Dream Off-Grid, Self-Sufficient Life All Started With a $2,000 Tiny House Truck!

to have a beautiful bit of land to build a gorgeous tiny house to be off the grid growing your own food and to do it all really affordably today we're about to meet an inspiring couple who really are living the self-sufficient dream [Music] I agree how are you good thank you how are you very well thank you good day Brent how's it going mate nice to meet you mate it is a pleasure to meet both of you and to see your incredible home here what an amazing place you've created thank you thank you I love what you've done with all of these beautiful gardens in this super cool rock work everywhere yes stones are something that's just everywhere you go every time you dig up a hole you get more rocks so yeah you have plenty of working material no need to buy them in you can see that there is a tremendous amount of work that's gone into this place yeah there's was a lot of work with crowbars and Spades and shovels to try and shift rock around it was Madam's Greer's idea basically that we line footpaths with stones because it was plenty around it's worked out really well we've been called hobberton before for a few passes by flynnstein yeah all the Flintstones so how did you come here to be on this property we were just looking for somewhere cheap to buy and we didn't want to have a huge mortgage and we just went looking and I've always liked the west coast and bought rent along here and we fell in love with this this one we literally went on a trade me and went under a hundred thousand and what little came up was sort of what we went off on a road trip kind of checked them all out and managed to Wrangle a deal that we got it which was yeah fortunate but that was it we had no more money that was it was gone but we had land and that was how we sort of started it off amazing and that land that's the important thing right because once you've got that that's when you can get creative and do all the other projects yeah slowly we build up a bit of money we do another project then we're back to eating rice we wanted to grow our own food and to get to the stage of being able to supply others you know and so we've got to that stage now it's great excellent because you do have the little farm store here as well don't you yeah it was to try and be self-sufficient and not have to rely on supermarkets and bits and pieces and we've got some other locals Here and Now selling their crafts through our shop and seeing some cash themselves so it makes them happy too yeah it works yeah great because we have all our preserves in there now and girl down the road does crochet beautiful crochets so she puts that in there and yeah lovely what a great idea and so cool that you get to live here have these incredible Gardens and also make an income for your property absolutely well I'd like to retire in the next year so that's the plan is to better just work from home and make enough money to survive you know and can you talk to me about what you've got going on in the gardens here basically we've got three tunnel houses and what we're doing is trying to grow our own food well we are now and the Surplus goes into our little shop and we've got a lot of fruit trees just trying to be self-sufficient as much as we can and you're living in this beautiful house truck can you tell me how that came to be yes I was living in a house bus and that burnt down and just before Brent came down we were going to travel in it yeah all she had was herself and my daughter two dogs and the clothes she's wearing but anyway we found this in canvas Town it was an old ruin left to rot but we cleaned it all up and it's been our home so yeah we love it it was kind of known that we only had about two grand in our pockets and that was kind of exactly the amounts you managed to offer us the truck she come back and said yeah that'll do and it's been about seven years after you've had it yeah it certainly has cleaned up beautifully yeah so we have modified little bits and pieces as we've gone just fixing things up to suit our needs and personal likes and tastes so yeah it's worked out well and what was the process of renovating the house truck like it was fun because we'd only just met and um there was a lot of cleaning a lot of crying of losing the last one and it was different and you know we went op shopping and we got different things and found stuff and it came together didn't they quite nicely he scrounged the Havelock dump yeah a recycling center Place provided tap wear and tin and bits and pieces we need it and can you tell me about the materials you used to renovate the truck because of its neglect Summit was pretty awful so there was panels of ply was shot they had to come off and some of the shingles that were dozy we sort of went we've got to do something about that and you hooked them up didn't you through trading with something a box of brand new cedar shingles I've done a lot of this sort of tin work with just flattening out bits of old scrap corrugated iron we didn't have a lot of cash and money to muck around with so a big outlay like the roofing iron was as much as we could kind of afford at a time and yeah and so Greer you've lived in house trucks obviously for quite a long time you must be really enamored with this way of life I love it I love loving in a tiny space I always have I saw what did I say that program of the lady that lived in the bottle Genie yeah and I always loved that couch I dream of jeans and I always thought when I get older I'm going to have a little couch like that and live in a little tiny space and do you have that couch in here kinda that's purple we'll see you soon yeah and I see that here on the property as well you've expanded in a few ways like you've got the Caravan over there and a few other buildings around the place so we found that Caravan for 500 so we got that it's called Lily lichen we are going to paint her one day maybe and again with the rock work here I love what you've done outside the truck with that fireplace that's super cool yeah it was again just more bold as dug up rolled into position and when we first turned up here there was gold miners working in the riverbed a husband and wife both with excavators working in there so he gave me the Digger teeth which are arranged in the front of that and he said oh you can have these so I'm just gonna they're just gonna go to scrap and I said yeah because I was looking at them they'd make cool little bits and pieces so yeah we hoarded them off them and I see you've got the solar panels there as well so are you off grid here in the truck yeah we're completely off-grid basically that our stroke was already established with a basic solar setup so we've just upgraded basically into a better more efficient system we've installed it in a little cupboard here and got all the system in there and new panels and now it's kind of parked up yeah it's sort of a more permanent setup now than it was before but that's it we've got no water no septic instead we've got solar composting lube and our gray Wastewater goes into Gardens and around our trees in the summertime for keeping things going so it works great job hey yeah yeah what you've created here just looks absolutely magic and I am so excited to see inside the house truck can we take a look absolutely all right thank you boots oh wow what a beautiful place you've created I love all of the character that you've built in here thank you thanks very much first of all what a gorgeous door well it was with the truck basically that was how it kind of came and invited us the design glass yeah yeah this place just has the most wonderful and welcoming feel to it and so much art everywhere yeah little bits and pieces that we find along the way and yeah Greer's got her tastes and I've got mine and it's trying to blend the two bits we do have differing artistic flavors and tastes so it's a mission I win most of the time yeah yeah so I get away little bits and pieces if I sneak them in and then they appeal to her but yeah and it is wonderfully warm in here and of course that is thanks to this gorgeous potbelly stove you've got yeah it's our Lifesaver in the winter yeah you don't need much wood or coal on there just a little bit and we're comfortable ball is with clearing the land of course for two or three years there's still remnants of course in our wood bags coming in now so we still haven't used it up sort of six seven years down the line we're still burning goose and we cook on it through the winter so that saves our gas yeah yeah so it's perfect and now the layout in this bus is really quite unusual isn't it what is going on up here up there is just where we store it our clothes and Ladder here lardic on Space because there's not many cupboards the two sides it was basically bedrooms for the original guy that built the trucks two little kids but we've just sort of benched it out and shelved it I've got my wardrobe and she's got hers and yeah it works in really well and it's nice to sort of have all of that storage but be able to also kind of hide it away like that too absolutely so what size is the house truck 11 square meters is the basic floor pan and with the Loft areas we've got 17.4 17.5 meters square so it's teeny and small and you've got the I Dream of Jeannie couch here which looks super cozy I know same color and all right yeah it is it's comfy now you can sleep on it at night so if we do have an extra person with Throne on the couch because we didn't have the Caravan before yeah and it's right next to the fire so it's a good little mistake is that all right and then you've got the little seating area here as well yep definitely is little because we struggle with our knees but you know if you get them in the right position we can sit there and they've done it together without squabbling plus the way that it's shaped just looks really cool in the space too I don't like just Square everything I like different little shapes in there so it makes it a bit easier to just to get in there and take a seat because you've got to negotiate around a pole and there's storage and under the seats and it just means you can actually kind of flip the seat back up and have a look under there it gives it a bit more room so yeah it's made a bit more practical and usable and I like what you've done with the Tails here too that's you Amos that was my very first attempt so it didn't come out too badly really that looks great and there's so much beautiful timber in here too yeah clearly the guy that put this house truck together for a start was quite a woodworker a lot of this was as it was when we came it just needed a good cleaning and a lot of oil to kind of get it back into condition again bring it back to life yeah and then other bits of woodwork some of the stuff scavenged bits of old boards I found on a farm the pieces of shelving alongside the fridge were dug up from somewhere and we've repurposed things that we're shelving elsewhere that we set up for a start in here and then gone no I don't like that so they got changed yeah and the kitchen looks compact but it looks like you've managed to pack everything you need into that space yeah absolutely I mean yeah it's definitely compact but we do massive cake making we do preserving I tend to take the kitchen myself because it's easier just to wash and dry instead of having arms kind of banging around everywhere so Brent quite likes that yeah it's just a one person space really but it works brilliant I love the mug hanger that you've got there what is that it's an antique we picked up in omaru or somewhere and we're actually tracking around looking for a bit of land and it was I believe part of the rig for horses you know to link up a bunch of horses together so I just gotta repurposed into a cup holder very cool and I see beyond the kitchen there you've actually got access to the cab of the truck too yeah that was a crawl through sort of designed I guess so that while they're on The Road Trucking along you can kind of go at the back and make a cup of tea like you would in a modern motor home we're sort of working on an idea of actually giving ourselves a little bit of extra living space out there and creating like a little bit of a mini theater or somewhere or social media room because I don't know I just want to make sometimes we sit in there with a cup of coffee at night and watch the full moon that's pretty cool yeah yeah and pretend we're traveling look out to the beep beep I love that does the truck still drive yeah yeah it could do with an extra wheel because it's only got five at the moment but it's still running yeah yeah it still goes fantastic and above the cab there is just sleeping Loft yeah that's the bedroom for the dogs and cat and ourselves it's just accessed by a ladder to clamber up into there and it's toasty warm in the winter time and reasonably comfortable in the summertime it could do a little bit more venting but it's as good as it's going to get it's comfy it does the job and the ladder comes down and the dog she climbs up there as well she's learned to climb the ladder so she goes up and down that's so cool I don't know I don't know sometimes it's not so great and then what's behind that door there that's our shower room just a very small little space it's better than nothing when we first moved here we didn't have a shower for two years so it's a luxury actually and for your toilet you've got that outside yeah we have a composting loo Arrangement little sort of when we call the Outback long drop dunny down the hill and especially in a small house there is something to be said for having that outside as well isn't there that's a great thing you disappeared down there and the smell doesn't usually follow you back no it works cool I think Grieves being more accustomed too I've been more a man that had a flushing loo and a a bathroom with a shower and stuff but she's done the house truck house bus kind of living more and sort of taught me how how to deal with it and yeah it works good and it's actually a good system when you get your head around it and so you originally bought the truck for two thousand dollars what was the cost to complete the renovation I think the roof was the most expensive I think there was about four thousand but the rest of the stuff was just stuff we bought at the second hand shop or found you know so not much definitely under ten thousand yeah yeah to have this quality of home for under ten thousand dollars is just remarkable and especially having such a beautiful garden like this you have got a lot to keep you busy here don't you it's definitely a full-time job yeah I just work three days in town but the rest of the time we basically work seven days a week here you know I've been out in the garden that's my passion probably not so much Brands but he's getting better at it aren't you yeah and literally it is it's my vocation is on the yard manager here so I'm just the grunt I run round and trip wheelbarrows of stuff rocks you know all that sort of stuff that's sort of my thing that I can do but doing land like the way we've done it it is a labor intensive job and it's hard yakka and we're glad we did it when we did because the older you get it definitely it's hard I think this home in the land in particular is a blessing for us that we were lucky to get it there was no way to live in a modern three bedroom brick home blah blah blah and it wouldn't have been what we wanted anyway no what we've steered for instead is we've secured land that we could afford and then we kind of have evolved ourselves to fit in with that land and working with it I think you wake with that kind of sense that we've got a home and land to work with Gardens you know a pretty environment around us and we're essentially debt free we don't owe a bank huge sums of money we're not fretting from day to day of you know what if I lose my job what if something comes up you know and I can't afford it we've kind of eliminated a lot of that a so we've actually got ourselves in a situation with probably a lot more relaxed I guess and at peace and it's lovely to sit outside in the morning you know listen to all the birds because they weren't there the Bell Birds weren't there but we've planted a lot of trees for the birds and the two ears come and it's yeah it is nice that you've had a part in bringing the school together and sitting back and watching it yeah it's cool well what you've created here with this home really is just so cool I love all of the style that you put into this and your Gardens are nothing short of incredible thank you both so much for sharing it with me thank you my pleasure cheers here on this property Greer and rent have carved themselves out a bit of absolute Paradise what they have built with this home is a place which is warm and cozy and the gardens the fact that they are off the grid the fact that they collect their water generate their power grow their food and have even taken all of this to a point that they now have a wonderful Farm shop that supplies the community this really is living the tiny house dream and Beyond [Music] foreign [Music]

Channel: Living Big In A Tiny House

Views: 390,650

Keywords: living big in a tiny house, tiny house, tiny home, house truck, off the grid, self sufficiency, small space design, alternative living, Brent, Greer

Id: Qbr6WQUvonk

Length: 17min 39sec (1059 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 26 2022