Hello everyone, I am back on steemit after a long break of just over half a year. Winter is upon us and blogging time is back.

I am usually online a lot more during the colder months anyway but I have still been making daily videos on YouTube all along.

I am not going to try to catch you up with the past videos. I figure you can go and see them for yourself on my channel if you want: https://www.youtube.com/user/techman2015

We just came out of the hunting season so I was not around the homestead much during the past two weeks. Most of the summer I spent working outside the off grid homestead to help raise more income to care for my family.

Some changes came to the homestead since I have been off steemit though and I would like to share some of them with you now.

The biggest thing for me is that I bought a chainsaw lumber mill. This is a stationary lumber mill with tracks and you roll the carriage down the tracks. The log stays in place while the chainsaw rolls through. I really love this machine and we hope to be able to build a frame and siding around the trailer to make it livable for winter months next year. I hope to make all my own framing and siding using the lumber mill. This will reduce the cost of renovation by about $30,000.

Considering that the lumber mill only cost $600, this is a huge savings by using my own machine.

I am cutting live edge slabs on the lumber mill with plans to make some beautiful furniture next year once the wood cures. Live edge slabs are cut from a log, keeping the natural bark edge on. This type of furniture brings a nice amount of income to a homestead.

I have also been hauling home a lot of logs from a property nearby which I am either using as fire wood for the off grid tiny house or for turning into lumber on the mill.

This year I brought home a lot of fire wood and we bought a log splitter to help us process our own fire wood even faster.

We are happy that we did too because it has turned out to be an exceptionally cold year so far and we used two full cords of fire wood already. We had to start burning fire wood in September while last year we did not start until November.

I got a deer hunting this year and processed it myself. I put the video on my tactical channel for anyone who was interested in that. I kept my main channel clean though and avoid showing such things.

Well, a lot of time has passed but I plan to share a blog for each of my daily videos again from now on so stay tuned.

Troy

The Do It Yourself World