Mortise & Tenon Sawhorses at the Log Cabin, Is This Really Off Grid Living?

#woodworking #logcabin #offgrid

I finally spend some time building a set of sawhorses for the off grid log cabin using mortise and tenon joinery, a simple woodworking technique that is well suited to my rough carpentry skills and primitive life at the wilderness homestead.
I really didn't take me long since I had cut the red pine log in half almost a year ago and I cut the balsam fir legs last March, 2017. Cutting the tenons with a knife, axe and draw knife took very little time since I didn't need a precise fit and did not need it to look like finished furniture. I cut the mortises with a 1/1/4" auger, a simple hand tool traditionally used for drilling deep holes through wood in timber frame structures. Cali, my golden retriever, did slow me down a bit as she is constantly asking me to throw her training dummy for her to fetch, which she does with a lot of energy, eventually burning out and falling asleep at my feet despite the noise that I make with the woodworking tools.
The pair of sawhorses, which are about four feet long and thirty-four inches high (I'll cut the legs down a bit and even them out once the snow melts) came in very handy while I worked on the rest of the log cabin this week. I used them as a base to cut the pine logs to trim the west window, to cut short lengths of pine for floating shelves between the window and the woodstove and to plane smooth the flat side of the balsam fir logs splits, the wood that I'm using as the stringers for the staircase to the loft of the tiny house.
The weather this week is a little unusual - very sunny but cold, quite a bit colder than is typical for mid March. In fact, the sap in the sugar maple trees has not flowed since the day I tapped the trees and installed the spiles and buckets, more than two weeks ago. Judging by the forecast, sap won't start running for another week or so (maybe by the time this video is live). However, even though it's cold this week, February was a record year for warm temperatures, which really cut back the amount of firewood I burned this winter. In fact, I burned less than a cord of wood since early January, which means I have a good start on next year's wood.