The purpose of this post is to give you my step-by-step progress update in my endeavor to construct one hell of a off the grid cabin that will hold up to Alaska's often extreme weather. Can it be done? Find out with me and click on that follow button! Below I will be showing you a range of different photos to detail what I am doing and maybe you can give me some friendly suggestions or, you may want to take a gander around this blog and learn something for yourself.
One of the most important parts of building a cabin is finding good ground to build it on. You can't just place your cabin willy-nilly anywhere. It's always a good ideal to check out the soil that your cabin will be sitting or standing on.
Look at the trees that are growing around you. Trees can be a very good indication to what the composition of the soil may be like. Alaska presents some of the most difficult terrain to build on, not only do you have a ever-changing layer of permafrost to contend with, you also have saturated tundra to deal with. I was lucky to find a a parcel that had a natural gravel bed under the topsoil. I ended up digging a test hole that you will see in this first picture. Maybe a little overkill?
The survey stakes I have set up here were just to give a rough idea to where I wanted the cabin. I came back later with some mason line to take actual measurements. The cabin size will be 16 feet my 24. By the way, I wish that hole wasn't there anymore. I need to fill that sucker in! Talk about an elephant trap, I fell in this damn hole a few too many times and I wasn't the only one to!
This next picture is my pylons, or what some people may refer to as the foundation post. We'll just call them the pylons. This was when all was said and done. I leveled each and every post to a level plain. This took a little surveying with a scope leveler. With the post I put them about four feet into the ground and reenforced a lot of them with concrete.
After a good winter of mushing dogs, spring finally came around giving me a great opportunity to transport all my goods. It is now time to drag all my building materials in with a snowmachine.
This was my drop site for my lumber. Here you see most of my floor along with some other necessities.
The hardest part was hauling all the 24 footer "I" beams over a mile into my property. I got stuck a few times on trees. Second hardest was hauling the 8"X8"X16 footers, my back wasn't too jazzed about that one.
Phase two begins: Building.
This is the most up to date picture I have at this time. Anyways, I crossed braced the pylons using 2"X6" pressure treated lumber, that way there is even more support and the pylons will be less likely to lean over in the future. I also tacked the 2X6es on with some good hefty hex lag bolts. In this picture you can also see my stringers which are a beefy 8"X8"X16'.
