Building My Cedar Chest

Hey Ya'll! Here is a lil' video I put together about my trials and tribulations of building a chest made of cedar...
I made this chest to keep my natural fiber clothing from getting seriously moldy during the humid summers here in the Appalachian Mountains - it's really easy to make once ya learn a few tricks about putting it together. Building it myself made the $cost$ of the chest about 1/3 of the price I would have had to pay for one ($40 for the wood).
I love natural living on the cheap! ;)




Xoxoxox

Building the Bathroom Wall with Local Wood

Yay! The Luck Cabin now has a 98% finished wall for dividing the kitchen and bathroom - and because I used locally milled pine it only cost 40$ to build an entire wall. That is super affordable compared to the pain staking, time consuming and toxic sheet rock commonly put into homes now. There is something to be said for the rustic look and it's ease of construction and price - so much more tactile and warm to me. I likes it!

I have never built a wall before but noted the process as my carpenter friend Mark threw this wall up in less then 3 hours. Level 2x4 studs in first....
Some horizontal and well as the vertical ones go into place to hold the wall together, but i like it cause it made cool little box shapes - that I can use for hanging pictures, putting shelves into, a rock collection cubby... boxes are endless awesomeness.
Then I wanted wide planks to be nailed to the studs to match the 'decor' of the rest of the Luck Cabin...
Sweeeeeet!!! It's almost complete. I even have cold and HOT water running to my tub now, from the gravity fed spring. Time to go wash some undies!
XoXo

Learning To Use An Ax

Oh...Gawd... today I learned how to better split wood with a "go devil" style ax! I have not done much log splitting in my life, being that I grew up in a tropical big city that only sees the icy junk we call snow like once every 20-30 years and also thrived on central heat for the rare chilly days. I remember begging my parents to put logs in the fireplace, just for fun. :)
As you can see in the very top pic, I have to stand and meditate before i swing the ax, getting just the right position before swinging. And I can tell ya, I was doing it all kinds of wrong.
See in the pic above, my hands are WAY too far apart at that point, but my legs are not. The reason I am standing so funny is because should I miss the log, I didn't want the ax to hit my leg instead... even the thought of the chance of some possibility of this occurring terrifies me more then the worst horror movie ya eva' saw X's a million nightmares.
Because my hands were so far apart at the end and too close together at the beginning of the swing, I could not get proper momentum going to crack the log...only getting a few dents...
Once ya give it a good wack and it doesn't split or crack, the ax kinda gets stuck in there - which can seem impossible to pull out, but if you hold down the log, and then pull the ax handle down to the ground in front it will roll back out.
THEN START OVA' !!!
Hells yeah! With the right amount of force, aim and hand placement (which is not really shown below, cause i slid my hand back down after it split), it gets alot easier. The hands start out on opposite ends of the ax in order to pull the weight up over head, and when coming down they slide to the bottom together.
The thing is, I used to use something called a "wedge" to split logs and I can say for someone my size (AKA tiny as hell) using a wedge is a little easier if ya' don't have the body weight to really slam an ax down. But it is never a bad idea to have some basic skills to work with, in case you are ever in a situation where all the easier tools are not available and ya need to make a fire. (Blizzard perhaps? Zombie Apocalypse? Peak Oil? Living out in the middle of nowhere and have no car to get supplies easily? Extreme poverty?)
BTW- the logs were from trees already dead on the property here. Supa' eco-nomical. :)
XoXo