Every Friday the YouTube personality known as Bus Huxley posts a new video. For the last three years his series “A House Built From Trees“ has chronicled a seemingly endless house-building project on his family’s land in western Maine.
It features Huxley — real name Gardner Waldeier — cutting down trees, milling lumber on the site and doing the vast majority of the construction himself.
But on May 10 Waldeier announced on YouTube he was taking a job for five months supervising the construction of a one-story commercial retail building in Colchester.
“This will be a step back into the real world,” the video producer declared, the walls of his house-in-progress covered in black plastic, visible in the background.
The lanky 37-year-old Maine native regards the real world as one in which you show up to a job five days a week but the world Waldeier inhabits isn’t necessarily unreal. It’s just a bit odd. An ace auto mechanic, professional cook and accomplished woodworker, he is a freelance master-of-all-trades who has chosen to cobble together a living by going from project to project, managing to live on very little money.
Which is why Waldeier secured a somewhat unconventional living space in Colchester that lacks both the burden of paying rent and bathing facilities. So, he’s arranged to shower at a local woodworking business in exchange for performing some light janitorial duties. For dinner he cooks cans of soup on a single-burner butane stove.
“I literally have sardines every day for lunch,” he confessed. “There’s probably some sort of obsessive compulsiveness in me that gets a routine going and then is just petrified of any deviation from it.”
And apparently he’s been unable to deviate from his routine of posting videos every Friday morning during the time he’s working in Colchester beginning with “Commercial Retail Build Part 1,” which shows workers digging up topsoil and hauling it off in a dump truck. The video runs a mere 4:23. Waldeier’s Colchester videos are shorter than his “House Built From Trees” episodes and garner only a third of the views. Since he arrived in June, Waldeier has produced 16 videos chronicling the 6,300-square-foot structure going up on Route 2 in Colchester.
“I hope you enjoy what you see,” Waldeier deadpans into the camera. “It’s nothing too spectacular.”
“I’ve watched a couple of them,” said Michael Cleary, the project manager of the Colchester build. “I imagine his subscribers are fairly bored with this.”
You wouldn’t know it from the videos’ comments. “Thanks for taking us along on this sojourn!” one loyal viewer posted.
Waldeier has more than 6,000 subscribers to his YouTube channel.
Cleary learned of Waldeier from his brother-in-law, Andy Saver. Waldeier and Saver have cooked together for years at Penny Cluse Cafe in downtown Burlington and at Hind Quarter Catering, a Huntington-based company known for cooking meat on wood fires at weddings.
In November 2017 Saver brought Cleary to watch a group of volunteers raise the frame for Waldeier’s “House Built From Trees” in Waterford, Maine. It was a kind of old-fashioned barn-raising that attracted about 40 people who were served spare ribs cooked in the fall chill by Hind Quarter’s founder, Luke Stone. And, of course, the frame raising resulted in another Bus Huxley video.
“I talked to Cleary for about a half-hour and tried to convince him that I wasn’t qualified [for the construction superintendent job],” Waldeier recalled. “He seemed to think I was.”
“It’s not rocket science,” said Cleary. “Gardner’s a bright enough person and he’s been around the trades enough … and anyone who’s built a house can grasp the whole picture.”
Watch a couple dozen of the Bus Huxley YouTube videos and you come away with the impression that Waldeier is the kind of guy who likes to figure things out. He’s used YouTube for everything from learning how to replace a car door handle to shucking oysters, a skill he needed to master in a hurry when a friend who owns a restaurant asked if he could shuck 400 oysters in a matter of hours. Waldeier had never shucked an oyster in his life but assured the restaurateur that he had in fact shucked plenty of oysters. He turned to YouTube the night before and mastered the art of shucking.
Waldeier’s skill set is eclectic but wide ranging.
“He’s an arborist, a logger, a maple syrup maker, a gardener, a welder, a naturalist, a first responder and a videographer,” said Jeremy Gantz, a friend who is part of Red House, the worker-owned home building company in Burlington.
Waldeier the videographer has found that much of his life is grist for YouTube. One video featured his work with Hind Quarter Catering cooking pork bellies wrapped in banana leaves and covered in salt on an outdoor fire for several hours. Another video featured Luke Stone butchering a deer Waldeier shot and making sausage out of the meat. Waldeier made serving trays for the wedding caterer out of black cherry wood harvested from his land and that, too, was turned into a video.
During the last few summers Waldeier commuted every weekend from Maine to northern Vermont to cook for Hind Quarter, driving his late grandfather’s avocado green 1967 Volvo sports car, which he lovingly restored. Waldeier has continued to cook for the wedding caterer while working in Colchester. On a recent weekday Hind Quarter’s Stone took a break from butchering a hog at a commercial kitchen in Essex Junction to assess his friend and employee Gardner Waldeier.
“Gardner adds a certain personality to the job that not many others can,” said Stone. “He’s totally positive but he’s a tough one to explain.”
Stone and other friends are amused by Waldeier’s lifestyle, which could be described as frugal but that would be an understatement. One friend chuckled at Waldeier’s practice of putting large chunks of ice in his refrigerator during the winter to save on electricity.
Waldeier plans to take the windfall from his earnings in Colchester and put it to a well, driveway and windows for his house. Still, Jeremy Gantz estimates it’s going to take Waldeier another two years to finish the house.
Knowing Waldeier’s reluctance to spend money, Gantz predicted: “He’ll probably work out some sort of trade with a plumber [that’ll involve] deer meat and moving some rocks.”