hey guys jenna here welcome to my channel where i take you on tours of tiny and unique homes
in today's video we're going to meet one woman who built her own tiny log cabin she
lived in this tiny home for a few years and then expanded her family and added on a few additions
she's going to take us on a full tour of her beautiful log cabin and also talk about how
she's now teaching these skills to others if you like these kind of videos make sure
to subscribe and hit that bell so that you get a notification every time i post a new video
but right now let's meet natalie and take a tour of her beautiful log cabin
i am natalie bogwalker with wild abundance and i'm so excited to get to share my tiny house log cabin
i've been living in this cabin for about eight years i would say i finished it about six years
ago the original build is a round log log cabin so building with round logs is pretty challenging and
especially when you get into round meet square the original build of the log cabin was under 5
000 which was pretty epic for a 12 by 16 space two stories and that's because the logs came mostly
from this land and because i salvaged or bought from salvage sources all the windows and doors
i feel really great about you know the space being under 400 square feet when it was just me and then
now with three of us it's just under 700 square feet with the additions and that feels awesome
i run wild abundance which is a school for building we do a lot of women's carpentry classes
we do tiny house classes so it's largely based on this land and on the internet my way of making my
living is very integrated into my lifestyle this home kind of maintains the lifestyle that's very
centered in earth-based living this beautiful natural space that i've built myself really
resonates with me with the way that i like to live which is basically having a handmade life
this is the original part of the cabin so the original build was 12 feet by 16 feet we had to
stack all of the logs and put on the roof and then wait for the whole thing to settle before we cut
out the doors and the windows that original 12x16 cabin was home for yours trolley and not a whole
family so we'll be seeing additions that have been made to the cabin since then as you walk
in the door you're straight to the kitchen and that's really important because for me that's
where i spend a lot of time in the house i have this counter right inside the door it takes stuff
that i need to set down right away and then you walk in i've got my stove this is a sink that i
crafted with my friend baron brown it's made out of soapstone that i went up to virginia there's a
soapstone mine and bought there i carved in with a file these drainage points which it's amazing
when you put water on the sink it just drains right down you don't end up with wet counters
for long which is fabulous this windowsill is also soapstone and this is south facing so when there's
not leaves on the trees then the sun which is in the winter time it's it's amazing how that
happens for passive solar that when there aren't leaves on the trees is when you want
to have that solar gain that sunlight coming into your house the sun comes in it hits this
windowsill it heats the sink and it heats them up and then it releases that heat into the room
this wood stove which this is actually a wood cook stove that we have installed relatively recently
it's a baker's choice it's a fabulous wood cook stove it has a nice big
fire box and it also has a really nice sized oven to be able to cook things in
when this is really roaring in the winter time that also heats up the soap stone and
then that heat is slowly released even if the fire goes out from the wood stove
there's another cool thing with this wood stove is it
has you can see these copper pipes they go into the wood stove and in the fire box there's a coil
and when there's a fire going the water is going through that coil and that fire heats
up the water and it causes a thermosyphon with a tank that's upstairs and so the hot water goes
up into the tank and the cooler water comes back down to be heated back up and in the winter time
that's what makes hot water come out of the sink and out of the bathtub so it's pretty fabulous
some other details that i want to mention about the kitchen is these cabinets we made from scratch
they are spruce and local black walnut i made them without any use of plywood when i was building
this first part of the cabin i was incredibly purist and so there was no plywood involved and
that is a pain in the butt i would not suggest doing that plywood has a purpose it does not move
anyway so building cabinets without plywood crazy but i did it and then we have these
antler poles which are really nice so those are the cabinets and then this is the jar storage
and when i designed this jar storage i designed it so that pint jars could fit
perfectly on the top shelf quart jars perfectly on the second and the third shelf and then half
gallon and gallon jars can fit perfectly on the bottom shelf and then up here i have my spices
we have soapstone soapstone which is great for putting hot things on
and then this is my butcher block which i really like to have just in place
welcome upstairs this is my office and this is a desk that i made with cherry and with
spruce and so i used this kind of distressed cherry for the drawer pulls and i'm just
really stoked about how they've all turned out and then this is a special spot for my printer
this is slate it's actually old slate roofing that i used as wall paneling and in the winter
time light shines in and hits the slate and radiates that heat back into the room and it's
pretty dramatic like when you put your hand on here in the winter time it's super warm and in
the summertime the sun is blocked from coming in that window by this little roof eve so it
doesn't heat up here i have a bunch of stuff like it's kind of a display alter of my past
life as a primitive skills practitioner which i occasionally still dabble in but these objects
are really special and really important to me so i like to have a place to put them
but also in a tiny house that space to put them means to be compact and so it is above the desk
and then i have this bookshelf and it's a similar concept to the jars that we saw earlier
where there's little books medium-sized books and then big books go on the bottom shelf and
as we come around this cabin is a clear story design the way that this roof is
and um when i was building it this part was actually going to be open when i first drew it
but then at some point i realized that i just couldn't fit everything that i wanted to fit
like i wanted to have this really generous desk office area and so in order to do that i needed to
jack up the roof so that i could fit my bed in here i have enough room so that i can comfortably
sit up in bed and it really feels so cozy and lovely to be just in this little space sleeping
and i chose to put tulip poplar bark i harvested and i used that for paneling on the ceiling
and here we have the hot water heater and so that is not getting electrical to it it's getting
water from the wood cook stove during the winter time and any time it's cool and so that water is
just cycling through and it's important that the storage tank is upstairs or just higher than the
wood stove and you can see i've left my stove pipe here bare because that way when i'm having a fire
downstairs that heat can radiate all the way up here to where when you touch the pipe up high it
is cool to the touch going through the stairs though of course i had to use insulated pipe
so this has been the original cabin which worked awesomely for one person and could work for two
people but when you add on having a baby then the 12 by 16 cabin living under 400 square feet
becomes a little challenging so first we'll go check out my daughter's room
i designed this room with the idea of it being a naturally inspired magical place for a small child
we have this bear that myself and two other friends sculpted in the wall and those mimic
another bear that you'll see a little later on in the tour this wall i used a technique that is like
traditional plaster on wooden lab and so that has regular insulation in it well it's wool insulation
and then it has lath and then it's lime plaster on top this part before it was in addition it
was a covered porch we closed in this room and the other room which we call the addition this other
room the other edition was actually done before this room and so this is old live edge lap siding
which then we sanded because it became interior then my partner frank built hazel our daughter
this fun um playhouse up in her room she likes to climb up it and then jump off of it into the bus
this is the room that i made to be the nest for having for giving birth to my daughter and so
this originally like the other room was part of a covered porch and the original timber frame
is here we did this building technique called slip straw which is a natural building technique
it's also called light slip straw and the way that you do it is you use plywood forms and you
take straw and you cover it with a thin clay slip and then you pack it lightly into these
forms and then you plaster over that and this has been plastered and it has elise and this is
this beautiful sculpture and this is when i was pregnant and my friend beatrice was pregnant and
it's mama bear with her baby bear eating berries she did this she's an amazing artist she's
actually she actually passed cancer but before she did she left this beautiful gift for our family
this is the bear that's then reflected in hazel's room and this one was done first and so this was
my nest for having my daughter and then here we have our bathtub and i do not understand
aside from ease of having plumbing in one place why you would ever want to have a bathtub next to
a toilet because it's so nice to just luxuriate in the bathtub and basically be like in a bedroom or
in a living room and so here we have the bathtub featured inside of the room we've created this
like tile corral for it i do like to keep the toilet out of the house so i have um i have a
an outhouse and i just really like keeping that function away from all the rest of um
my cozy life and another thing about this room is that it has these lovely niches which you can
with this straw clay technique and with a lot of natural building techniques you can
do a lot of sculptural work and so we have this lovely niche that makes a really lovely altar
something that i want to highlight about this room aside from the gorgeous timber frame which
is all from wood on this land there's also just some really fun detail work with the trim
so this is some black walnut that i really like kind of this asian influence how i did this trim
and i actually put this trim up i think it was 10 days before i gave birth which was pretty crazy
this has been a vision since i originally made my 16 by 20 cabin and that's something that i think
is really important for tiny house builders is that you think in terms of expansion and so this
set of french doors leads now to this deck this vision is slowly coming to fruition so we have
this lovely place for outdoor eating and then i really love gardening and so having a greenhouse
that is really accessible to the cabin is super important i've been really digging this deck
this is our back porch and i'm a big believer in outdoor living i do not want to be sleeping inside
when it's stuffy and it's so beautiful outside and out here i can hear the sounds of the frogs
i can like be breathing fresh air i can just be part of nature which is how i want to be and so
in the winter time i sleep inside and this is our outdoor bed we have very few biting insects and so
occasionally we'll put up a mosquito net but for now we're just sleeping out it's so much cheaper
to build spaces that are not insulated and it really enhances your quality of life
and so i highly recommend building lots of outdoor spaces and making the outdoor
spaces be in some ways bigger and more spacious and even more lovely than your indoor spaces
i plan to stay in this house like forever is my plan living in a space that i built
it was a lot of work to build it and a lot of work to add on to it and really
truly a labor of love and so i'm planning on milking that work as long as i possibly can
thanks for watching this week's video i hope you enjoyed it make sure that you
like share and subscribe and i will see you soon with another tiny or unique home tour