheathing is installed with sheathing spacers to create a slight gap around each sheet of OSB. Once the sheathing was on and before we began roofing I framed and cut out the The roofing began with tar paper and roofing nails. I know there are a lot of different products that you can use at this stage but this was cheap and it is what I was familiar with. Once the tar paper was on we started installing the roof panels. These were all pre-cut to length by the roofing supplier making it easy and fairly fast to roof the cabin. The roofing supplier was very helpful and from a basic drawing provided everything we needed including the end caps, the ridge cap and all the supplies we needed. It was easier than I thought it would be but it was still a lot of up and down on the ladders and I was very tired and sore by the time the roof was finally complete. While I was roofing with my older son the rest of the family worked on insulating the floor and installing the flooring. We used one inch rigid foam insulation along with R13 fiberglass insulation in the floor. The flooring was three quarter inch tongue and groove OSB floorboard. These were glued to the floor joists and screwed into place. We did the same thing in the loft. This is one of my favorite pictures from the build. This picture also gives you a good perspective of the space in the cabin and in the loft. We installed all the roofing panels, end caps and ridge cap. We installed the skylight and unfortunately I did not get any video or pictures of that installation but it was pretty straightforward and I simply followed the instructions that came with the skylight. The most critical part of the skylight installation is the flashing around it making sure rain runs off of it properly. Next came the end walls. We were able to complete one end wall and measure for the glass in the other end wall during our build week. We framed the end wall, sheathed it with OSB, waterproofed it and installed the windows and doors. The windows were leftovers from my work and we bought the door used from Facebook Marketplace. We painted the exterior of the windows with black spray paint. I was unsure about how long it would last but it has been years now and it still looks great. We insulated most of the interior during build week and in this picture you can see the foam roof vents that go in before insulation. I don't have any good pictures or video of it but we vented and enclosed the eaves with plywood and wire mesh. My family and I, okay mostly me, are fans of the Homestead Rescue show. My family and I took this picture of us working on our resumes and posted it to the Rainey's Facebook page. Marty Rainey commented on the picture with one word, forgitude. In a later Homestead Rescue episode, Marty Rainey defined forgitude as forging ahead with the right attitude. It was a long week but we accomplished a lot. We built the entire main structure with the exception of the glass end wall in nine days. We worked all day and sometimes into the night to accomplish what we did. I was very proud of my family and what we were able to learn and to accomplish. I built the storefront glass end wall at work. I've been installing glass for over 20 years and believe it or not this was the first triangle window I'd ever built out of storefront material and it proved to be quite difficult but it really turned out great. We went back two weekends later when the glass came in to install the glass wall. The storefront windows were made up from scraps that I had been saving for months. The doors were left over from a project that a customer decided they wanted something different. The glass install only took a day and it was fun to teach my family what I do for a living. The next day we enclosed the eaves with cedar pieces that we got for cheap from a lumber yard. This completed the exterior shell of the cabin. The entire structure was closed in and ready for interior finishes. We really feel like we accomplished a lot over the course of just a few weekends and a build week. A-frames are great structures that go up fast and with the size we chose was manageable for my family and I to build. I hope this video helps someone out who is thinking about doing something similar. If you would like a full tour of the finished cabin please click here. If you found this video helpful please like and comment and thank you for watching.