Tiny House Furniture, Gratitude, Perspective and Perseverance, Log Cabin Life, Braised Lamb Shanks

Description

Using materials from the forest that I've stockpiled for furniture, I build a log chair for the tiny house, the first of two. In my self reflections near the end of the video, I speak about gratitude, perspective and perseverance and how they have helped me to overcome challenges in my life.

Tiny house furniture is usually smaller and often multi-functional, but this log chair is not. My wife wanted a chair she could curl up in in front of the fire, so it had to be about 24 inches wide to fit the cheap pillows that she bought for the two wood chairs. My chair will be smaller and dual purpose - to sit facing the fire, but also to turn sideways to work at my corner desk when editing videos on my computer.

As usual, Cali, our golden retriever, is at my side while I'm building the furniture, either demanding my attention, entertaining herself or watching me intently, waiting for any indication that I'm done working at ready to play. She loves the outdoors and often chooses to lay on the front porch in the snow while she sleeps or watches for wildlife to chase.

The dog follows me around as I collect the balsam fir logs I cut down last March. The weather turns cold and snow, so I spend half of the time debarking the logs inside beside the fire in the wood stove. When it turns sunny and warmer the next day, I am able to work on the sawhorses on the front porch, using my hand tools to carve tenons on the logs. I use a two and a half inch hand auger to drill mortices in the legs and back supports. The logs are 3 to 4 inches in diameter and I drill one and half inch holes to accommodate the tenons. This is a very traditional way of making chairs, but this is the first chair I have ever made. Now that I have a better understanding of how to do it, I'll make the second chair for in front of the fire and then I'll turn my attention to the dining chairs or stools in the kitchen. I want to use smaller diameter logs, probably maple from the forest around the cabin. I don't have a lather, but I can hand carve the wood legs and use an adze to carve a comfortable wood seat.

At the end of the video, I talk again about how I was personally seven hundred fifty thousand dollars in debt and how I had to change my perspective to keep motivated to get back out of debt. I talk about gratitude, accepting my role in my failures and being grateful for the positive things I still had in my life. Perspective was the result of gratitude, realizing that life always has challenges, life sucks generally, but by accepting that and being grateful for the good times, people and things in my life, life is not only worth living, but worth living fully. Perseverance is how I made it through the most challenging events in my life, including several years in court defending myself and family against relentless creditors who threatened to take my house and sue my parents for all of their equity in their home since they guaranteed my home and mortgage. It was a rough time on the family, but I absolved my family members of the burden, taking it all on myself, and persevered until I was successful. Today, I'm not only out of debt, I'm financially secure, happy and healthy and I plan to stay this way - hence the cabin life.

The meal, I almost forgot! Braised lamb shanks. My wife made lamb on the stove in a cast iron crock pot. Wait until you see this. Even if you don't normally like lamb shanks, I guarantee you would like these!

To see what I’m up to during the rest of the week, please follow me on my other online channels;

Website: http://myselfreliance.com/

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My Mailing Address:

P.O. Box 20042

Barrie, Ontario

L4M 6E9

Canada

Tags: Self Reliance,off grid,log cabin,homestead,diy,inspirational,motivational,bushcraft,forest,wood,cabin,tiny home,woodworking,maker,woods,My Self Reliance,cabin life,tiny house,tiny house furniture,gratitude,perspective,perseverance,diy furniture,wood furniture,log furniture,braised lamb shank,lamb

Video Transcription

(wind howls)

- Good girl, you're a big help. You should have a nap, Cali. You look tired. Yeah, you look tired, though. (dog grumbles) Can you sit? Cali, sit.

Okay, do you want me to let you out, or do you want me to go out? Sit.

Nope, not now. Can you give me five? Oh, 10.

Okay, I'll let you out. I can't go out, pup. It's too cold for me. I still get a lot of questions about why you take the bark off the logs before you build the cabin or other furniture, anything out of it, and the answer is that it holds the moisture as well as insects. So, you can see this wood that was cut, I cut this down about a year ago. The problem with that is that the bugs are already in there. So is the moisture. So the top layer tends to be damaged, deteriorated a little bit, and full of grub holes. In a lot of cases, the grubs are actually right in, deep into the wood. So, as I'm drying this wood out, the grubs will be coming back to life from their winter dormancy and coming out of the wood. So I wanna dry them quickly and get them outside to debug, essentially. So there's several methods to debarking. A lot of people use a draw knife, and I do too, especially when it's really holding on, when the bark's really holding on. But a better tool is actually this. It's actually meant for this, for debarking. A better way to do is actually take it off sideways, 'cause then you can kind of get all the way around the stump or all the way around the log. And that, of course, won't do it. Like that.

So, you loosen it up, and you can kind of go all the way around and peel it off in one, sort of one big chunk like that, see, where with the draw knife, you're just taking a strip off each time. What's out there? What's going on out there? Did you get excited? (pot clanks against stove) Something going on out there? (Shawn laughs)

Spoiled, aren't you? Spoiled dog.

So I asked a while ago for questions from you guys about what you want to hear from me in regards to success in life and success in business maybe, or how to achieve this kind of lifestyle. And I made the point, and I wanna continue to make the point that I don't want to sound like I'm an expert. I don't wanna sound like I'm preaching, so I'm literally just answering questions, your questions, and from my perspective, what I think the keys to happiness and success are, 'cause I feel like my life is where I want it to be. I'm finding meaning. I'm finding happiness. I'm feeling fulfilled. And if I am maybe, you can, by following some of the things that I've done or just pick up the odd tip or trick or habit or whatever from me, so just a little bit of advice, so. Again, tune out if you're not interested in hearing this. This is the my self reflections part of the video, so here I go, answer to the broader question, how do you turn your life around when you are in a bad place that, you know, that you're willing to admit that you contributed to? So there's two ways of looking at life and at suffering and at the difficulty of living as a human being, and one of them is to assume that life just sucks and it sucks for everybody, and therefore, it's not worth living. And then the second thought is that maybe your life, good or bad, is a result of the things that you put into it, the effort that you put into it or the decisions you make and the people that you have in your life and so on. I think the truth is for me, from my perspective, is that it's a combination of the two things. Life is hard. It's difficult, and it's made more difficult by our frame of mind, our perspective. But basically, having, I guess, gratitude, appreciation, goes a fairly long way. When I lost my business and went from making like literally $300,000 a year and, you know, building up this value in a business itself, when I got hit by the financial crisis and hit by the result of bad decisions that I made, it left me $750,000 in personal debt that I had to get out of. And when my wife and I went and talked to bankruptcy trustees at the time to see what the next move would be, what the solution would be or what we should do to try to resolve the situation, they said, first of all, the type of business you're in, you can't declare bankruptcy. So that's not an option. So taking on that debt and dealing with the creditors is the only way to resolve it, which is going to take time, and he said every single client that's he's addressed that was in a similar situation to that degree ended up in divorce, the couple ended up in divorce. And I can see why. The stress on me was incredible, and therefore the stress on the family was almost insurmountable. My wife is very involved in the business, very instrumental in it, and she could see first-hand what kind of position we were in and how hopeless it was. So at that point, we both could have given up, and me as a man feeling like my life work was in there, my whole passion was in that and my value as a man was tied up so tightly into that business that I could have felt hopeless. I could have felt that life wasn't worth living. And I didn't. I felt like, you know, I woke up each and every day, and I looked at my life, and I thought, I still have a beautiful wife and two beautiful daughters. I still have three sisters and parents that are living and in good health. You know, I still actually was living in the same house. We liquidated all assets. We financed the house right to the hilt just to pay back some of those creditors. We sold off everything, like, literally cash, whatever was in the garage, whatever we could sell, including parts of the business, like those assets I mentioned. We sold everything off just to pay creditors and to have living expenses or pay living expenses, and ended up with almost nothing at the end. Well, worse than nothing. We ended up $750,000 in debt that I guaranteed personally, so I had to pay that, and the business was another 200,000 or 300,000 in debt. So it wasn't really an option to continue it. But the stress on me was so great that I carried on doing the liquidation part, winding down the business for three months, and then I got a job with this real unlikable person.

I mentioned him in another video, so I won't go into it. But did that for six months before realizing this was not gonna solve anything. I'd be literally never in a better position for the rest of my life. I'd never even pay off the interest on that debt, never mind pay the principal off. So I made some major changes. But I made sure the number-one change that I made was changing my perspective and changing my outlook or how gracious I was or thankful, so I woke up each morning, like I said, I looked in the mirror, and I thought, I still have all these great things in my life. I'm still physically in the same shape. I might be a little bit more mentally worn down, but other than that, what's the difference between waking up today and waking up six months prior when I had half a million dollars in my bank account and a $300,000 annual paycheck? What could I possibly complain about if I had all the same comforts? Still had a warm house, still had food, and those people in my life, so what was the difference? It was really just a matter of perspective, and just the extra anxiety of thinking, okay, now my future's not secure, so when I do get sick or, mentally or physically ill in the future, or, you know, something happens to me where I get in an unfortunate accident or something and I've left my family hanging, but they're resilient too. People are resilient. People are able to go on, whether you think they are or not, and that includes yourself. So when these major things happen in our lives, like, in my case, that was financial, but it could have been a loved one dying. It could have been, you know, a personal injury that left me in a handicapped position where I was incapable of doing what I really loved to do and things like this, but there's other things in life, and there's more important things in life, and there's, you know, you can grieve, and you can forever hold those losses in your heart, but that doesn't mean you should hold onto them so tightly that you forget to live your own life and forget to add joy to other people's lives around you, and to me, that was the number-one lesson that I've carried, and I think by applying that principle or applying that outlook, it allowed me to quickly bounce back. I started another business, and I grew that so quickly, a completely different business and a completely different mindset and completely different set of risk factors, so I did it smartly, but we're able to pay off all that debt and to get into a better position. So, it was really the outlook that I had to change first. Second is habits, good and bad habits. You can get up in the morning and continue with those bad habits, continue to do those things that have not worked for you in the past, those things that have taken you down instead of up, taking you backwards instead of forwards, whether that's, you know, picking up and opening up those bills and paying that phone bill that's getting out of hand or the utility bill or whatever it is, taking control or taking responsibility, I guess, for every action that you take. Each and every day, starting today, make that decision just to address one thing even today, and don't put that off, and let that kind of build momentum. Start, you know, feeling like each and every day, you've accomplished something, however big or small, that you can build on. It's, you know, it's a cycle, and once you get that feedback, once you get that good feeling that you've done something, that you've accomplished something, that you've eliminated some of that stress, you've prepared some of, or prepared, done something to improve your future and your future security and your future health. Maybe it's a diet. Maybe you drink too much or smoke too much. Do something else maybe, just this one day. If you just could change that and do something different, adding a bad habit and eliminate one, or adding a good habit and eliminate one bad habit, or just do one little thing good instead of one little thing bad or one little thing good instead of nothing, that you should have been doing. Then maybe that's the start of a great life. And that's the way I get up each and every day. I have to tell myself, even if I'm not feeling well or not feeling motivated or got depression or something else, that suffering, pain and suffering that's inherent with humanity that kind of wants to take over. I have to fight that, each and every day, just like anybody and just say, I'm doing something. I'm gonna do something productive today, and at the end of the day, I'm gonna feel like I'm fulfilled and I took some steps forward. I climbed that ladder, no matter, that endless latter, 'cause there's no top, by the way. So that's it for this video. I'm gonna sign off here. So you have a great week, take care, and I'll see you up here again at the cabin next week.