An 18-Year-Old Spends a Year Alone Building a Log Cabin in the Swedish Wilderness: Watch from Start to Finish

Hen­ry David Thore­au has at times been upbraid­ed by crit­ics for “everyone’s favorite incrim­i­nat­ing bio­graph­i­cal fac­toid,” writes Dono­van Hohn at The New Repub­lic: “Dur­ing the two years he spent at Walden Pond, his moth­er some­times did his laun­dry.” The author who became “America’s orig­i­nal nature boy “played at rugged self-suf­fi­cien­cy,” it is said, “while squat­ting on bor­rowed land, in a house built with a bor­rowed axe”; he played at rugged indi­vid­u­al­ism while rely­ing on friends and fam­i­ly to sup­port him.

Who did Erik Grankvist’s laun­dry, we might won­der, while he built a log cab­in alone dur­ing the year he record­ed in the edit­ed video above? Grankvist shows how, at 18, he “ven­tured out alone with only a back­pack full of sim­ple hand tools to actu­al­ize my dream… [to] build my own tra­di­tion­al off grid log cab­in by hand from the mate­ri­als of the Swedish wilder­ness. Just like our Fore­fa­thers did.” You may notice, or not, the clean­li­ness of Grankvist’s cloth­ing. You may won­der, “who washed his fore­fa­thers’ clothes?”…

Or, you might say, “this isn’t a video about laun­dry but about build­ing a log cab­in!” And you would be cor­rect. As an exper­i­ment in build­ing a log cab­in from scratch with (most­ly) just a few hand tools, it is an extra­or­di­nary doc­u­ment: “I had no pre­vi­ous expe­ri­ence in build­ing, gath­er­ing mate­ri­als or film­ing,” Grankvist writes. “So I start­ed study­ing myself the old arts and learn­ing from my grand­fa­ther and men­tor Åke Nils­son. I began to cut down trees and film with my phone, learn­ing as I go.”

The project real­ly picked up steam once Grankvist grad­u­at­ed high school, he writes, sug­gest­ing he did not actu­al­ly live full time in the woods but that some­one fed, housed, and clothed him while he worked. We see none of this in the video. We do see a trac­tor at one point, and Grankvist admits he’d rather the mod­ern extrav­a­gance have been a horse.

Does it ruin the mag­ic a lit­tle to won­der about the mun­dane details of the builder’s life — food, cloth­ing, health­care, etc. — while watch­ing him cut his own tim­ber, clear the land, build a stone foun­da­tion and, on top of it, a rus­tic lit­tle cab­in? Maybe a lit­tle. But as extra­or­di­nary as it is to watch an 18-year-old Swede build a log cab­in by him­self, one also can’t help but remem­ber it takes a vil­lage worth of fore­fa­thers, and moth­ers, to make an 18-year-old Swede. But Grankvist does not present his visu­al Walden as a how-to guide (any more than Thore­au did), but as his own state­ment of inde­pen­dence, one worth mak­ing even if it does­n’t tell the full truth about self-suf­fi­cien­cy.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Japan­ese Car­pen­ters Unearth 100-Year-Old Wood Joiner­ies While Tak­ing Apart a Tra­di­tion­al House

How Frank Lloyd Wright’s Son Invent­ed Lin­coln Logs, “America’s Nation­al Toy” (1916)

How to Sur­vive the Com­ing Zom­bie Apoc­a­lypse: An Online Course by Michi­gan State

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness