By Jade Small | Creative Commons | TheMindUnleashed.com
(TMU) – No matter the size or location, home is where the heart should be. Whether it’s a mansion in the suburbs, a city apartment with a view, or a cottage by the sea, it won’t be home unless you love living in it.
However, because the current pandemic situation is resulting in economies tanking and millions of people losing their jobs, and perhaps even their homes in the process, downsizing and off-grid living is becoming a viable option for many.
The tiny house movement has grown in popularity over recent years, and now it makes more sense than ever…
Jaimie and Dave, a couple from Cowlitz County, made the decision to get out of the debt and mortgage trap before the current situation changed the world we know and decided to create a new home with shipping containers.
Using two containers, one of 20ft and a 40ft one, they created a beautiful home and filled it with everything they need, including love and joy.
Jaimie said, “…We thought, how hard is it to stick a couple of containers together? It’s like Legos, right?”
The couple found and bought a small piece of land in an ideal setting and went about transforming the two metal boxes into a beautiful home, and they did it all themselves. From top to bottom, the structure, plumbing, electrical wiring, welding, and all the construction work and fittings cost around $80k. It’s DIY at its best – and they saved a fortune on labor costs. Of course, it was a big help that Dave was proficient at metalwork.
The couple’s home is not off-grid, which meant they needed all the usual permits and they got them all with the support of the county, even though their home’s design and the building materials were not the usual runs of the mill variety. Once the plans for the house got approved, everything was processed in record time.
Once they estimated the cost to build their home, they reserved Friday to Sunday for building and Monday to Thursday for working at their jobs. They were able to move in after just ten months, even with a medical emergency in between, when Dave suffered a spontaneous intracranial hemorrhage.
When Jaimie arrived home, she saw Dave halfway up the driveway, ‘’I could tell by the way his face was that he’d had a stroke or a seizure or something,” she explained.
It took a while for Dave to be ready to continue on with the build but they didn’t give up, and after a lot of therapy and Jaimie’s support, Dave was ready to finish the job. Turns out, getting back into the process of the build was an important part of Dave’s mental and physical recovery.
The finished result is simply stunning. The home has a beautiful upstairs bedroom opening onto a patio with a view to live for! The downstairs area has a spacious lounge, a kitchen with all the bells and whistles, a pantry, and a bathroom. All this framed by tall forest trees and their landscaped garden, their own little Eden in the making.
According to Jaimie, the whole process was a valuable lesson:
“I think what this has taught us about ourselves is that we can do things that are really, really hard that, if we do them together, we can definitely accomplish it,” she said.
After they had moved into their home, they landscaped the garden and also built a workshop… and they’re not done. They’d like to link the house and workshop with a suspension bridge and also build a zip line!
