A COUPLE who pooled their savings to snap up a mouldy 25-year-old caravan have turned it into their dream home.
Wedding photographers Jon and Emilie James forked out just £400 to renovate the overgrown motorhome – and they don’t pay a penny for gas.
3
3
3
The couple swapped their £132,000 home for the £90,000 three-acre site for the off-grid resident.
And the intrepid duo have made some serious changes to the gaff, including an outdoor shower.
Sharing the renovation process on their YouTube channel, Camp Out West, they showed exactly how they transformed the caravan.
“During our first week, we didn’t have a shower on the site, so we decided the next thing on our list should be our own outdoor shower,” Emilie said.
read more in off-grid homes
“Our goal was to make it out of as many second-hand materials as we could find.
“John used some aluminium sheets from his grandad’s house for the shower walls and we found a shower base on Facebook for free.
The couple sourced the perfect spot for the bathroom – an old caravan outhouse base with direct drainage to their sewers.
And John and Emilie can enjoy a piping hot wash thanks to their portable shower unit powered by gas bottles.
Most read in Money
“We found six bottles of gas left on the land,” Emilie continued.
“So for the last 12 months, we’ve had free hot showers.”
I’m a ‘proper’ gypsy because I’ve finally moved into a caravan with boujee decor & furniture covered in plastic
The pair, aged 33 and 34, had £79,000 left after paying off their mortgage, which they pooled with £11,000 of savings to buy the park.
The site was previously used by coal miners and fell into disrepair after closing in 1989.
During our first week, we didn’t have a shower on the site, so we decided the next thing on our list should be our own outdoor shower
Emilie
“It’s always been our goal to live within our means and be mortgage free, so we’ve just sold our house on Instagram and used all of our life savings to buy a three acre abandoned caravan park, so we can self build a tiny home,” they shared.
John explained: “We didn’t have a big budget so were limited to what caravan we could buy.
“We chose this one as it had the dining area as well as a bathroom at the back.”
THEY’RE NOT THE ONLY ONES
A man who worked 60 hours a week and made six figures now lives off grid in an old school bus full of genius features.
And, a dad has revealed having to live in a caravan with his six-year-old twins after losing all of his money in a divorce.
While also, this chap revealed how trolls call him a “jobless sponge mess” and would rather he did not date their daughter because he lives outdoors.
The die-hard nature lover said he enjoyed the outdoors so much that instead of visiting it on his day off he wanted to live there permanently.
READ MORE SUN STORIES
And finally, a couple have dashed their home and hit the road in a converted van that costs £600 a month to run.
HOBBIT HOME
A HIGH-FLYING city-slicker has told how he sacked off his busy corporate life to build himself a ‘hobbit home’ on land he bought on eBay, by Dan Coles
The former lift engineer has been busy building an impressive homestead for five years – and said he has never been happier.
36-year-old Kris Harbour was a two-property homeowner and enjoyed a busy social life in the capital city – but even with the success, the direction his life was going in didn’t “feel right”.
The former city-slicker said the strain of living in London – one of the most expensive cities in the world – left him feeling “tired and unfulfilled”.
After shifting his house – and a buy-to-let flat – he was able to close off his £400,000 mortgage, and spent what was left on 18.5 acres of land in South Wales.
When he moved onto his new plot, he was forced to live in a tent, but fast-forward five years and his empty plot of land is the envy of everyone that dreams of taking the plunge into off-grid living.
The home has a roundwood timber frame, a reciprocal roundwood roof, with cordwood walls that sit on gravel bags and stones.
The wood he used was free and the binder between the logs is a mixture of clay, sand and straw, which he mixed together with his feet.
He said: “It was incredibly cheap, it was built based on the small budget I had.”
He built everything by hand, and the house took him six months to finish before he could finally call it home.
However, he did admit that its not built for a lifetime and will – at some point – begin to rot, but he “built it with the intention of lasting 30 years.”
He then constructed a shed that was built for “almost nothing” – cutting down trees on his land – to house his hydro, electric and solar power.
After that, he built his “dream” workshop which has two floors, one for metalwork and a second for wood.
He said: “It has this lovely porch at the front which we sit under and store our firewood in, and is accessed through a small “hobbit door”.
As well as all of that he has a garden where grows all of his vegetables and says it produces almost all of the veggies he needs for the colder months – he also built a green house of “his own design” which cost around £2,000.
To keep his food stocks up, he fenced around 4 acres of his land that he houses chickens and sheep in.
He said: “They better get laying, I want my egg sandwich in the morning.”
He’s not the only hungry-for-the-slow-life Brit that has packed in their busy life for a spot in the outdoors.
