Aldeer.com Forums Alabama Deer Talk Aldeer General Forum Irishguy's Cabin Build...

You got some UGLY legs.
But them ankles in the new balance, on the other hand.

My ugliness comes from getting kicked in the shins all the time by the ones in the New Balance.

Since I'm off today from my real work and from cabin work I figure out how I'm going to trim everything. I'm going to use a classic cabin style interior door and window trim. So I sketched up a few details to help me estimate how much lumber my buddy Larry needs to mill for me...

The pic on the left is a cool exploded view I found on the innerwebz and the drawing on the right is some of my hen scratchin's:

Man youre doing a great job! It is looking good.

Looks great Irish. I have saved a couple pictures similar to this window trim that I like as well. I think it is going to look great.

That is something to be proud of, really looks good. You might want to check out this guy in Canada that built his cabin using only hand tools - his youtube channel is called My Self Reliance - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCIMXKin1fXXCeq2UJePJEog

On the window/door trim, try using a 1x6 for the header piece.

I'm watching his intro video right now. He's either craftsman, crazy or maybe a combination of both. It's a really neat video.

I posted about that guy a long time ago. Go back and check my threads. There was a pretty decent thread on him here. He seems like a pretty decent dude. He has an awesome dog.

It's kind of ironic that he eschews modern tools and stuff and is building an off-grid cabin in the middle of the Canadian woods, but then he (or his wife) is filming everything with multiple cameras and a drone and the editing all the film on a computer and then uploading everything to YouTube.

Irish Jr., the computer guru, says that guy easily makes a comfortable living from those YouTube videos based on the number of views he gets.

I can tell you... Mr. and Mrs. Irish are NOT using hand saws and hammers. We are using all the power tools available to us including, power miter saws, table saws, air compressors, pneumatic nailers, etc... and we are still working our asses off.

Roger that. Thanks for the suggestion. Glad to know someone is paying attention!

Some of the BIG BIG time Youtube stars are making serious money.
Well into the 6 figure range and some into the millions.

The main thing I like about watching is that it's very relaxing to watch, because most of the videos are just him building stuff or cooking cabin food and no talking or commentary until the very end. It's a tremendous departure from normal TV with all the "drama." If for no other reason I have to give him kudos for that. There's also some pretty nice camera work in there too. Other than the crazy bugs in the summer time up there that he has to deal with and the crazy cold in the winter time up there it looks like a cool place.

That said, I wouldn't trade Camp Little Ridge for his place.

Camp Little Ridge is my happy place.

Funny nail gun story this weekend...

So Saturday morning Mrs. Irish is cooking breakfast and I'm measuring, cutting and nailing up shiplap. Well, my 15 gauge nailer started to act up. It was jamming, not retracting the piston, etc... So thinking the worst I thought, "Well, the damn gun is going out." Instead of driving all the way to Lowes and buying another, which would have been at least an hour and a half round trip, I decide to take the gun apart and see if I could find the trouble. I took it apart made sure it was all cleaned and then oiled it all really good, but it would only work intermittently, So I take it apart again and tried again.

By this time I'm about 45 minutes into this thing and getting more and more pissed and frustrated. Then after reassembling it for the second time, it occurs to me... I unplugged the compressor out by the power pole so we could run the A/C in the mini-cabin the night before. So I go out, plug in the air compressor, which immediately kicks on and by the time I get back upstairs to the nail gun, now that it actually has air pressure, is working perfectly again. So that's my dumbass nail gun story for the weekend.

We still managed to get the other upstairs bedroom finished. I'm convinced as soon as we get out of the upstairs things will really start moving. These high ceilings and all the bevel cuts are really slowing things down and we are going through shiplap like poop through a goose.

Pics of the 2nd upstairs bedroom with all the shiplap installed.





The thing about upstairs is the little closets with the high ceilings create there weird unusual places in the tops of the closets. So we decided to add another door in the tops of the closets and I am going to build a nice wooden "library" ladder that we hang on the wall upstairs so we can access these storage areas.

Happens to the best of us!

Cabin still looks great!

looks good, better than I would do. read the whole thing and just couldn't help thinking with all those nooks and crannys you sure wouldn't want brown recluses to move in and infest the walls. I would recommend spraying around it with demon to discourage them from the get go. maybe a regular perimeter spraying from the start would mean less spraying inside in the future. nothing to worry about, just something you don't want to worry about.

Funny you should say that...

Since I'm white washing the shiplap (Take a look at the 3rd pic and the 9th and 10 boards up from the bottom on the left side of the door to see the examples of the two different types of whitewashing I'm considering) and since we're painting the trim semi-gloss white, I think we are going to caulk the edges of all the trim to seal it all up.

But to answer your question we are already spraying but we do need to get a pest control service on board right about now. Especially a good termite bond company.

Amateurs my ass. Place looks great dude.

OK... So we are making some big time progress now. I was only going to take Monday and Tuesday off and come up here and work by myself, but on a lark I decided to text my brother and see if he had any time off from his job to maybe help a little. He's been a carpenter for about 47 years. He's 5 years older than me. He's a serious trim carpenter on a lot of very high end homes.

So he tells me he just quit his job and needs some work, so I paid him to help me all week this week. He and I together got as much done in one week as Mrs. Irish and I could have gotten done in about 6 weekends.

My brother:



He drinks PBR like water and smokes about a pack of Pall Malls a day. That's an old carpenter for you.

We basically got the whole downstairs ready for flooring, counter tops, trim and the tile back splash. We worked like Hebrew slaves getting all the ship lap installed. A lot of high work in the stairwell.

Finished mantle ready for the ledge stone and the wood stove to be installed:



After all the cabinets were installed and the ship lap installed he suggested we make a run to Lowes and get the stuff to finish up the stairs, and finish them we did!



Something else he did was to wire up another breaker in the temporary power box so that we could run the cabin A/C on a separate circuit from the compressor and power tools. It was a game changer. Just the one window unit kept the cabin at 78 or below all week. I have smaller units in each of the upstairs bedrooms, so between all of those we will easily be able to keep the cabin plenty cool in the hottest summers.

More stair pics of my Bro's carpentry skills. He's giving me a bunch of 1" square iron tube spindles left over from a job and we are going to use them on the stairs.



We installed drywall up behind the cabinets because all of that up to the ceiling will get subway tile and grey grout. We will be using Acadia butcher block counter tops with butterfly joints where we connect them in the corners. I never realized that there was so much work to installing cabinets correctly. He used all kinds of shims and spacers to get everything perfectly level and square. I learned a lot just watching him work all week. He is an amazing carpenter.



To cap the week off I installed the Compass Rose I designed in Autocad and had Roland at Metal Market in Ft. Payne CNC for me. It turned out great and makes a nice addition to our top deck. I got out my trusty compass from my Jeep gear to set it right. If you're out in the woods I would never trust a smart phone compass. We had two phones out there with compasses and my Suunto compass. The only one that was right was the "real" compass.



Mrs. Irish and I were getting a little burned out and the contribution my brother has made has been a complete game changer and reinvigorated us to push on through and get it finished. We bought all the interior doors and flooring Friday at Dixie Salvage in Ft. Payne so those will be getting installed soon. We may yet meet our goal of getting finished for the Holidays.

Nice. It looks like it's getting very close.


How far off were the phone compasses?

Beatiful place. Need to break it in with an aldeer get together (after the work is done). Lol