Ryle starts building a 28 ft × 24 ft cabin on his Colorado property with no prior experience. He clears the land, stakes out the footprint, and digs foundation holes with an excavator, hitting bedrock that needs jackhammering. A camper becomes his on-site base as he prepares for concrete and footings.
Hey y'all, it's Ryle here. Thanks so much for joining me on this little adventure. We're right now headed up to a piece of land that I own here in the Colorado mountains that I've had for a few years and always felt drawn to a particular spot on the land and thought maybe someday if I ever had the time, I'd love to build a cabin on it. And that time has finally come around, so I thought it'd be cool to document the journey here on YouTube as I stumble along. I've never done anything like this before, don't have any prior building experience really of any kind, but I'm excited to learn and be in the process of building a shelter for myself and my family and friends. And also really looking forward to spending a lot of time outside here in this beautiful scenery and use my hands and body to build something, create something that hopefully will last a very long time and continue to serve people long after I'm gone.
So this is the site where I'll be building the cabin. First step is going to clear off all this growth and clear a path to bring some equipment. To the site. So step number 1 feels good to start somewhere. So I got the land cleared a bit. You can kind of tell where I want things set up. Cabin's going to be 28 feet long, 24 feet wide, front porch, very basic, very basic setup so I don't get in over my head. But, uh, yeah, it'll sit somewhere right in here. I'm going to be bringing up a little camper and parking it over there. So I can maximize my work hours. But, uh, nice to be able to see something and get a sense of the layout. All right, got a path clear to the site now. Took down a tree, a bunch of branches. So I can drive my truck in and tow an excavator in to dig the foundation holes. So now I got to figure out where this cabin is going to lie, uh, so I'm going to do some measurements and stake out some corners, give me an idea of the layout, and that'll help me get set up to identify where I'm going to be digging my foundation holes. Alright, so I've got all the batter boards up. That's the wood boards that are around each corner, and those you set up to run these strings. And got those set up. Now I got to get them all squared up and make sure that measurements are right, and then the crossover points will be pretty much the exact spot where the piers will go, and that'll tell me where to dig my 2x2-foot holes 4 feet deep with the excavator. It's not level yet, that's a future step. I just want to figure out exactly where my pier foundation holes are going to go. So that's what this step is, and, um, now I'll take some measurements. Well, I got as much of the excavation as I could get done with the machine, with the excavator. I went between grape Got my 4 foot of depth to total fail, hitting, I don't know, bedrock or a boulder in a couple spots. Probably about a third of where the piers are gonna go, uh, it's hitting rock before I can get to the right depth. And everywhere else is fine. It was quite a learning curve trying to figure out how to use this excavator. But, uh, not exactly sure what to do about these boulders or rocks, big rocks. Uh, could maybe jackhammer them, could maybe take a pickaxe to them. I'm gonna have to do some research, but feels good to have moved all this dirt and it wasn't a total disaster, so Feeling hopeful. So I've been working really hard on jackhammering and shoveling out all this hard rock that's all down, up and down these trenches. It's pretty hard work. It's probably day 4, I guess, of fairly nonstop jackhammering. Shakes your whole body. Good times. But almost done, just in the last home stretch, getting the last little bit of rock out of here, and then I can start getting the footings put in place. I'm replacing my original batter boards with these metal grade stakes to make them more solid. The batter boards were wobbling a bit And the next step there is going to be to get a laser level and make sure they're all level so that when I run my strings, they're all nice and level. A big, big accomplishment of the day was bringing the camper up. It definitely was kind of a surgical process threading it into this little tight space, but got it right where I wanted it. And, uh, really stoked to have a little setup up here that I can stay in and sleep in and spend a lot more time up here. So stoked on that. So I'm going to finish up the last bit of excavation and then start wrapping my head around putting together these piers and footings, concrete work, rebar. All that good stuff. So that's to come.
