Man Builds off Grid Cabin Alone in the Forest with Hand Tools.

Hey guys, thanks for tuning in. Me and Doug are here up at Sean's place. Doug's doing some crazy dances behind the camera, but we're going to keep that out of the video. I wanted this video to be an interview with Sean about why, oh my goodness, about why he's doing this cabin, about how he's doing this cabin, and what are his future plans kind of thing. So without further ado, this is Sean James. He runs a channel called My Self Reliance. It's, oh my. so Sean why don't we turn it over to you why are you building this cabin in the first place well uh 26 years ago now when I was 21 first of all I at that age I really just didn't want to start a typical job I was just very restless and I wanted to kind of live off grid I guess is the word they we use now but didn't back then back then I just said not really interested in the traditional job I don't really want to just go to a nine-to-five and go home and you know hope to buy a house and get a mortgage and all that one day so instead i took the money that i made in construction working in the summers and bought a five and a half acres up in central ontario how old were you 21 i was 17 when i bought my first property actually sold that one and i got this slightly bigger property when i was 19 but when i was 21 i said i don't want to work anymore i want to go and live in the wilderness douglas we got some clown action behind the skiing scenes be sorry folks anyways yes um yeah so i was 21 i just said that that's it i'm quitting my job and actually i had applied for college that year and i didn't get the funding that i needed to go so thought backup plan i'm going to the woods i'm gonna move into the woods and build myself a cabin so i had this five and a half acres mortgage on it was like 150 bucks a month so something i could almost do anything to scrounge the money up to pay for that but i had no money for building materials so i just cut a bunch of trees down on the property i built a cabin right so it was 8 by 12 had a wood stove in it a couple of bunks and had everything i thought i needed to live there so i thought that was awesome at the time i did that but then i realized i actually had to get a job even at 150 bucks how long did you stay there for three months i ended up living in it for three months went and hunted my food and and uh stockpiled stuff before i went like oatmeal and tuna and just anything that to get my calories i bought a little uh seven month old golden retriever and he joined me so it was just the two of us out there for three months so i built that and lived in it and ended up keeping that for 10 years after i went back to work so i just it was a great period of my life and i guess this is the recreation of right so you've got a golden retriever puppy now again yeah doing it all again completely coincidental i didn't even think of it until after the fact but yeah so how are you building this uh from my understanding you're doing this no power tools yeah which is pretty crazy now in this day and age you know what part of it was you know the dream of living off grid or doing something simply or on a very very low budget to me doesn't include you know things like fossil fuels that you continually have to buy to operate your equipment so i thought if i get a bunch of hand tools and quality hand tools and something i can keep forever i could build a cabin i can build a home you know because a home it's not just a cabin it's a place you can live in and i could um you know take a take a shotgun and pretty well almost live off the land so even though financially i don't need to do that I want to do that right it's a sense of like self-sufficiency total self-reliance like if everything hit the fan I could literally just move here and live in this cabin I'm not putting anything in here I don't want power lots of suggestions about putting renewable energy a solar system or something but I don't even feel like that's appropriate I just want to make some candles and kind of light the place that way and the building it with hand tools just seem the right thing to do in that case if i build this thing by hand what else can i do or you know if it breaks down for example you can repair it yeah you know every single little right i know i know every log intimately i've handled every one several times i've cut every little notch in the thing i couldn't i'm not very mechanically inclined because i'm not that interested in fixing a chainsaw for example so do i want something that can break down or i just want an axe that i can sharpen or saw it right it makes a lot of sense how long have you been working on this for too long i had no idea it was going to take me as long as it did i wanted to build it smaller originally and a lot lower well like half the size yeah half the size half the height like when you think i had to go up nine feet to get enough room to put a steep roof on to have room to sleep on the second floor that added probably double the time well how tall is it it's nine feet to the bottom of the second floor i'm gonna raise the bottom floor up so nine feet to basically that the top one yeah right yeah so sorry you're gonna then it's five and a half feet from there to the peak so there's a second floor up in there right so we can sleep three or four people up there no problem that's what we're gonna do tonight yeah camping out here yeah and then on the main floor i have a stove wood stove going in a couple of chairs another single bed that's at the bench and a table. Full kitchen, well, full remote kitchen building. Hey man, we're used to cooking on a fire, so anything in there is pretty awesome. Yeah, exactly. I'll probably put some kind of sink in so I can wash stuff in there, but an ice box built into the floor, insulated with sawdust. That's really cool. Yeah, and that's what we did in the past. Now we think we can't do that kind of stuff, but why not? Right. So I'm excited to get that part done and then move into it outside. Love this fire pit, but I'm gonna build a full kitchen here as well. So I'm gonna have a bread oven and a grill and all that kind of stuff so I can cook outside as much as possible. So I've seen you've had some animal visitors, some company through your videos. Yeah, part of why we chose this property up in central Ontario, we're near Algonquin Park. Very close, yeah. Yeah, this awesome wildlife up here. So I've had moose walk within 20 feet of the cabin here, but just recently had a bear start hanging out with me, so just down behind the cabin, I'm literally up on the roof working, and I look down, there's a bear staring at me. He's a decent size, isn't he? Oh yeah. He's a pretty big guy, yeah. I thought that was interesting just to see it once, but it's been here, I don't know, maybe six, seven days I've seen it at a time, and he just sits there literally watching me. I've got film of him just sitting there looking at me as I work and doesn't care that I'm here. That's pretty cool. You're not worried or? You know what, if you look at my logo, my self-reliance, there's a bear in it. There's a reason for it. I've always felt an affinity with bears. I've spent a lot of time with them, and it's just an animal that I just feel a kinship with. So, you know, I am a hunter, and I do harvest animals, and I actually don't have anything against harvesting a bear to put in the icebox and eat that. But, you know, having a bear to hang out with me while I'm working here alone all the time, I think it's pretty cool. That's not the worst thing I've heard. I appreciate it. And yeah, from the stories you've told me in the past on our previous camping trips and stuff, you do have a lot of experience hunting bear. Yeah, that's pretty cool, man. I wouldn't mind seeing him while we're here, to be honest with you. Yeah, I'm hoping he does show up. Joe and I have been up here in the past, too. You and I have been up here in the past, too, and there's a wolf pack that hangs out. We have that Adirondack shelter we built nearby, and I think the wolf pack and the bear kind of hang out very cool yeah very cool yeah this place is really nice man we just missed the peak colors the peak uh leaves and everything but if you guys check out sean's channel my self-reliance he's got drone footage he's got all through like what late summer not even middle summer basically well basically i cleared the land behind here in um like march april so i've been here for even the spring yeah we were here in the winter we were trekking across the ice yeah so we saw the snow and the ice and now basically all seasons yeah so he's been here putting lots of work into this cabin um like i was gonna say if you had there's no leaves on the trees now but if you want to see some awesome fall colors some drone footage some really cool stuff check out sean's channel my self-reliance he's got this whole like cabin built from the basically from the beginning all on up do you do you plan on putting out more videos on it you plan on putting like a full completed video on it you know what it's the youtube community is so fun to deal with the comments that i'm getting on the videos and the the inspiration and the feedback i want to keep doing this and keep uh sharing the story and you know i plan on finishing the cabin of course and it's going to be cool it's got some really neat techniques like this roof is really really unique very cool yeah i've never seen anything like that and um it's just fun like creating with this thing so i see it going on forever i see me spending a lot of time up here i'd love to to just move into the cabin and show cabin life so right more homesteading kind just like everyday day-to-day like yeah yeah foraging like we're kind of living off the land and just yeah building some other things that are supplementary or complementary to the main building so yeah i think it's gonna be a lot of fun oh it's very cool when i got when doug and i got here we're like man like you've been putting some work like this is really really cool it's a freaking cabin hand tools no power tools by one guy that's pretty pretty awesome so yeah we're gonna come back here lots of times we're gonna have lots more footage from here doug get away from my camera i implore you go check out uh sean's channel my self-reliance you can see lots of really cool stuff lots of cool stuff to come up uh and we're gonna do some more stuff together in the future so yeah yeah i want to thank sean for letting me interview him here about his cabin which is really really cool we're gonna sleep on the loft tonight up up there and uh yeah just kind of hang out cook some good food and stuff so uh stay tuned lots of cool stuff and uh yeah thank you thank you thanks for coming up we haven't got to spend all that much time together this year after woodland caribou so it's nice to see you again well you know you do some stuff you just committed to the cabin yeah i've been calling you let's go on these trips but you know no we've got no time for old joe well that's going to change though. Alright guys, thanks for watching. Thanks guys.