I have spent 4 years living off-grid & rent free – we built a two-storey house out of containers & even have hot water

10 months ago 11

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A SAVVY couple have decided to abandon modern civilisation and live off-grid building their DIY shipping container home.

Adventurers Jake and Nicolle have spent the last four years living rent-free in the Canadian wilderness, sharing their lives through video diaries.

Mum-of-one Nicolle is building her off-grid home out of old shipping containers with her husband Jake[/caption]

In 2019, they finished their 30ft diameter yurt and in doing so established financial independence from monthly rent and mortgage debt.

The couple then decided to transform the yurt into a home made out of shipping containers, which will feature several bedrooms, bathroom, kitchen, hot water and a guest house.

Set right in the middle of the woods, the family’s home is made of six 40ft cargo containers, with giant windows which will brighten up the place.

In one of their videos, the dad-of-one is seen carrying immense tree logs, which he later cuts into slabs and smaller pieces to frame the home’s windows.

The two-storey development is meant to be Jake and Nicolle’s permanent home, where they will keep raising their toddler son Fox.

Footage also showed a couple of solar panels, which will probably be installed on the roof.

Before receiving the containers by boat through the lake, Jake and Nicolle first cleared the terrain and placed huge concrete blocks across it to serve as a base for their home.

The containers were then placed on top of another, quickly revealing the base structure of the new DIY residence.

One of the containers will be the house’s food storage room, as Jake explained it will be always facing North, therefore always in the shade.

Another will work as the home’s shaded front porch, with a third piled on top, creating a second floor.

Holding her baby boy, Nicolle gave a quick tour of the empty structure which was built in only two days.

She explained how hers and Jake’s room will be down the hall from Fox’s bedroom.

“This [container] is going up top today so they’re lifting it up and adding to the one that’s already up there, then we just have two more to put on the bottom and that’s it,” Nicolle said.

Husband Jake added: “I really felt such pride each time we got a container safely and perfectly in position because so much planning and patience and effort went into setting all this up.”

As of their most recent YouTube video, the couple was already installing power and heating, but the container home is still far from finished.

In 2019, Nicolle and Jake decided to retrofit their van into a sleeper and go off into an adventure to a new property that they had acquired.

They would live in the van as they built a life for themselves in the middle of the forest, while using an inflatable boat to get to and from civilisation.

“We’d get our water from puddles of rain in the beginning,” Jake revealed in one of his videos.

It comes after a real life caveman swapped his life in a fancy house for an off grid lifestyle completely rent free out in the wilderness.

After getting a life-changing scare Donny Dust decided it was time to pack up his things and live the life he had always wanted to try out.

After a terrifying heart attack at just 35-years-old, Donny knew his world could be over at any second so he wanted to make sure he lived it to the fullest.

He said: “The day of my heart attack changed my life, because it was a reawakening.

“Knowing that eventually one day you will expire, you need to live the life that you want, find the value.”

His decision took him inside a forest where he set up camp inside a cave in the Colorado wilderness.