She Made A Tiny Home From A Shipping Container For Less Than $7000 (Fully-Furnished)

Rock Harper here and today I am with Karen who is going to show us what's behind these doors and it's quite amazing because she's made a tiny house out of a shipping container. These are cypress pine weatherboards and these are tongue and groove cypress boards and I've made the circle and I've cut it into one two three so it's got four sections and it opens from the middle. The handles are made from tree branches and when it's open it blends in with the whole look. Very roomy and that's a two meter diameter. Wow nice all right. So you can see it's an old shipping container but it doesn't look like a shipping container. Okay so you've made a shipping container into a tiny home. So what I've done here is I've opened the doors from the shipping container and I've made a floor between the two doors and I've put a wall at the end of the doors. So that's where I've managed to put in my beautiful round door. So it extends the house by the distance of the door. I've put a roof on the top. This roof is actually a moon roof so I can lift up the roof and I can see the and out here in the forest the stars at night are just incredible. So I can lie on the bed and look at the stars. I've also used a clear perspex so that allows natural light to come in and it lights the space inside without having to bring in extra light. These doors were given to me by someone who really needed them removed so I said I'll take them away for you. That's how I score my doors. Oh nice score. On my wall I've got more of my art and you can see I've lined the walls with pine tongue and groove boards but between the pine boards and the steel wall I've got broccoli boxes the white polystyrene boxes to insulate it so on the walls and the ceiling it's all insulated which is important out here. We've got two big glass doors which fold straight out and the bed I got off marketplace. I've got a nice big cupboard. A woman in town the other day asked me to take this cupboard to the tip for her so I said all right and I took it here. So all the cupboards, all the furniture. This a woman in town it didn't fit under her desk so she gave me her her chair. This is actually a door or a window but I'm going to put a stained glass on it so I've started my my design here. Oh nice that's beautiful. It is and my ten-year-old is now 21 and when they come to stay that's their room over there. Oh right over here okay. Where are they living? Sydney. I just moved them to Sydney. I put that in a competition. This is Mendoran art exhibition and that one came first. Oh this one got first place? Yeah. Oh nice. That's going to be a stained glass window there too. I've got loads and loads and loads of coloured glass so this furniture just came off the side of the road. People don't seem to want wooden furniture anymore. They all go for the IKEA. This is the other side that really looks like a shipping container from this side but it won't always look like that. This door is an indoor door. Basically it's just a placeholder at the moment. I'm going to make that into a stained glass art piece and it will be a double door so the top will be like a window and the bottom will be like a door. Up the top I've got storage. In there I can put all sorts of things and it's protected from the animals and from the weather and it's completely out of my way. It doesn't clog up anywhere. It doesn't take up space. It's perfect. The tin roof came from one of the neighbours. He pulled apart his chook house and gave me his the tin for the roof so I'm still screwing it down. I've only just got it so I'm screwing it down but it's a it's a life of leisure. Well this is certainly a nice little place right here. You've got a great place to just sit out here, feel close to nature and some nice touches around the place and this is where you cook. This is the gas so you've got your propane tanks here and your cooker right up top. I have to put my food in this. This is not a fridge. It's a cupboard because I need to keep the goannas and the black ants and the animals out of my food so this is my food. I don't have electricity. What I use, I have a little battery pack that I can charge with just a small solar panel and from that I can charge up my iPad which is all I need electricity for really. I go to sleep when it's dark. I wake up with the sun so I don't need lights. I don't have internet here but if I go into town or to the neighbours I can just download some fantastic YouTubers and watch them on my iPad at my leisure. So over here I do have food. So here I've got garlic chives, garlic chives, basil, spinach and beetroot. So the local kids come to visit me and they'll pull out a beetroot and just chew on it or they'll pick their peppermint and make peppermint tea. I have another little shed there for working so there's lots of art that goes on. These are the broccoli boxes I use for the lining for the insulation. I've been wanting one of these for years and they're about five thousand dollars. It's the back portion of a trailer and I call it my toolbox. It was out in the paddock and I said to the owner, hey um can I buy that and they said oh we don't need it just take it. So it's got lots and lots of room inside. I've got shelves I store all my tools. Everything is set up and set out and easily accessible. So it's got three sides to it and it's just a fantastic little work shed. I'm going to put a table here so that I can use it as a bench and this is where I work. And of course you can't have fun without Lego. So my Lego, a chainsaw. In there I've also got glass for doing stained glass windows. So it's my little craft space as well as a workshop. Well nothing quite says fun like Legos and a chainsaw. Lego and a chainsaw. That's it. That sums up my life. That's a good time right there. And tools galore. So I have access to all these tools and you might wonder how do I use all these tools? Well the answer to that is I use battery tools or my little battery pack that I have. I can charge it up enough to operate these tools which is how I've built this place. And that's just mounted on boards. I have an outdoor composting toilet. So the outdoor composting toilet is, it's just a bucket and sawdust and every couple of weeks I bury it deep deep in the ground and after six months I use that soil and I put that into my garden. Neighbours are, well there's a goanna came through this morning. Yesterday there was two kangaroos wandered up and the day before that two emus came all the way in. Wow cool. So they're my friends. Yeah it's good to have friends in the bush. Right. I travel by bicycle. I have a collection of bicycles there that I've been up cycling. So up cycling, get it? Bicycle? Yeah. So I'm fixing up all those bicycles for the local kids. Now you do have a vehicle here. Yeah this is a 2000 model Land Cruiser Prado. I bought it really cheap and I've restored it myself. So I don't know anything about cars but it didn't stop me. I crawled underneath to have a look and I found a few problems and then I went about trying to fix them. In the main chassis there was a hole that needed to be welded up and the fellow that could weld it for me, he was going to take a while before he could get to doing it. So I put the car up on blocks and I pulled apart the entire front end. I went and got the manual for it and I replaced everything that moves and everything that's got rubber. So the ball joints, the CV joints, tyre rods, all of those things that move, I pulled them all off, replaced the bits that wear away and put them all back on. I put new alloy wheels and tyres that I got off auction and I bid right down on those. So I actually all up between selling the wheels that I had and buying these wheels, it cost me $600 for a complete set of five alloy rims and brand new all-terrain tyres. And that's how I've put the car together. Just bits that I've got from the wrecker and from the auctions. New transmission I got from the wrecker and anytime anything goes wrong I just stop and think about how to fix it and then I'll work on it and put it back together. So I'm going to do a nice fancy paint job on it ultimately, but they say that Prado's go on forever. And is this one a diesel? No, it's petrol. Petrol auto. I normally like manuals, normally like diesels, but this it just goes and goes. So this space here in the back, at the moment I've got water drums because I'm going to go and fill up the water, but I've got these nice long drawers that I can put things in. The space here fits a mattress in it so I've built it in so I can put a mattress in there and if I ever go anywhere long term this is for putting on a stove. This is my stove and I can cook here. I use long life milk. I've got rice that I just cook on my little stove. Happy days. Everything I need is right here. Just make sure I have water drums and I've got the Brigaderie antenna, radio and spotlight. So although I don't have phone service or internet I've got a CB radio. Oh there you go and that still works, you know, I mean it works. All right, yes, that's how they contact me from the main base. So water, water. I bring my own water in so in the little town locally there's a free water station where I fill up my 20 litre drums with water and that's what I use for drinking water and for feeding my plants. But ultimately I'm going to get a water tank and catch my own water which will then be used mainly for the garden and for drinking. But at this stage I haven't got water yet. I don't need any more electricity. I don't have phone service which is a blessing. Internet I can just access elsewhere and come back. So basically it's peaceful, there's no distractions and none of those extra things around in the air. Yeah, I'm happy. And that's the main thing, you're happy. Would you ever have chickens here do you think? Yeah, it wouldn't be hard to do. I've got a little bit of an enclosure here. I've had to put a fence all the way around because this property where the little house is, there's sheep that get, that graze on here. Sometimes they move from paddock to paddock. So I've had to put up a fence and given that I've already got the fence it wouldn't be that much harder to go the next step and put in a fence for chickens. All of my scraps and compost would go to the chickens and I would have my own eggs. So that would make me even more self-sufficient if that's possible. Yeah, it'd be a great form of recycling. Take your scraps, give them to the chickens and you get eggs. Absolutely, that's how it works. Out here in the bush, bordering on the outback, you have to be thankful for whatever grass you make happen. And Karen's making a little patch of grass happen right here in her yard, right? That's if the apostle birds don't eat all my seeds. So I have to have a scare crows. So this is my compost pile, all my grass clippings and waste vegetables and organic matter goes here and I turn it over periodically. On the other side I've got fallen timber and this timber is what I use in winter for the fireplace. So everything, everything is used and reused and everything is functional. All right, well that's certainly being self-sufficient. It really is. Yep, the poles that I used for my structure were on this site before I came and it was all pushed and bulldozed down. You can see a pile of logs there. I've chosen the logs from there to make the uprights for my structure. Okay. Now my structure will be coming out this way a little bit more. So it's just one big wide roof to keep the sun off but the rest is just bush. How much would you say the shipping container and everything that went into it cost you to make a home out of it? All right, the shipping container cost me $2,000. Everything inside it cost me nothing. I had to pay for screws, which I guess I've spent about $150 on screws. The transportation is the hard part. It cost $4,000 to move it here to the site from Queensland. Okay, so that was the big expense. Yeah, big expense was moving it. But the rest, just being frugal and careful and keeping my finger on the pulse, I was able to get all the materials either very cheap or for free. So you've got a tiny house for probably less than $10,000. Oh, way less. Way less. Yeah, and everything in it because you found the stuff? That's right. Okay, well that's a good way to be frugal. Very frugal and because I eat from the garden and I don't pay an electricity bill and I have to buy gas every four months maybe. I do little drawings and sell them and that gets me a little bit of income. So a very simple life. Very simple. So how much would you say you spend per month roughly? $500 and most of that would go to fuel to go to town and back because I volunteer in town once a week. Okay, so you're living well out in the bush on $500 a month? Yes, food and petrol. That's about it? Yeah. The MFISH company invited me to try out a couple of their products. The Super Mushroom Rechargeable Mini Portable Power Pack and the Multi Charger. I have to say I was impressed. The Super Mushroom comes with two 20,000 milliamp banks of power for a total of 40,000 milliamp hours when you magnetically connect them. I can charge my cameras, phones, and other devices. That power pack is small and easily portable. I can charge it up in the car's 12 volt port while I drive. It also comes with a magnetically attachable flashlight and attachable multi charger top and I also like the universal cable to connect just about any device to be charged and it can all be stored in the carrying case. I've also enjoyed using the portable mini charger that simply plugs into a 110 volt outlet and charges your devices. Just flip out the prongs, plug it in, and plug in your devices to be charged into it. Now I have power in the middle of absolute nowhere like right now out in the heart of the outback of Australia. This is my battery pack. It cost me $400 and if I open up this side you'll see it's got different ports so this port is electricity straight from a power point and this port I can use a solar panel or the car battery so when I take a run to town I plug this in. One run to town and that charges this up fully to 100% or if I put a little solar panel onto it, not big, it will charge up within half a day and then I can use it for three days. On the front here I have torch which is good so any light that I need I use this light which is enough for me and I have the usb-c and the car 12 volt car port and on this side I have the 240 volt electricity points so with that I can operate my angle grinder and I can operate my that's about all not many things I need electricity for so this just does it three days takes uh an hour and a half to charge through a power point and it lasts me for three days okay all I need yeah you don't need to run much so it's good just yeah yeah it would be nice to have my fan plugged it in but it'll only last about an hour and a half and uses up all the power however I do have a 12 volt fan that I have to pull out and when I plug that into the usb port that should keep me going during the summer too so then maybe I'll get a day and a half out of it but that's okay okay does it ever get so hot that you can't sleep at night yeah it does it gets really hot at night so what I tend to do is I will my t-shirt I'll just dip it in water and wear the t-shirt and that will cool me down so it will evaporate and keeps me cool if it gets too hot even my pillow case I'll wet my pillow case but just having a bit of water keeps me cool and the 12 volt fan will will work as well the thing is if I open all the doors and windows then I get mosquitoes and that's the other issue with being out in the bush but the way I deal with that is I use a mosquito net so I have a mosquito net over my bed and a wet t-shirt and I'm I'm fine good as gold so this is Karen's pantry here I've got a nice assortment of teas plates are down below I've got some assorted dried fruits and chia seeds cashews whatever is up there and I make my own pots and cups and my teapot the decorations I have a fairy garden with lots of mushrooms and fairy houses so I like to make things out of clay my plates are all ceramic my cups are handmade and you made these I did I did I made this cup and here's another cup that I've made oh the bench I've made that out of a piece of red cedar and it's actually got it's got lego and it's got uh it's got a frog in it as well somewhere there's a frog there's a frog on that one over there I make everything even toys what have you there uh this is a vase that I made in a class recently some people wanted to make something new and different so I've made this it's the human anatomy and inside it you can put your own plants and Karen also makes her own stepping stones if you look closely in this you will see a frog right about there and over here is another frog and there's a dragonfly right over there I got this off a rubbish pile so and I built a frame around it to hold the sink up the taps don't work but if I connect the water to it it would I am intending to create a water system that comes off the roof and gravity feeds to the sink filters and gravity feeds to get it to the sink and this timber here came off somebody's ceiling they didn't need it anymore and instead of taking it to the tip I took it and put it here on the back of my my sink beautiful outdoor sink all right well you've always got a good eye for repurposing oh of course I mean I don't like to throw anything away in fact I tend to keep more things than I need to keep repurposing I mean that's what it's about uh once something's made it doesn't need to be thrown away it can be used and reused and reused and I've got another example over here behind you okay it's my gate so this is my gate to keep the animals out but it's actually an old army bed so if I fold the legs out if I have guests there's a beautiful outdoor bed just put a mattress or sleeping bag or sleeping mat on it it also doubles as my front gate all right gate to sleeping whatever sleeping cot sleeping cot to gate we don't have any rubbish removal here so I have to make sure I take care of my rubbish I single out the recycling into one bin and the other bins are where the rubbish goes anything that can be composted is composted but otherwise every four weeks six weeks I go and take this to the tip and I empty it at the tip in town but sort everything out so there's very little goes to the tip but I have to take it away and all of the recycling goes to the recycling place so it's all divvied out and removed from sight and it's all done in a very mindful way here's one way to repurpose a buddha head well you just cut the top off and you start growing plants and give that buddha an afro and put them in a rock band I'm in a swing chair made from an old van seat I hope you enjoyed seeing the tiny house that Karen built don't forget to give me a like on the video share and subscribe until next time this is rock hopper I'll see ya