BUILDING an OFF GRID SURVIVAL HOUSE to pay for itself.

all right you guys we're going to do something kind of a little bit different today normally on this channel we talk about construction equipment tools and job sites but i want to talk to you guys about something that i think is personally pretty important and that's not being dependent upon somebody else for your personal welfare i'm a big firm believer in being self-reliant in fact the property i'm in right now this is not my house out in the country this is my house in the city but i've developed a number of safety protocols into this house that allow me if the grid goes down i can still heat i'll still have water but i'm going to take this to the next level up north and i'm developing and building a property out to be completely independent and not needing anyone else for any of my needs and so we're going to head north today and we're going to check out what my game plan is and i need to hear from you if this is something that you guys find cool and also another thing we're going to be doing is opening this box this is not a tool this box is one of the personal toys in my life the personal joys the things that i find really interesting and i'm super pumped about what's in this box so we're gonna also be opening this up and checking this out in just a few minutes but let's head north and start to check out what my plan is for up there and how to become self-reliant good morning good evening good afternoon you guys we're up at shangri-la and we still got a ways to go on this property um but we are going to be starting a brand new project going to be taking a modular home and converting it over into a self-sustaining off-the-grid shelter and i want to know from you guys if that's something that you guys would like to go along for the ride on something like that let me explain my thinking up here the whole concept of being up here is because uh you know i've seen i see what's happening in the world today you guys it's it's obvious not just with you know wars and conflicts breaking out but also just locally like what happened in texas a few years ago when the snowstorm hit and the entire grid system failed and there were so many people put at risk and i wanted to create something that i could go up and still protect my family this is basically a modular home and one of the things there's this misconception about modular homes oh they're you know they're kind of sub par and actually nothing could be further from the truth the modular home is actually built much better than a stationary stick frame home for one reason and one reason only they have to withstand the rigors of traveling down the road getting moved into place getting jacked up jacked down and then finally set into place without shifting without moving so modular homes are already really structurally very strong but they do have a kind of a look to them and what we're going to do with this modular home is we're going to completely change the way this looks there is a method to my madness now hear me out and let me know what you think of this i want to create this as my shelter so if the world goes south i've got my off the grid screw the system place that i can go and be safe but if the world doesn't go south i want to be able to rent out shangri-la down below me and i want to be able to rent this out and have people come in and lose the stigma of oh i'm renting a modular home and i apologize if i've offended any of you guys by saying stigma about a modular home but it is what it is so let's just take a quick peek and then i'll walk you through some of the details of what i want to do and the method to my madness with this we're going to put in a wood burning fireplace i don't want to be dependent on the grid for my heat i don't want to be dependent on electricity to power my furnace i don't want to be dependent on propane to heat this house and currently this entire property is dependent on somebody else supplying me the fuel to heat it now my house down below my main cabin i could not install a wood burning fireplace and make it make sense so i built that structure as the main property that i'll personally live in hoping nothing ever happens but i can also rent it out when i'm not there and get you know recoup my funds recoup my losses or my investment not losses my investment into the property but up here wood burning fireplace goes in this corner i'm gonna put a mantel in place i'm going to store my wood there i've got a covered deck right out here i'm going to be storing wood in the winter time i can completely use this entire zone to store my wood and keep it close at hand so um as we walk in walk in here let's just show you around the property what we've got going on just a standard bathroom nothing big uh this entire property has been winterized here's a back bedroom now what i'm going to be doing with this is converting this over to the bunk house and we're going to call it probably the bunk house i don't know what we're going to call this the stoney bunk house because i'm going to be using a lot of stone and i'm going to be using a lot of it from my own house where i took it off from a different structure i'm gonna take this closet out and i'm gonna put a window in here and i can use this as my office at that point but i'm also gonna put bunk beds in here at another bed right here and this room will be able to sleep multiple people at that point we're going to do some cosmetic work in it but here's your befores and then i'm going to take you guys along for the ride if you want to see what that's like now as we go this way the fireplace will be there starting right there right where this window is this all comes out we're going to put in an 8 foot window which will take it right to there from that point we're gonna have support beams put in put headers in across back and forth and then these three windows which happens to be eight foot from this point to that point are going to be taken out and an eight foot patio door is going to be put in now we've got the good old 1970s cabinets in place so there's nothing wrong with these they're functional they're strong but they're really not very aesthetically looking we got the nice gold trim to match and there's a little bit something about that retro look that's not too bad but i like rustic i don't really like 70s retro that's not my personal taste so we're going to be taking all of these cabinets out over here and i saved all of the cabinets from another remodel that i did in the lower cabinet when i built changer lodge down below and we're going to be retrofitting these so these cabinets are going to be coming out of this back bedroom where they're just being stored and used in the kitchen [Applause] that was all the b-roll you get dan let's see what we got in the box yes my thingy came my thingy came all right well let me explain to you guys what this is while i open this this is from i found a website called skull bliss so it's look at that perfect shape so nick do you know what skull bliss is no but i mean do you know the story about what it is no so there's a these these are sustainably sourced animals so they're not slaughtered or killed just for their trophy skull these are animals that are harvested then they use all the parts of the animal they're over and i think the balinese or something you know they're on a different they're on an island far away and what this animals get that well they they raise the animals just like we raise them on the farm right oh look at this and then they hire these local artisans get to come in and then they hand carve and they put these things together and you can get them detailed all sorts of different ways look at that so we got the feathers what do you think yeah it's fancy isn't that nice yeah and what it does is it puts food and water on the table for guys that may not otherwise have them could you help me what do you want me to do hold it hold it or put the horn on [Music] i don't even know if this is the correct side is there a left and a right you're asking me oh boom oh you okay did that hurt all at once yeah sorry yeah there you go you're stalled how does it look is it cool yeah in a kind of creepy way it's awesome it's in a creepy way it's cool okay i can't see it i gotta see it there's no man alive that doesn't want a big giant skull on his wall of some kind of an animal and if you're not going to go out and harvest an animal yourself and use a hundred percent of it yourself i would say this is the way to do it guys i did legitimately i bought this at skullbliss.com and i read the story how they got these animals so no part of the animal went to waste it helps put local people in that country to work that otherwise wouldn't have work and their selection was phenomenal and now you guys got to see me uncrate this and exactly how well it's shipped this is the way they do it nothing special was done so uh let's get right back into my property up north now to heat this home it's a really long home i think it's 72 feet long that heat isn't going to travel and i'm anticipating what's going to happen if i have zero electricity how am i going to heat this and if a wood burning stove over there is not going to provide adequate heat throughout this entire structure so i'm going to put a second word wood burner in right over here this entire room is going to be remodeled and then this these two windows are going to be taken out right here and then i'm going to put in an eight foot window right there so as a rental property as an airbnb somebody can come up here they can lay in the bed or the bed can go here i don't know where look out and see the lake right from the master bedroom they can build themselves a little romantic fireplace heat this up and we're not dependent on propane but from a survivalist standpoint if i'm cold i can i got a furnace going here i got a fireplace going here and i got another one going in the other part of the house i'm gonna have two different sources of heat so that i can get better heat distribution now in here we've got i don't know this is we've got a lot of water stain problems so don't just ignore the tub that's actual what our water looks like it's really rough and speaking of water one of the things that's probably going to be addresses how are you going to get water to this place if there's no electricity we're going to put in a hand pump well now we are we do have a solid well we got a cast iron or we've got a poured well uh so we've got a good well on the property we don't have the water filtration system set up but that well that's on this property depends on electricity again and i'm going to be going completely self-sufficient with this so i'm going to put in a hand pump well so that means worst case scenario if i don't have electricity i can hand pump a well and i can get water again and i can also go right down to the lake and get all of the water i need i've been i've lived on this lake my entire life i've drank that lake water my entire life some of you are like yeah you probably ate lead paint too but you know it is what it is i haven't figured out what i'm going to do with this bathroom yet but i'm just going to show you the before and then as we go through this we're going to be redesigning this to make it a little bit more user friendly people don't use tubs like this i don't know i've never used that tub not because it's filthy this is what it looks like when it's been winterized but just because we just don't use it we use the shower and the shower in this place you know you hit your elbows on when you try to wash your hair so we may i may end up taking this shower out turning this into a closet and then putting this as the entire shower a nice big fat showers i've always loved big fat showers i mean it is what it is if you guys haven't seen already i rebuilt my shower down in shangri lodge report the floor put in all new work but uh this this happens to be the utility closet we've got electric water heater in here uh the pump uh pressure tank is in here uh this this is just gonna be reused as storage so uh there's a method to my madness on what we're gonna be doing and we're gonna start taking you along for the ride i know i did a lot of talking but i kind of want to break this down because i know some of you guys are looking for your own plan b how do you where do you go how where do you when when the crap hits the fan what are you going to do and how are you going to live that's what's that's what i'm building up here is my shelter uh from uh from whatever potential could happen uh so you know what without wasting any more of your time i know this is a long this was 10 minutes of me talking but we're gonna start working next so let's go in here and we're gonna i'm gonna come more talking you guys sorry uh i'm gonna be going through this entire property and getting it to match changer lodge so i used cedar on shangri lodge and you can see i've also custom cut the logs on the outside of the house problem is in the last 18 months it's april 2022 right now in the last 18 months the price of cedar has gone up so much that i can't afford to do this anymore now what i did with this cabin was i actually harvested logs and then we notched them out so that we could create corners and i'm look and what i did is you actually got a dead one there that i'm saving i got another dead one there that i'm saving i'm actually go through and i save all of my dead standing pine and i'm going to be using those as the corner logs up on the stony bunk house like i did with schanger lodge right here the cedar itself is not going to be reused and here's why this is where you're not even going to believe before i tell you how much one of these boards cost this is a 1 by 12 12 foot cedar take a guess how much one board one board cost take your best guess in the comments down below and then what i'm gonna do is i'm gonna tell you have you guessed yet typed it in 74. for that one one board that's 74 that's 150 that's 225 that's 300 to go from there to there in cedar siding i'm going to a local sawmill and i'm getting 1 by 12 rough cut pine and then i'm going to side this house that same board in pine versus from a big box store in the city milled at a local place take a guess how much a 1 by 12 locally milled is going to cost me a pint i know they're not the same board but i can make them look the same or really really really close and i'm going to show you what i use to do to make that color seven dollars when they quoted me that price you guys i stopped and i didn't want to say anything but i'm like could could you just say that one more times i thinking i'm missing a number or something did you say did you miss the two in front of the seven was it 27 was it 30 47 seven it was seven dollars all right let me show you what we're going to be using here this is what we covered the entire house in sickens log and siding transparent stain that's why this that's what makes this house look the way it is i covered my log house in that and speaking of my log house back home if you guys want to see that one let me know in the comments down below uh because that house is actually built to be quite independent as well not as independent off from the grid as i would like but at least it's better than nothing um but some of you guys if you like that look that color that's how that's the product i use that's how i achieve that one of the things that you may be asking yourself is oh man look at you got you got this why why is that that color i don't like that well here's the deal that cedar is left untreated on purpose because i'm intentionally aging it and what i mean is when i leave it without staining it i get a really cool unique patina right there and what that patina ends up looking like i love it so the process is actually pretty fun when i uh when i do this it looks good now but as it ages it actually starts to look better in my own personal opinion i don't know about you guys but this is untreated aged cedar and it just complements everything so well i just i just like how it just makes it very rustic and it also goes with everything else but it kind of offsets it and that up there is going to eventually blend to this down there a little bit of a method to my madness i wanted to share what i'm doing up here uh because i'm a firm believer and having a backup plan having a plan b having a way to to to not be dependent on somebody else for the things that you need and that's where frankie and i have been working on for 18 months up here is building changer lodge and if you want a more thorough tour of shangri-la and of my house back home let me know in the comments down below and i'll put that together for you let me show you one other thing boy i can't stop talking today right like somebody put a quarter in my mouth i'm calling the stoney bunkhouse and this is why you guys these are all the stones that i pulled off from my fireplace back at home and i rebuilt that to change that up to lighten up the load and these are all going to get reused and repurposed and then what i don't like is with stones like this they're concrete they're fake this isn't a real stone it's concrete on the back right when you add real stones and the smaller cobble in between on all those joint spaces you can create the illusion that this is real and then what i do as well just to really bring that home and make it look authentic i take real stones you can actually see i pulled this one off from the fireplace back home and i add real stones into the mix and that just creates finishes that illusion off without adding all of the weight that real stones at because real stones are really heavy i'm not worried about weight in this modular home because it's over built it's built to go down the road it's really they're well fortified you guys look at it you're over there they're really well fortified and so if we have to do some reinforcement we absolutely will i've got no problem putting in headers i've got no problem reinforcing walls i mean it's not that big of a deal to structurally fortify a house so that's the plan i'm gonna call it the stoney bunkhouse i think i don't know what do you guys think it needs a better name than that so tell me what you would call this be nice i know you guys are like oh stay on stupid plan or something like that and some of you guys are uh you know a lot of you guys are totally awesome but that's it for this one god bless you guys go get em and i hope you uh guys hang around for the ride because we got more coming