So, I've always been thinking about doing a video tour
around the old workshop, and the homestead.
But, I never thought it was quite interesting enough
for my main YouTube channel, so I'm just gonna post
this on my other channel. I'm standing in front
of the old shop, and turning around
and here you can see an old out house that they used
actually at a time when they rebuilt the house.
And, here's the driveway.
And the carport, and behind that the house.
And, here's my mom's garden.
And, here's the lumber storage shed, so let's go there.
This is what's left of my dad's lumber stash.
Quite a bit actually because he had quite a lot,
and he slowed down quite a lot in his old age.
Old lawn tractor here,
and various junk we keep here.
This, this whole building is actually a pole barn,
and a couple years ago, a friend and I
fixed it up a little bit. What happened is
my dad really wedged the poles into the ground with rocks,
and with frost-heaving and such,
these posts slowly ratcheted out of the ground,
especially this one, this one, and this one.
And, so I cut these ones off with a chain saw,
and let them come down a bit, and then tied them back
together with strapping. This does, of course, mean that
there's no stiffness where the joint is.
But the whole building itself is stiff enough already
so there's no risk of these poles now tipping over.
When we built this, it was shortly after the fire
of the old barn, so we didn't have enough of the right
kind of wood, so we actually used really junky wood,
poplar for this, and the problem is some of the screws,
on the roof became a little bit loose, and a little bit
of water got in, even though we put the screws on the ridges.
And, so Eric and I put in a few cedar beams
next to the one that got rotten. The ones that are rotten
are still there. Most of these are still good
because most of the screws did not leak.
And then we also went up on the roof, and we put some
very sticky roof patch tape on where all the holes were
and put the screws in different places for the ones that leaked.
Got lots of firewood here for heating in the winter.
This part here actually used to be the milk house
of the old barn. The old barn burnt down
and my dad had somebody with a bulldozer push in the old
foundations, and cover it with soil, so the barn used to be
right here, and the grass does turn brown here sooner
if it's dry. This addition, he just used
the old foundation and put a roof over it.
So, it's a nice place to dry firewood.
The back of the shed here
oh yeah, you can see all the silvery bits of
aluminum tape that we put on the roof
for where all the little leaks were.
And, then there's an area back here for
stacks of lumber. None here anymore,
but this is a good area for drying it.
And, those bars are there to keep the cows from getting in
there and shitting all over the place.
And, we still have a few 8 by 8 beams,
which are very handy when I have to fix stuff
on the cottage foundation, since that's for just
shoring things up with. All this wood has been here
for many years, but it's still good.
So, the only reason this isn't all overgrown
with bush around here is cause the neighbor's cows
are allowed to graze here. Neighbor maintains the fence
in return for letting them graze.
And, that keeps the weeds and such down,
cause the cows just eat them.
Some old apple trees, I wish people still planted
apple trees, but it seems nobody cares about that anymore.
My mom harvests some of these apples to make
apple cider with. This building here
is an old log cabin.
The previous owners that we bought this from in 1980,
were Finns, and Finns like their saunas,
So, this used to be a sauna.
And, some of these concrete bits here is where
the stove was on. The front room was where
you changed and then the back room was the actual sauna.
But, they put a sauna in the house, so they themselves
hadn't used this in many years.
This building unfortunately, needs the roof repaired,
and it's just not being used, so...
If it was on my property, I'd fix it but,
when I'm here, I don't have enough time, so...
It's biting the dusty. I last fixed that roof
probably around 1986.
And, here's the lumber shed again.
And, the house, which has got hand-split cedar shakes
everywhere, and here's the garden.
So, I'm back behind the shop.
Again, lumber shed here.
And, back here
is what's left of the old saw mill.
And, that saw mill was one of the main reasons why we
ended up here, because my dad liked the idea
of a property with a saw mill on it.
This is a log building here, not part of the saw mill.
Probably quite old.
Look at the cool joinery on the corners here.
And, that was just for animals.
It was last used agriculturally as a chicken coop,
but that was probably at least 40 years ago.
And, the way I know that,
is if we look on the wall there, you can see those
three things here, that's for putting bars on there
for the chicken to roost, that, and having
an access door up here,
where the chickens can come in and out, but hopefully
not any wolves, or anything like that.
This whole building is piled full of oak
but unfortunately it's a bit far from where I live
and realistically the effort of hauling this back is
comparable to just milling new stuff.
So, it'll probably stay here for good, until the roof
completely goes. There's tin on the roof
but it's a bit open on the ridge.
So far, the wood has still kept dry.
And, here's what's left of the saw mill building.
This is about a third of the building,
the rest of it collapsed in 1998, when there was
a really big snowfall. And, the actual workings
of the saw mill, my dad sold for maybe
a couple hundred dollars to somebody,
which in retrospect was a good thing, because
otherwise it would have just rusted to bits
so hopefully somebody has a use out of it.
So, the whole saw blade mechanism
used to be right in here, this was full of pulleys and such.
That all got taken out when somebody took out the workings.
And there was rails that went along here
extended to the end of the building.
And, out this way a bit, you can still see
a concrete foundation back there.
That was the far end of the rails, and those were
for the carriage that held the logs.
And, there used to be a big old bull dozer, right here,
that powered the whole thing, just for the engine.
And, it was my job, and my sibling's job to
take the lumber off the saw mill, right here.
And, we'd carry that out and store it into
different stacks by thickness, and my dad
would be working on the other side putting the logs on
and moving them, and all that, there's no hydraulics
on this thing, so the only thing that was powered,
was, of course, the saw blade,
and the carriage back and forth, so there used to be
a big lever right about here
that he'd pull or push to make it go, in fact
there's a hole in the foundation, which is where
a bolt went through there to actually activate
the mechanism on the inside.
And, then the sawdust
there was a chain that pulled it all out to here,
and this would always turn into a big pile here.
In fact, you can even see there's a bit of
sawdust here, the sawdust take a long time
to really decompose, so that vegetation can grow on it,
so this is the remains of the sawdust here.
From last time this saw mill was used,
which would have been, oh maybe about
1997 or so, what's left of this building
is probably also gonna collapse in the next few years.
This could be saved but really there's nothing of
value under it, and when I am here, I only have so much time.
Here's what's left of a homemade trailer that
my dad had made. Back in the 80's
it was still legal to just have something without any lights
on it and use that, but since then
it wasn't allowed to use anymore, so...
it just stayed here and rotted, it was all just made
out of old car parts.
Frickin' pesky airplanes. Come on, go away
I want to record.
This area back here, used to be full of trashed cars
when we bought the place, but at some point
scrap metal value got high enough that
people came with a payloader to collect them
free of charge, and we were just glad to be rid of them.
Of course nowadays, they'd actually be worth money as scrap
But, it's better to be rid of them.
Some old fridges here, these are the tanks from old
hot water tanks, and various miscellaneous bits.
This trailer actually we used at some point.
This is a deck from an old motor that no longer works.
So, well private junk collection.
That's how it works in the country.
Some of this junk that's lying around has been here for
probably 50 years.
This is some piece of hay equipment.
I think some kind of a rake to be towed behind horses.
And these tines here, would pick up the grass,
and then every once in a while you'd dump it.
They're just put into rows.
There used to also be some horse-drawn seed drills
around here, but don't know what happened with those.
This is the log building from the other side again.
My dad asked me, back in '85,
to nail the aluminum roofing, from the old barn,
on here, basically we redid the extension part of it,
with newer roof, and then
we figured might as well nail these on top of the old
cedar shingles on here, because they were just about gone.
And, that saved this building for as long as it has.
And for our ridge cap,
I just nailed some old cedar slabs on top, but
those have fallen off since then.
So, ideally there'd be something nailed on there now,
but again, I have just not had the time to spend here
this summer at all. So, back about 50 years ago,
this whole area used to be fairly actively farmed.
But, it hasn't really been since then, because
if you want to make a living farming, you're much better off
doing it somewhere where the growing season's a bit better,
and the land is more fertile.
And, I guess we have enough food, so there hasn't really
been a need to use this land, so...
much of it is slowly overgrowing.
Except for where the cows are grazing, beef cows.
Still a bit of that going on here.