11. Cabin Life Updates: Preparing the Homestead for Winter, Sourdough and Current Projects

Join Shawn James in this week's episode as he shares insights into his journey of self-reliance, and navigating the challenges of living off the grid in the Canadian wilderness. From leaving the corporate world to crafting an off-grid homestead, Shawn provides a glimpse into the rugged beauty of his lifestyle. Despite setbacks, like a recent podcast footage loss, he perseveres through the harsh winter conditions, juggling between an on-grid homestead and a more remote, off-grid dwelling.

In this episode, Sean delves into the meticulous preparations for the impending snowfall, emphasizing the importance of securing firewood and lumber for the colder months. He walks you through the intricacies of his cabin, detailing the off-grid systems, from solar power to drawing water from local sources. As he battles the elements, Sean also updates on the progress of his wife's endeavors in maintaining the on-grid homestead, including cheese-making and sourdough baking.

Explore the challenges of homesteading, from outdoor cleanup to processing meat, as Shawn strives to balance the demands of daily life with ongoing construction projects. From cellar improvements to cabin modifications, Shawn shares the intricate details of his off-grid lifestyle. Tune in for a firsthand account of the joys, struggles, and triumphs of building a life harmonized with nature.

To keep up with Shawn's journey, subscribe on your favourite podcast platform, including Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, and Spotify. Don't miss the weekly updates every Tuesday morning and occasional bonus content. Follow along and witness the growth of this unique platform as Shawn shares his experiences and invites you into the heart of his wilderness homestead. 

 Step into our under-construction cabin as we talk you through our plans for the future, our ongoing projects, and the thrill of seeing our self-reliant dream take shape. As our podcast channel continues to grow, we welcome your insights on future topics and remain grateful for your unwavering support. So, come along, immerse yourself in the rhythm of our lives and get a glimpse of what it truly means to live off the grid.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Good morning everyone. Welcome back to the cabin. If you're new to the podcast, I'm Sean James. I'm the host of the my Self Reliance podcast, but also the my Self Reliance YouTube channel and the Sean James YouTube channel, so I've been on line filming content for mainly YouTube and Facebook for the last eight years, I think. 2015, I think, is when I started, and essentially what it's about, or what my channels have been about, is me kind of leaving the corporate world, leaving that all behind and moving to the bush and building an off-grid homestead, a wilderness homestead for originally for my wife and I, and then my kids got involved during the pandemic and my two daughters.

Speaker 1: 0:51

And here we are in 2023 and I am still on my path on that journey to self-reliance, Working on it every day. I've felt basically onto my third homestead since 2017 and really setting it up to so that my family can thrive during hard times, which we've been through a few hard times recently, as you all know, and I think that we're probably headed for a period, at least in several years or more, or maybe decades, of some difficult times where we have to kind of choose our path, whether we want to live in the virtual world or, in the analog world, the old traditional lifestyle, and we're choosing at least my wife and I are choosing this lifestyle that's a lot more rural and less dependent on society and on the systems. So it's a struggle. Of course, we're always trying to balance what's best for ourselves, best for our family, best for our community and beyond and, like I said, that's a continual struggle. But what it means is that we're working very hard and we're working hard every day, and weekends are only slightly different and really the main reason they're different is because I have to come into our on-grid homestead, visit the on-grid homestead at least on Friday, and sometimes Friday, saturday, sunday, where I get a lot of the chores done here, where I've been building this. Like I said, it's a bit more of an on-grid homestead on 8 1⁄2 acres, but it has full off-grid capabilities and most of the systems actually are off-grid. So I've been working on this, or my wife and I have been working on this since what? 2019. So it's at the point where it's not finished, but it's livable. The more wilderness homestead that's less accessible and it's completely off-grid, with no opportunity to ever put it onto the electrical system, for example, the distribution system in Ontario, which is where we are Ontario Canada, central Ontario Canada. So that homestead has to be built completely off-grid, which is what I've been doing over the last four years, and it's at the point now where I have some solar power and I've run a freezer and a computer and a few other things, but the water systems are just drawn from a stream, a local spring, or a spring, that's rate, adjacent to my property. Actually, the heating and cooking is done by fire, so lots of firewood on the acreage.

Speaker 1: 3:33

So here we are on a Monday, having edited videos over the weekend and had filmed a podcast with my friend Jim Baird. He might know him through his own content or from maybe you saw him on Disney forget what the series is called, he'll talk about it in the podcast. But also him and his brother went along in series season four, I think it was. So we've been friends since 2000 and what 18, 19, much sure went exactly. So I visited him at his house and we filmed and recorded a two-hour podcast and then I brought it back here to the the office and was transferring it from one drive to another and the drive crashed. The host drive crashed and I've lost that footage for now, so I have to go through all the effort of sending that away and getting it recovered, which might take I don't know what it's going to take weeks or months possibly. So that's really disappointing and a bit stressful for me to go through that effort to film and capture that and start editing and then losing it. But that's life. Not going to dwell on it, I am moving on today.

Speaker 1: 4:49

So minus 13 Celsius outside today, which is about minus nine or what it is this morning as I'm recording this, and the temperatures stay basically below freezing for the next seven days and the next seven day forecast at least, and we're getting snow starting, I think, tomorrow night. So my struggle at this time of year it's always I've rushed just to get everything done, all the outside projects done, not just because cold weather's coming, but we tend to get snow that usually starts falling around this time of year, maybe early December, and if we don't get a thaw, it's here for the winter. It doesn't melt until April. So what does that mean? It means that everything that's on the ground right now is either going to be frozen and stuck to the ground, or frozen and stuck to the ground with snow on top of it, which is even worse. So I'm basically trying to clean up the site, both homesteads. I'm trying to make sure all the firewoods off the ground and undercover that I need all the lumber that I've milled on the mill hardwoods and softwoods. I'm trying to get that separated with stickers between them so that they're not sticking together and so that they can continue to dry out. But again, once that gets covered in snow it's really hard to access it. So it's a challenge. But the focus over this weekend, other than spending a few hours with Jim he's about an hour away, so driving to his place and then recording that to end up being at least half a day. So besides that, like I said, I've been doing this outdoor cleanup and trying to get as much firewood cut, split and undercover as possible. I'm not going to continue to do that, probably today and tomorrow until that's no starts, and then I can move back inside the cabin.

Speaker 1: 6:36

Now the cabin itself. So if you're new again to the channel I've been watching on YouTube. The cabin is really inside dimensions. I think it's 18, I built it 20 by 24, but that includes the porch. So it's 20 feet by 18 feet is the cabin footprint itself, with a six foot by 20 foot porch on the front of it, and then I have a breezeway that I built to get connected to an outdoor kitchen. That's, like I said, attached to that breezeway. That breezeway is eight foot by what is it? Eight feet by 10 feet, and that has this stairway that goes down into the cellar below, which is used for storage, for water storage, for the solar battery backup or solar storage system, electricity storage and mainly for food storage. So it's a root cellar as well as shelves for other items, like food items, like dried goods for example, and back section is potatoes, mainly potatoes, carrots and squash right now.

Speaker 1: 7:41

So that's what I've been up to now, what my wife's been up to, and she's really taken on the more of the on-grid homestead and again, it's self-built. We bought the lot eight and a half acres, cleared it, cleared the trees off of it, cleared a big area for a vegetable garden. We got fruit trees and vegetables growing there and then built the house it was mostly stone and wood and connected it, like I said, to the electrical grid, but with our own water. Well, and we get propane delivered for cooking and heating, but we also have wood that we mainly heat with at this time of year. So she is very busy maintaining this homestead, gardening, getting the produce out of the garden, for example, and preserving that and storing that. It's a big job. It's full time most of the fall actually.

Speaker 1: 8:38

And then on top of that what she spent the weekend doing was making cheese. We started buying milk directly from a farmer, I don't know how long ago 10 years ago maybe and my wife makes cheese with a lot of that Now, on top of what we use for drinking and for putting in coffee and tea. And then she also made a couple of sourdough loaves. So back into sourdough making. But also means you have to basically babysit that sourdough starter. So you have to feed it every day or two and then make something with that starter. As you're developing the starter to be used for bread, you're taking part of it, you're setting it aside. So with that stuff she sets aside, she's making crackers and other bread type items. So she's quite busy doing that this week.

Speaker 1: 9:32

Like I said, I'll spend the next day or two getting the firewood put away, stored and really just, I guess, making sure even the chainsaw and my axes and stuff are put into the shed so that I don't leave them out, and soon as the snow comes and the ground freezes solid, I'll continue doing that firewood processing and collecting for next year. But it gets more challenging as the powder, as the snow gets deeper and powdery. The trees that I fell fall into that snow and get covered in snow. So it's not ideal. So that's why I'm focusing on getting it as much of that done as possible. Now.

Speaker 1: 10:12

The other thing is that I need to get the ATB ready to put away and for now, until I get a little garage built right in front of the outdoor kitchen there, I just tarp it over and just try to keep the snow off of it. I have to not tarp it too tight because then squirrels tend to get inside and make nests inside the thing. So I've got to leave it open, but I can't, if I, stop the snow from getting into it. And then I'll be pulling out the snowmobile and getting that ready and I will start using the snowmobile even when there's only a few inches of snow on the ground, as long as it's cold enough for it. It glides nicely over the frozen ground. Plus, it's a wide track, long, scandic. It's a scandic, so it has good traction in any kind of conditions. So that'll happen probably, maybe this week, depending on how much snow we end up getting. And then I'm moving inside.

Speaker 1: 11:08

So the cellar, the freezer I've pulled out from the wall and I put some wood down. So I'm going to put a wood floor in that section of the breezeway and I can push that freezer back against the wall, get the meat back into it, the moose and the deer and the bear that I've been processing, that'll go in. And then I think I'm cladding the ceiling of that section in the breezeway, the ceiling of the cellar. The electrical is done finally, throughout the cabin Well, not quite, I guess, but the cellar, electrical lights and fans and everything are hooked up. Now the only thing I need to hook up still is the bathroom upstairs, but the cellar. I have one more shelf like full length wall shelf to build to store the canned goods on, which is just mason jars full of dried and pickled foods, mostly fermented foods. I think I'll put sort of a plank floor in the one section, the middle section of the cellar, and then I'm going to probably raise that 1,000 liter tote, that water tote, up a few inches so that when it's full I can drain it out the bottom if I need to clean it out. So that's pretty much it for the cellar, and then I'm done. I think oh well, yeah, I have the materials to put in build a door at the bottom of the stairs, inside the breezeway as you enter the main part of the cellar that's under the log cabin itself, there's a. I'm going to put a door right there just to be able to control the temperatures between the three sections better. So that's going to keep me busy for a few days, which would be nice during the really cold and snowy weather just to work inside and then on the main floor.

Speaker 1: 12:48

Two things what I'm focused or when I need to get done. I'm trying to get a lot of this done before Christmas, when the kids start coming up to visit the bathroom. So I need to get the legs on that claw foot tub, get that raised. I need to plumb it. So I need to put a drain in and run it outside underneath the cabin and then out to the outside the footprint of the cabin. And then I have the sink and I need to build a cabinet for the sink and then sink, put the sink in and plumb that in and then hook up some kind of hose back to the water tote for pumping the water up from the cellar into the bathroom and then the composting toilet. I just have to vent that outside, maybe put the urine diverter as well. Going outside so busy enough. That's another, I don't know, with everything else I have to do cooking from scratch, heating with wood, just dealing with all that kind of stuff. I don't tend to get a lot done in a week really as far as building the infrastructure. So we're probably talking the rest of the week just to get the cellar done and then another week to get the cabin done.

Speaker 1: 13:52

If you've been following along, pretty much all last week was spent just processing meat. So the moose that I had shot back in September most of that was in the freezer still in full quarters or big pieces, and I needed to cut that up, wrap it and get that back into the freezer, and the deer that I shot to process that completely. And then the few bear quarters that I had from the spring that were in game bags stored in the freezer had to cut those up as well. So that ended up taking most of the week. Then if you've been watching then you'll notice that I've taken off a lot of hair, so there's half a day just to shave this head and this beard down to more respectable levels for my age. I think it makes me look quite old because I'm quite very gray or white. And you know, I said to my wife you know I have plenty of time to look older than my age, or plenty of time to look like a senior. So I'll wait maybe another 10 years before I start growing a full beard and full head of hair like that again. Anyway, I think that's it.

Speaker 1: 15:01

That's a bit of an update for the week and if you want to continue to follow along on this podcast, of course I'm on Apple and Google podcasts and Spotify and I'm not sure where else.

Speaker 1: 15:14

We put it up through Emily.

Speaker 1: 15:16

My daughter actually edits these podcasts and then she uploads them, so it's kind of distributed to different podcast platforms and also I put these videos on my Sean James YouTube channel.

Speaker 1: 15:28

So please, you know I was going to ask to I don't even know how you subscribe or follow, but anyway, go to your favorite podcast platform and have a listen and just tune in weekly, for sure every Tuesday morning, so you put out these kind of update videos and then throughout the week, if I have time to film something and Emily has time to edit it, then we'll put up random podcasts as well. We're on our 10th episode right now and interesting to watch the growth of this new platform or content type. For me, compared to the YouTube channel, it's starting over again, so it's kind of exciting just to watch the numbers grow and get your feedback on what you think of what I've done so far and what you'd like to hear for future podcasts. So I guess that's it. I'm going to sign off and get back to work. So thanks for following along and I look forward to seeing you back here at the CAVA next time. Take care.