🌺🌻 Spring Inspiration 🌼🌷

More project ideas while we wait for things to melt...

It’s spring up here in the mountains of Colorado, but that means we’ve got three months left of snow. By mid-April, we’re usually OVER IT. It keeps snowing into May and it doesn’t even feel like spring here until June.

So we’re going to travel back east soon!

As you probably know, my little cabin in New York is accessible for about half the year, since it’s at the end of a sketchy dirt road. I’ve got plans for a driveway in the works, but more on that soon.

Meanwhile, I’ve been spending my time researching and fantasizing about projects to do on this land. I want to share these resources with you all. I’d also love to hear some of your favorite videos or projects in the comments.

Building A Pond and Native Plant Habitat

This 15 minute video shows how a relatively simple pond can be a crucial addition to a habitat. The creator of this video is a wildlife photographer and replaces a small pond with a larger, deeper one.

He shows how a little pond like this can be a critical center for many different species of wildlife. The complexity of predators, prey animals and migratory birds all unfolds over a single year. Plus, this video is just peaceful and brought me some joy.

I’d love to build a pond like this, in addition to swales along the orchard, and see the impact on the local animals with some trail cameras.

Building A Yurt

This is a cool one. These folks have 40 acres and, as their first structure on the land, they assemble a foundation on concrete blocks, some floor joists and insulated floor panels. On that floor, they erect a yurt. They show the entire process in about 10 minutes.

A yurt is something I want to add to my land. It would be so fun to have a yurt guest house. Yurts qualify as temporary structures most of the time, so permitting can be easier than more permanent structures.

This video got me going down the rabbit hole playing around with Pacific Yurts 3D yurt builder and pricing out a $10,000 yurt.

Some day.

For now, I’m staying focused on making the cabin livable by the five year mark. Two years to go.

Woodness Goodness - Building An Off Grid Cabin

This Youtuber is one of my favorites. “Woodness Goodness” is a goofy dude named Graham that builds a bunch of DIY Projects. He calls himself a “semi-professional-amateur” and his work has a good mix of knowing-what-he-is-doing and totally-winging-it.

He is currently building a remote cabin (sounds familiar!) and documenting the process. The video above is about the building of a small foundation for a cabin that will have quite a view.

He’s also built an outhouse on the same property, and a small cabin in his backyard during COVID, which was pretty informative. He shows the process for the floors, walls, windows, roofing and more. As an amateur-amateur, I find it both informative and entertaining.

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Let me know in the comments if you have any favorite Youtubers or project videos, will ya?

That’s it for now folks,
Lucas