Treehouse inventor creates Ewok world in Rural Oregon
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Cabins, Shelters, Off-The-Grid Tech and other Fun Stuff
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Haida Gwaii – Masa Off Grid – 365 day project Webisode Series
I recently found this webisode series on Youtube about a man named Masa, a successful travel writer with an MBA that has decided to live off the grid in a small community on a remote B.C. island called Haida Gwaii (First Nations’ name for were the Queen Charlotte Islands. The community is called Tow Hill and it’s right on the beach and full of amazing creative cabins, built with mostly found materials.
Masa is currently in day 319 of his year on Haida Gwaii, he’s built his cabin and trying to live a subsistence lifestyle, gathering as much food as he can while it’s in season; hunting or growing. He uploads video updates 3 times a week to his YouTube Channel and posts long thoughtful blog entries to the RADx website and his Facebook Page. I encourage you to follow his project and slowly get to know him and his journey as he truly has put his money where is mouth is and left a busy career to sample a totally different lifestyle.
Go Masa!
I’m a big YouTube fan and use it as my main entertainment source, I even watch it on my TV in HD. That’s the easiest way I catch Masa’s videos so I encourage you to subscribe to his YouTube channel and you’ll be notified each time he uploads.
Here’s his first video if you want to start off right:
Cool Neighbor cabins
Masa visits Richard and Frances Riley, neighbors and cabin builders themselves to check out their digs. The couple explains how they’ve put together their own comfy home using recycled materials and timber they found on the beach.
Keep coming back for updates as Masa documents his epic adventures for radX.ca. His new video diary will be published every Tuesday, along with a weekly written blog.
Raphael’s Smoke Shack in Breckenridge, CO
Raphael's smoke shack - Breckenridge
My latest project is to find all the “smoke shacks” or “huts” hidden in the woods inside ski areas. I know there is usually at least one hidden shack or shanty built by skiers and snowboarders hidden inside almost every ski area. I know of a few local ones but have only found one so far. Don’t worry I won’t be posting the location of any. That would leave them open to destruction by the “Man” and that’s no fun for anyone plus finding them is half the fun.
I’ve seen one at Stevens Pass but didn’t bother to hike up the hill to check it out. It’s hidden in plain sight and I understand that’s it’s inside the spray painted rock I saw. A few guys were smoking in front of it when I looked up to spot the landing for a friends jump, that’s the only reason why I saw it. I have ridden right past it for 20 years.
My next smoke hut to find is the one at Snoqualmie Pass, I hear it’s 3 stories tall and has a new window. I’ve got some foggy directions so it’s going to be fun to find one day when the snow isn’t so good. Lots of people know about this one.
Check out these 2 videos below about this smoke hut in Colorado. It’s just out of bounds at Breckenridge. This one is a tree house, built with all natural found materials from the area. It must be pretty strong judging by how many people are inside it in the video.
Other Smoke Shacks from around the country.
Got a photo of your smoke shack? Is it the best around? Send it to me! I promise I won’t ask where it is. Upload photos to Solar Burrito’s Facebook Page.
Snowboarding to Colorado 420 Smoke Shack – Loveland Pass, CO
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- Raphael’s-smoke-shack – Breckenridge
Little Footprint Big Forest – Container Cabin Contest
A friend just emailed me this great design contest that just happened here in King County. The parks department wants low impact over night structures that are easy to install and maintain for guests in their parks. Stone Gossard of Pearl Jam was judge!
The challenge is to design an overnight structure re-using a surplus cargo container, which can be staged anywhere in King County Parks’ 26,000 acres of open space, and more specifically, on our forested lands that have minimal roads or utilities.
While I’ve questioned containers being use for building before, it mostly came down to it being more expensive. However in this situation the counties goals fit the containers perfectly. Strong secure structures that can be built off site, have minimal maintenance and have a low impact on the site. I bet they’ll be using an off-road fork lift to place these at site without roads like they mention.
Check out the entries below, they are really creative especially giving the counties requirements. Some very cool ideas to be gleaned from these designs. Hit the link below to read more on King counties page.
Congratulations to Hybrid Architecture for their REtain design, which was selected as the winning design of the Little Footprint Big Forest contest and was announced today at the Built Green Conference.
What do 26,000 acres of open space, public recreation and a cargo container have in common?
Conservation. Sustainability. Public Recreation. Aesthetics. Forest Stewardship.
The Situation
King County Parks is looking to balance the natural and built environments to create truly inspirational accommodations that:
* use salvaged and locally-sourced materials
* are economically achievable, both for us to build and maintain and for the public to use
* can be replicated across our 26,000 acre system
Read more about Little Foot Print Big Forrest Shipping Container Contest
The Challenge
King County Parks and the GreenTools Program have teamed up to create a competition that we hope will inspire designers to integrate the principles of conservation, sustainability, public recreation, aesthetics and forest stewardship.
The challenge is to design an overnight structure re-using a surplus cargo container, which can be staged anywhere in King County Parks’ 26,000 acres of open space, and more specifically, on our forested lands that have minimal roads or utilities.
All submittals must be received by August 22, 2011 by 4:30 pm PST.
The Judges
* Dow Constantine – King County Executive
* Stone Gossard – Sustainability advocate and Pearl Jam rhythm guitarist
* Kevin Brown – Division Director, King County Parks
* Art Wolfe – Wildlife and Landscape Photographer
* Eric Corey Freed – Principal, organicArchitect
* Kim Munizza – Principal, Mithun
* Aaron Adelstein – Executive Director, Built Green
* Chris Toher – Executive Vice President and General Manager, Skanska
* Bill Schwartz – Manager, Small Projects – Capital Improvement Program, King County Parks
* Andy Wappler – Vice President of Corporate Affairs, Puget Sound Energy
* YOU! Enter to win a chance to join our all-star judges panel.
Here are my favorite entries:
Cabins of Government Camp, Oregon
Government Camp Oregon in the Winter
I was down in Government Camp, Oregon aka “Govy” for a work snowboarding trip last week. The main goal was to test some 2013 snowboards at Mount Hood. Unfortunately I hurt my back the first testing day and had the whole week to down there trying to rehab my back. To kill some time I walked around the tiny but awesome town and snapped some pics of some old cabins and interesting architecture down there. Some pictures below were taken the local cultural center and show a family that built 40 cabins in the area. They were known for they’re woodcraft and rustic Oregon style of architecture. The door pictured was had made and featured a wood lock.
The town has a snowboard camp in it that attracts dozens of kids to “Govy” all summer long. It also has tons of history, being one of the first settlements of the west and the last part of the Oregon Trail.
Thinking about Cabin deck or porch
So I’ve been thinking about putting a covered deck on the cabin for a while now. We have a unique set of design requirements though, which makes it a bit more complicated than I’d like. The porch or deck needs to be self supported and not attached to the cabin. This is because we according to code this is a shed and we want to play by the rules. Also I want to use logs from our land to support the roof. The deck would be about an inch away from the door of the cabin.
I drew the deck in Google Sketchup to better visualize it. The plan would be to pour small cement footings with a metal bracket to attach the vertical logs.
The dimensions are 8′ x 12′ in this sketch, 2×6′s for deck support and 2×4 rafters 16″ on center.
Any thoughts or concerns you guys would have with this design?
This Old Shack – April Update Video
As promised, here is the progress we made on the cabin this weekend. We got a lot done…. well more than usual. Not much wood split but we didn’t have the proper tools… My camping ax wasn’t cutting it. Literally.
We arrived to 10 inches of snow late Friday night after a late ferry ride, it was above freezing so it was pretty slushy. We didn’t have a cooler so it was nice to use the snow as our cooler the first night. It almost all melted by Sunday.
I also wired up a switch that will power 3 12 volt lights on the main level of the cabin. I only had 25 feet of wire so I stuffed it behind the insulation and then we put the paneling up. I’ll have to add a section for the lights and to the battery. Also I made a hidden battery box that will house our charge controller, combiner and battery for our solar power system. I probably shouldn’t share the location of that, even though I doubt the thieves are reading this….
Check out the video below, Nate is a character…
Cabin Wood Stove and interior paneling
Hammering door to make it close better
Well it’s the time of year again, spring is here and all 3 owners are going to the cabin/shack to see how the Winter and theives treated it. The snow is long gone since it’s April. It snowed last night and the temps here have been -15 colder than normal. So it’s a good thing we got this wood stove out of Aaron’s basement since it’s going to be really cold at night. It was used as a trash burner and has some sweet art deco style, says it’s from Sears.
You may have seen from my last cabin post that we installed the chimney but our old stove was too badly damaged to use again. On closer inspection it was cracked in 4 places. So I think we’ll be getting it installed asap we get there on Friday since we don’t want to freeze our asses off!
Things to do this weekend:
- Install wood stove
- chop wood
- wire light
- have fun
- install some insulation
- put up some paneling
- have fun
This week has been a great Craigslist week. Last week I scored some free spruce and cedar floor boards that we’re going to use as interior paneling or siding. It was a big score all we had to do was take it down out of and old house from the 50′s. It was a lot of labor since we had to take it down, take out the nails, then cut off the damaged tongues but well worth it as we couldn’t afford paneling otherwise. I also scored 3 sheets of cement board to use as a heat shield. I love me some craigslist.
Wish me luck, I’ll post the fruits of our labor.
Wood on ceiling before taken down
Build a log cabin with your hands for almost free – Videos
Watch these 3 videos below!
This guy (186282plus1) didn’t build 1 log cabin he built 20! Well not exactly 20 but it sounded cooler. He built 2 on youTube and possibly 18 more not on YouTube? Hard to say… But anyway these are some of the best log cabin videos I’ve seen since they take take you through the whole process of making a cabin from scratch, almost entirely from the forest. He used the first cordless tools aka hand tools and a few battery powered tools that he hauled up the mountain to his remote building site. The captions really help to understand what he’s doing, hope you like the videos as much as me! I wonder where he is located????
Cabin On a Hill
From the builder: This is one of the few spots that I can build a log cabin on the upper section of this land so it seems like a challenge to me. As you may have noticed from the video, this is a one man construction project, hence the size of the log cabin but it’s nice that I get to make all of the creative decisions on the cabin design;) Though, the downfall of that being that I can really only move up to a certain sized log by myself, and if anything is to be carried up to the cabin (it’s quite a hike up the mountainside) It’s on my back. So far I’ve put about 13 weekends into this cabin as well as $140 in spikes, rebar, nails, morter and plumbing parts as well as 9 trees and about 17 sapplings and a burned out old cedar stump (used for the shake roof). What’s interesting is that it’s actually quite therapeutic for me to just be out in the forest working on this log cabin project. I tend to find myself feeling very refreshed after a weekend of doing this sort of thing, I think maybe that I like the creative outlet that this project provides to me, dunno for sure. Though I have to admit that there are times when I really think that building a log cabin is a challenge to anyones limits of perserverance. So since it’s snowing now at this elevation and it’s really hard to work with frozen logs and cold fingers, I’ve decided to stop working untill things warm up a bit. I guess I’ll just go back to my regular therapist until then.
First Cabin he built to gain skills
From the builder: I know this log cabin is small, but it was more of an experiment in remote shelter building for me than anything else. It took about 3 months of weekends to build this log cabin, which was about 100 hours in total. All materials used were found on site or packed in on my back up a small winding foot trail. It took 5 fir trees and a handfull of sapplings plus a bag of screws, a few bags of morter, various concrete blocks and some thick poly for the window and a zinc strip on the roof ridge. The log cabin has had 6 feet of snow last year and the cedar roof held together nicely. This log cabin sits on 4 large rocks, one at each corner of the log cabin and the floor is made of dirt. The wood heater/stove doesn’t actually work all that well, but hey it was my first attempt. I think the notching is called a half notch, and it was chosen for it’s simplicity since this was my first attempt at this sort of thing. The notches require a hand saw an axe and a few sharp bangs from a mallet to make, they were very simple and quick compared with a saddle notch style, though the downside of this style is that they had to be spiked at each corner to keep them secure. Sorry for the lack of tunes, it’s my first vid or should I say slide show.
Notching logs for cabin with saw and ax
Beautiful Shed Cabin on Gambier Island B.C.
10x12 vacation cabin with deck
So I just found this small shed cabin project while surfing the internet today. I realize sometimes my posts are about projects that have been featured on other websites. I’m not really sure if my readers have seen them on other sites but I just blog about what I like and hope it interests you too. This Shed Cabin has been shown on Apartment Therapy and also Tiny House Blog (one of my favorites), check them both out. I couldn’t pass this one up since it’s a shed turned into a cabin like ours is. Also their deck is awesome and on my To Do List. If I was in Vancouver I’d totally get a little piece of land in the Canadian Gulf Islands, like they did here on Gambier Island. I’ve never been to this specific island but I can tell you other islands near the inside passage are amazing. In Washington State we have a smaller island group called the San Juan Islands. Being an avid on the cheap boater, I really dig islands and the idea of being secluded and off the grid.
Beautiful Shed Cabin on Gambier Island B.C.
Name: Tammy, John, Sam, Will, and Dobbs
Location: Gulf Islands, British Columbia
Size: 180 square feet
Years lived in: One (mostly on weekends)Before I get started with this tour, I cannot emphasize this enough: My husband and I are not rich and we are not particularly handy. Heck, we’re not even all that smart. This latter fact was probably the driver behind why two people with little money and even fewer skills would even attempt to build a cabin on an isolated island with no amenities. But armed with a hacked $25 shed plan and an incredibly generous friend with actual skills, we gave it a shot. Here’s how it turned out.
Stylishly simple cabin interior with will of translucent corrugated roofing
The footprint is 10 by 12 feet. That’s right: 120 square feet. The sleeping loft is 6 by 12, making the grand total 180 square feet. The deck, which was added this past spring, is 10 by 10, and boy, does it make a difference. With both doors open, it feels luxuriously spacious, believe it or not. The materials cost – including salvaged windows and doors – was about $7,000.
Loft framing
View a slideshow of this cabin
To get started, I’ll answer the three questions we get asked most often:
So how big is it?
Before we added the deck, the footprint was 10 by 12 feet. That’s right: 120 square feet. The sleeping loft is 6 by 12 10, making the grand total 180 square feet. The deck, which we added this past spring, is 10 by 10, and boy, does it make a difference. With both doors open, it feels luxuriously spacious, believe it or not.
How much did it cost to build?
The materials cost – including salvaged windows and doors – was about $7,000. But there were a bunch of big expenses along the way. We realized we needed a truck on the island, so we spent $2,000 on an awesome orange 1990 Chevy Blazer. We don’t use it often, but when we need it, we really need it. The propane fridge was $2,500. We needed two barge trips to haul the truck and our supplies, so that was another $2,500. And we spent about $500 to rent a generator and a couple of power tools we didn’t own.
How long did it take?
All told, about two weeks of work for two guys: my husband, John, and our good friend Stefan, who brought a lot of skill and positive thinking to the whole project. And when I say two weeks of work, I’m talking about hardcore workdays. They started in right after breakfast and worked straight through till dusk. If the weather was good, they hooked spotlights up to the generator and worked till late at night.