I want to ask what do you see that impressive about things like this, really. This guy got bored one day and somehow decided to fell a bunch of trees older than him to somehow not even finish the walls in one year?
And sorry but I am not able to find confirmation about him doing this in his own land which makes the whole situation a bit more awkward.
The ice accretion from a few weeks ago weighed down and broke a couple of branches 8-10" thick in my back yard. When it warmed up, I took a saw, a machete and an axe and converted it into firewood over the next few hours. All together, it's maybe 1/20th of a cord that will need a few months to dry, and a mere evening or two to burn.
This is a preamble to a novel of the world of pain my hands, arms and joints were in afterward, at my age and shape. And yet despite being an overpaid typist like most of us here, I regularly do heavy repairwork and maintenance, such as digging 110' drainage ditches on my property by hand, shovel and mattock. But it was the jarring impacts that don't play nicely with our flavor of carpal tunnel.
From that limited perspective, I can appreciate the amount of work this feller put into this build. He's using hand tools. The tractor is in lieu of logging horses or borrowing a half dozen people to pull. IMO, the sheer amount of time and effort that went into this is to be respected alone.
I think if you do something like this it's more about the process than the result. If all you wanted was a cabin it's faster and cheaper to just buy one.
Cutting down old trees happens all the time for lumber.
I think the process of a young person learning a huge amount of manual skills from their grandfather, putting in the sustained long-term effort and building something from scratch with your hands that has lasting value (like a cabin) is pretty commendable in this day and age.
And sorry but I am not able to find confirmation about him doing this in his own land which makes the whole situation a bit more awkward.