One Year Alone in Forest of Sweden Building a Log Cabin
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If you're felling a large amount of trees in a forest, at the bare minimum you need the blessing of the land owner (if that isn't you). Most likely, you'll also need in addition to this a permit to fell trees to begin with, because land owners in most countries aren't free to simply fell any amount of trees they wish just because they own the land.
It's obviously an impressive feat to build a log cabin from scratch, but since this step is so often completely omitted, I have to ask myself whether this is because it's considered too boring, or because there are people out there who think that as long as you go far enough into the woods, you can do whatever you want because no one will notice.
The building codes are administrated by the municipalities. To find out more, one would visit the website of the municipality where one would like to build the house. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_municipalities_of_Swed...
https://www.svt.se/nyheter/lokalt/vastmanland/han-bygger-en-...
Interestingly, if you're First Nations, those laws don't apply to you and you can essentially build whatever you like on Crown Land, provided you can make the case it relates to your cultural heritage.
There are many places where you could build and live the rest of your life without seeing another human (all on crown land) if you are so inclined. I don't hate society quite that much yet, but I'm keeping it in my back pocket.
0 https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/hidden-japanese-se...
As to building codes, they are very strict in zoned areas, possibly the strictest in the world, but it's much more relaxed in rural areas. Plus even in zoned areas you can always build a 30 m2 supplemental building. Plus a 15 m2 shed.
> considered too boring
Would you really find it interesting to watch the process of him signing the contract to acquire the land? I can't think of anything less exciting than that.
My favorite was where someone built a house in the middle of a block, in previously unused land between the houses, and had to get permission from 17 separate future neighbors to tear down and rebuild the back walls of their gardens while digging the foundations of their house.
I thought to put this here just because it's such a romantic notion regardless and I'd love it to be true, but I fear my dear friend was never less than a true romantic soul himself and it may have been a genius line with the ladies fed up with London living...
Seems there's an important detail here.
It is quite offensive. But, it is a prime example of American imperialism/colonialism at its best, when the American empire is not only in hardcore decline, but literally crumbling, if not collapsing.
Also, I love all of the Americans in the past few days who are trashing both the European Union (who did not suspend AstraZeneca vaccinations) and the European Union countries that have suspended the AstraZeneca vaccine for a week, most likely, at the absolute longest. By the way, those EU countries made that decision independently from the EU, so maybe you should not be trashing the EU here. We also have other vaccines in our arsenal to fight this. We also trust our officials, and we have a culture of doing so. We are willing to pay taxes not only for a stable government, but a stable society.
Yes, the EU did mess up with the procurement of vaccines, but we will get through this. We have handled the pandemic better than America has (I am also American...).
Oh yeah, to the Americans reading this: the EU, and its founding and its precursor organizations were designed for “what to do after your empire fails”. I suggest Americans maybe try to learn about this. Otherwise they are going to have more of the same, as in rulers like Trump or worse.
Free as long as you live there afterwards.
https://www.hemnet.se/bostad/tomt-norra-rorum-hoors-kommun-s...
10k SEK, close enough to cities to commute.
[0] https://www.hemnet.se/bostader?by=land_area&housing_form_gro...
Great memories: I spend an entire summer building a primitive "log cabin" from young trees as a kid with a few friends in the forest behind my parent's house. After the cabin was nearly finished, we were chased one day by a group of adults (apparently the owners of the forest) and hid a few hours deep in the woods. We only returned the next spring, when we finished the roof. I remember how proud we were when we cycled to the hardware store one day and bought a cheap lock for the cabin door. We lost interest the next year, of course, but the cabin remained intact for years. The local kindergarten used to go there for a few years.
It sounds like our productions were a lot less involved than your "log cabin" though. Mostly just switches and young hollies tied together with briar vines to form a roof, occasionally with walls (built of the same materials).
In many parts of world it is pretty easy to acquire land out in the middle of nowhere and basically do whatever the hell you want on it.
I'm not entirely sure about Swedish regulations in regards to building permits, but based on a quick Internet search it looks like one may or may not require a permit, based on the location, size and purpose of the the log cabin, and as a rule of thumb one should check with the local authorities before starting construction. The Swedish rules seem to be more lax when the building is to be located in sparsely populated areas.
If it's anything like the rules in Finland there's probably a bunch of environmental and building codes that needs to be adhered to, but on the other hand this is a traditional build so it might be perfectly possible that he just needed to submit the plans and get someone to approve them.
[1]: https://www.svt.se/nyheter/lokalt/vastmanland/han-bygger-en-...
> In Sweden, a friggebod is a small house which can be built without any planning permission on a land lot with a single-family or a duplex house. It is named after Birgit Friggebo, who was the Minister for Housing in 1979 when the new type of building was allowed. The word is a portmanteau of Friggebo and bod, the Swedish word for shed.
Regardless, it's usually a matter of documenting that the new building adheres to various standards.
https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attefallshus (link in Swedish)
These rules are mostly for built-up areas with neighbors. The rules used to be very draconian, but during the late 70s they were liberalized.
I want to clarify that I'm not saying this building is illegal, which is what some people seem to choose to read: I simply said that a large step in this process often seems to be omitted.
If you own the land, and neither the land nor the tree (specimen or species) is protected, you should have no problem.
How do you know if you don't bother to look it up? Many countries have national parks and entire areas where any "modification" to nature is illegal.
Purchasing land, getting building permits, etc. are not part of the fantasy, so they are never going to feature in the video.
It's like saying "these videos of hot bikini models oddly omit all the dieting and exercise"
You consider these videos fantasy, for others they may be instructional. That everyone watches popular videos with exactly the same perspective seems pretty unlikely.
You may look at this video as instructional, and that's probably okay, but it definitely wasn't created for that purpose. So its up to you to do the research on the omitted content.
"Hello, Geico. How much to insure a Huracan?"
Technically, I need to get a permit to cut down _any_ tree over 5 years old more than 30 meters from my house. Nobody does this, and the law is unenforced, but I probably wouldn't put up a video of it for fear of attracting attention.
I also should have tried to get a permit for my daughters' playhouse - _clearly_ not an inhabitable structure - because it's in the curtilage of a protected structure. But I didn't.
Recording things and putting them online invites complaint from busybodies though.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UWgG5pmhdik
They tend to get more into the realities of this type of work and lifestyle.
http://www.seattle.gov/sdci/codes/codes-we-enforce-(a-z)/tre...
California is famous for such regulations. In other states you are unlikely to have problems.
Arguably, this is to protect what little woodland we have left. Practically, though, it means that I would _love_ to reforest my land with native species, but don't, because it will forever lose its value as grazing land.
And I tend to agree, though private property is a complicated thing. After all, who did you buy it from? And who did they buy it from? And the person before that? Unless you're royalty and can defend your property by force (arguably the only true allodial title), you're basically borrowing the land from whatever government defends it for you.
“Where’s the R40 insulation?” “This is a 3-season cabin unoccupied 75% of the time. Or the insulation is weak, but the structure and windows are small, so it’s actually far more efficient than an R40 mansion”
“Where’s the septic field?” “The toilet is for guests (100flushes/yr) into a holding tank, pumped out yearly. I use the outhouse”
“Where’s the 20A circuits in the kitchen?” “I have 1 socket for 1 appliance, everything else is gas”
“Why aren’t there sockets every 10 feet?” “The whole point is to NOT have dozens of gizmos here”
“Your shower doesn’t drain into an approved gray-water system” “I can wash my car/shower outside but can’t shower with a bucket indoors?”
“This doesn’t meet min sqft requirements” “I built all the sqft I need, I’ll spend a half my time here hiking and fishing”
Crap like that.
One whole reason to build out in the boondocks is to build as you like. So it’s kind of beside the point, I think.
On the other hand if you want to build to some code, no one is stopping you either, so there is that.
In essence, you will have a hard time trying to do this.
It is similar to how, for example, there are many videos for how to travel the world by bike and how you can budget for it daily, but extremely few of those videos explain that cyclists typically have to work really hard in some boring normal job for a while to save up that budget for their travels, and then the process of buying all the necessary gear can be long and frustrating as one has to compare various websites and wait for things to arrive by post. Who wants to watch that?
I personally found his series a bit painful to watch as he's doing it all the hard way (which is his point).
This is not a good thing though.
Exceptions apply in some localities, please check before cutting down all your trees.
Serious question. Why does the government have any business telling me what I can and cannot do with my own property if it does not impact others?
I'm not saying i support clearcutting, from a purely environmental and aesthetic point of view, but I really disagree with government or any other associations telling me what I can do with my own property.
Almost everything we do impacts others though, in some way.
In a rural area in bulk, they effect air quality and carbon capture. Also erosion and water run-off. Clear-cutting a forest completely changes the local ecology, and not for the better, in a way that is irreversible.
We all need trees, and they take many years to grow to maturity. they should not be cut down en masse capriciously. And to do so effects others.
Other posters have noted this but Canada is almost unique because of its vast forested wilderness and sparse population. If you wanted to buy a parcel of forest somewhere and build a cabin, it wouldn't be a particularly expensive undertaking, so long as it's well away from an expensive urban area like eg the Lower Mainland of BC.
The only time you're in danger with the law is when some logging company buys the rights to the land where your cabin happens to be and you're in the way of the clearcutting. But if you're far enough from any roads even this is extremely unlikely.
Richard Louis Proenneke (/ˈprɛnəkiː/; May 4, 1916 – April 20, 2003) was an American self-educated naturalist, conservationist, writer, and wildlife photographer who, from the age of about 53, lived alone for nearly thirty years (1969–1999) in the mountains of Alaska in a log cabin that he constructed by hand near the shore of Twin Lakes. Proenneke hunted, fished, raised and gathered his own food, and also had supplies flown in occasionally. He documented his activities in journals and on film, and also recorded valuable meteorological and natural data.[1][2] The journals and film were later used by others to write books and produce documentaries about his time in the wilderness.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walden
Actually I don't think it is moral. This idea of going somewhere remote and just living off the land.
As an adult you are supposed to produce more than you are consuming.
Just as when you were a child or when you become old, society will give you more than what you are capable of producing.
Can't I just produce enough to support myself? Why would that be immoral?
He moved to nature at the age of 53 and stayed there until right before he died. If anything by not consuming housing and healthcare he 'took' less than his peers of the same age.
Both Proenneke and Thoreau have made massive contributions, no doubt about that.
Yes, we extract a lot of value. From the earth, from others (directly, or indirectly). But perhaps the depressing fact is that in terms of raw creation of value, perhaps "playing even" is not even such a bad "score"?
But the farmers and home builders who work at scale require tools and resources created by industry, which in turn require raw materials, an ability to process these materials, and an ability to transport them.
So are people working in those industries any less important than the farmers and home builders themselves?
Further, those industries are capitally intensive and require a financial network to raise and allocate the capital required so these industries can function.
In a nutshell - everything is connected. How do you simply decide where to draw the line of who is contributing an essential service and who isn’t?
PS: Extracting wealth from other people is a meaningless transaction when summing the net impact of every person.
Debt / GDP ~= 4 years. That doesn't sound insane, particularly if much of that debt is secured, but I'm not any sort of financial analyst.
Of course the other issue is that my personal "gdp" runs out when I retire - thus I have to pay capital as well as interest to continue to own the asset afterwards. That doesn't apply to countries.
This inconveniently conflicts with the old focus on economic output, the 1950s baritone-narrated black and white documentary of assembly lines and all the production numbers going up - progress!
Instead, the dude in the wilderness might hint at a happy and fulfilled life based on limited ressources.
Consider how much of the fruits of our labor ends up in landfills and this seems like a somewhat disastrous philosophy to me.
I feel that this view is terrible, not sure about why. Maybe because even if they can't stand others, you still want them to keep suffering.
I think life is no bargain. Living in society, I try to be nice with others and most of the time I'm on the nicest group of people AFAICT. But living by certain codes, such as strict non-violence or considering that we all are indebted with society, I can't agree. Moral purism just seems wrong to me, if it makes any sense.
if you are saying that we're become indentured to modern society, I have never thought of it like this before but I am immediately inclined to agree with the idea given how much intellectual and practical learning and effort as well as usually some form of capital it requires to be able to live quietly somewhere on the fruits of your self catering labor. I suspect that if more people were able to access such a a life, then the quality of life for everyone might be notably improved.
Back in the pre-Victorian era this was certainly not the norm. All these costs were self funded, and unsurprisingly people were uneducated, but parents still invested for their future by educating their children.
It reminds me of the thought: if you're a hunter-gatherer and you hunt and kill a deer, you can only eat so much. You have no preservation system. What is the best way to store it? In someone else's belly.
So society begins with a community, where by cooperation we achieve more together than we could individually. I feel that this is where these isolationist/survivalist ideas break down. Even the young man building the cabin is relying on years of education, knowledge about tools and construction, and of course food and medicine. I'm also not sure I would consider this sustainable if it can only be accessed by a fraction of the world's population.
The irony is that this image of off grid living is funded by the >30 million hours of screen time from people in high income, high carbon economies. My computer is using 130W just watching it, though lower on mobile I guess. So should we ban entertainment? No, because it sparks the imagination and cooperation, the force multipliers of society.
For instance, he used to bring his laundry home for his mom to do.
Small societies, done thousands of times, sound a lot like individuals.
Unless you're proposing some sort of overarching organization principle by which these individuals agree to abide, in which case...
To your point, I would argue that your moral responsibility is at least to break even, which you can’t do in isolation because your parents in most cases sacrificed a huge chunk of their lives and resources raising you.
>As an adult you are supposed to produce more than you are consuming.
This is just a fascinating moral outlook to me.
One has the responsibility to look after one's parents, but why is there any moral imperative to be 'productive'?
For 40 Years, This Russian Family Was Cut Off From All Human Contact, Unaware of World War II: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/for-40-years-this-rus...
Lykov Family: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lykov_family
The Lykov family (Russian: Лыков, romanized: L'ikov) is a Russian family of Old Believers. The family of six spent 42 years in partial isolation from human society in an otherwise uninhabited upland of Abakan Range, in Tashtypsky District of Khakassia (southern Siberia). Since 1988, only one daughter, Agafia, survives. In a 2019 interview, Agafia explained how locals were in contact with the family through the years and in the 1950s there was a newspaper article about their family.
Agafia Lykova: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agafia_Lykova
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentti_Linkola
And Lasse Nordlund (I think he was called "optimistic Linkola" or "positive Linkola" somewhere :):
If you are at all intrigued by this, I highly recommend them. Buying a DVD may seem dated, but I promise, these are worth it.
The one who got me into it was of course "Primitive Technology": https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAL3JXZSzSm8AlZyD3nQdBA/vid...
Which spawned a huge number of copy-cat channels which are all pretty good too:
Survival Skills Primitive: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UChUP6B_3zcdFYZnOdMM21og/vid...
Primitive Skills: https://www.youtube.com/c/PrimitiveSkillsnet/videos
- Turn on subtitles when watching Primitive Technology, he explains stuff in the subs.
https://www.reddit.com/r/PrimitiveTechnology/comments/gscvv8...
Edit: hit the CC button if your Finnish is rusty.
There are many one-off DIY projects on youtube that have greatly expanded my knowledge... but I worry that these kind of videos are piece-meal, stumbling-in-the-dark recreations of lost wisdom.
Something that reveals the "culture" or mindset of these kinds of videos: The author felt the need to justify using modern tools (tractor instead of horse) but no one questions what's traditional about a young man building alone, without a team of men of different ages.
I thought Mountain Men (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mountain_man) were the exception, not the rule.
And for the cabin/upcycling vibe, Modern Self Reliance: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UClhInAMlPM1UcjD8lI4o7UA
And for more solitary living-off-the-land type stuff, Shawn James at My Self Reliance: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCIMXKin1fXXCeq2UJePJEog
Edit: I think cutting the trees video might actually be few years before building the cabin.
Edit2: In his latest video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jsIgziUp1LE you can already see how some of the logs have bluish color several centimeters into the log. They have been getting wet at some point. Bluish and moldy is bad news.
"House museum. Traditional log house by traditional methods in 1980" (Finland). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajb9FMzmamw
Wooden log houses need long eaves to keep the water away and logs dry.
Here's a clip
Proenneke was a trained mechanic, who spent most of his life around farms and who's father was a carpenter and welder. He was also a very happy introvert. At age 53 the man had enough skills under his belt to fully appreciate the risks and work needed to survive in that harsh environment.
McCandless was unfortunately just a young man in search of himself.
Funny to see how his axework improves over time, in the beginning unsure and shallow, then later on with much more force and confidence.
In the end I wound up using makita battery powered chainsaw. You can do precision work and quickly too.
I did not have any skill before and my vacation was short, but theres now a 5' by 12' cabin, 8' tall, on my yard.
This summer it's the floors, roof etc.
The video is much cooler of course, just saying if you want to try something with limited time.
I had help every now and then. Looking back it's a project for two people definitely. Logs are heavy and having four eyes is better than two, especially as a beginner.
It's not a new video. but HN posts about it just AFTER I watch it. Coincidences eh.
It happened to me several times now. I suspect there is a "zeitgeist" sort of thing to the Youtube's recommendation engine. I mean it recommends same individual videos, to a given demographic of people in same span of time.
PS : I live in Sweden, I suspected it was just that.
Might be one of my all time favorite videos - the story of a man building a beautiful cabin in Latvia I think, from scratch using traditional tools.
I feel really drawn to doing the same thing even though it's an impossible dream for a huge number of insurmountable reasons.
I am so excited to sit down and watch the OPs video - food for my soul - thank you for posting.
Which is fine, building a cabin on your own is cool as hell in of itself. But the title and video description sort of give the impression that he's living off the land alone, which doesn't seem to be the case?
It's the same as with normal individuals, actually: The more the individual traits make one prefer solitude (like introversion or social anxiety), the more it is mandatory to maintain steady contact with others, otherwise the own comport zone steadily shrinks further.
Sweden has thousands of remote houses (ødegård) that be bought or rented for very little.
It can be refreshing going there for a few days. Drinking fresh cold water from a well in the forest, no electricity, a fireplace, some mosquitos, crayfish, playing scrable and looking at the rain.
And then being reminded why it is actually quite nice and much more interesting to live in a big city.
Everybody else around has a manicured lawn and ornamental shrubs. My garden is unkempt mess to them. That is what I mean by problematic relationship with nature.
I don't think you can fix that by only occassionally spending few days in cabin. I had to discover much of it myself, have personal experience with communities as described and still would like to meet like-minded people but...somehow there aren't many.
Now now, surely you mean thousands of mosquitos. Especially if you have a lake nearby, which is a real big possibility in Sweden.
In Spring, it rained (heavily, 5m of rain a year on average) 28 days out of 30, and on the other two it drizzled. Depending on the moods of the weather, floods could take out the roads[2], or slips, and never mind the earthquakes.[3]
During the winter you had to fill the kettle at work before 10am, because 10am to 11am was the coldest part of the day and that's when the pipes would freeze (the village lay in a valley running north to south, and the mountains limited winter sunlight to 11am to 2pm).
We weren't "returning to nature" as such, we always had power and usually dial-up (at a terrible bps...), but we were rather close to nature's virtues[4] and vicissitudes. We all relied heavily on wood fires, some on coal, although we only lost electricity some of the time.
What was really interesting for me though, was how a population of 37 handles all of the above, without killing each other.
Generally, everyone had one or two people that, I'd guess you'd call friends, but in reality were "people I can spend time with okay". Other than that, everyone kept themselves to themselves. In such a small village, it's very easy to gossip, hell, when you've only got two TV channels (and did I mention the shit dial-up?) it's an attractive option.
But, there were three types of occasions the entire village came together:
1) Happy Hour at the local pub on a Wednesday. And this misleadingly named event could last until 4am.
2) Cleaning up all the crap that tourists like to leave behind. So. Much. Litter. Basically an emu parade[5] over 3km of village.
3) Whenever an emergency hit. Whether that was flooding, a power outage, a bush fire, everyone pitched in as they could, no matter their differences, everyone was in it together.
I really enjoyed the model of living apart together, to be honest. Only reason I moved is that I got married, and about 20km down the road was a rather worrying neighbour, who I didn't want to subject my wife to...[6]
> The Alpine Fault has a high probability (estimated at 30%) of rupturing in the next 50 years. The rupture will produce one of the biggest earthquakes since European settlement of New Zealand, and it will have a major impact on the lives of many people.
But yeah, there was no inexorable slide towards a cult, because no-one could be bothered with that crap. And there were no "This man is actually an island, screw you John Donne" people, because when the the freeze came, and the cloud base was 100m above you, and visibility up and down the valley was 200m from you, in a valley 500m wide, everyone realised that they needed to talk to somebody every now and then, just to escape the reality that nature had put them in a frozen box.
[2]: https://i.imgur.com/kFryHnV.jpeg
[3]: https://westcoast.recollect.co.nz/assets/display/82881-max
[4]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JyU3Q5DeKEI
[5]: https://www.macquariedictionary.com.au/resources/aus/word/ma...
[6]: https://www.gns.cri.nz/Home/Learning/Science-Topics/Earthqua...
Try getting outside of cities and go somewhere rural next time you take a vacation.
Get somewhere actually rural, like a town with less than 1000 people or an area with most people in agriculture. Somewhere people can't see their neighbors. You'll find most people don't care about suburban nonsense like preening lawns and HOAs.
They also work as a great vector to plan outdoor trips for after the lockdowns.
> Building Log Cabin like our Forefathers
Is literally in the title of the video.
And this is in the description:
> Build my own traditional off grid log cabin by hand from the materials of the Swedish wilderness.
Did their Forefathers really use diesel tractors and cement gathered by hand from the Swedish wilderness?
The tractor is a Ferguson TE20 "Grålle" from 1946, they were wildly used to move timber. In 1950 the first chainsaws came to Sweden but they were too big and heavy to be practical. I didn't want to take down every closest tree. So by using the tractor (also as a little tribute) I could haul a few trees from further away, about 150 meters. I would have loved to use a horse but don't have one. yet..
The real contradiction is that by recording this project with the intention to publish this movie to the world I'm afraid that he totally missed out on the very nature connection that he states he wanted to have. Having to think about his future viewers and what angle would best document his work he must have lost the immersion building a cabin in the way his grandfathers did, youtube-free, would mean.
Meh, why is that so important? When I go skiing, half the "fun" is getting great shots. One can argue I'm not as "immersed" as compared to just walking up the mountain and ski down. But to me it enhances the experience and lets me even relive it later.
I don't know... sounds more like "hey, I thought I'd make a hit video that would attract a lot of on grid feedback, unlike my grandpa', who probably wouldn't give a fuck about what the world thinks about his cabin".
Now don't get me wrong, it is OK to create a video on anything, including on how to build a cabin or your experience on building a cabin (which is different) or your experience on living alone for a year (I guess this is not what he did), but this just doesn't add up to me.
I'm pretty sure 98% of people throughout history who have built a cabin -- or any other sort of home for themselves -- were inordinately proud of it, and the extent to which they showed it off was limited primarily by how many people they could force to come see it.
But as I explicitly said the thing I found weird is not that he did share it but the effort he put into the presentation and how I think that doesn't fit with the goal or at least the message.
It's a real accomplishment. I thought part of the point of the internet was to share things we do. This doesn't read as "gross, wannabe influencer" material, but rather a journey of interest and passion, documented for himself and others.
In other words if you want to show and document the process of building such a thing, that's ok. But it's not that. If you want to document your 'journey' of solitude, that's OK too, but you can't do that in my opinion by constantly minding about how you look on camera. Because that kind of defeats any purpose I can think of for solitude. (I.e. am I really alone if I keep thinking about the society that I wanted to leave behind and continue acting as if I was still there and they were still all watching.)
You can look at it as an art project. I.e. "this is how I imagine what it feels like to build a cabine in the woods on your own".
And sorry but I am not able to find confirmation about him doing this in his own land which makes the whole situation a bit more awkward.
Cutting down old trees happens all the time for lumber.
Someone linked to a newspaper article above that made it clear he is building on land owned by his family.
This is a preamble to a novel of the world of pain my hands, arms and joints were in afterward, at my age and shape. And yet despite being an overpaid typist like most of us here, I regularly do heavy repairwork and maintenance, such as digging 110' drainage ditches on my property by hand, shovel and mattock. But it was the jarring impacts that don't play nicely with our flavor of carpal tunnel.
From that limited perspective, I can appreciate the amount of work this feller put into this build. He's using hand tools. The tractor is in lieu of logging horses or borrowing a half dozen people to pull. IMO, the sheer amount of time and effort that went into this is to be respected alone.