Spectacular FLOATING HOME is Self-Built & Off-Grid

When I was thinking about what I wanted my life to be like for the next few years, I wanted to be as close to the water as possible, so

floating

at

home

became a really viable option for me. I actively sail and have a boat in the marina here it is also beautiful in the morning, getting up and having a coffee and looking, we have ducks coming to visit us, people are rowing and it was an attractive lifestyle that I felt I could make work, it is completely independent of the

grid

, so, in addition to being tied to the dock, it is independent of power, sewage and water.

I designed and

built

the entire houseboat. The only contractors I brought in were electricians and gas fitters, so I

built

whatever I started thinking about. about this four years ago, I spent a year planning and analyzing its feasibility and then I started building it three years ago just in my free time related to work, life and everything else, so I'm working on it in the evenings and weekends of the week when I can. and it's still a work in progress. I started by building a barge so the barge was 16 feet wide, 40 feet long and 3 feet deep and I built it to stand alone watertight boxes, basically all of them framed with locally harvested cedar and then she thin plywood and then topped with four layers of very heavy woven roving and cut strand fiberglass and then epoxy coated to give me a really sturdy, strong platform to build on and that's all covered and sealed and then I started framing and building the house on top of it.

That, the house it

self

is 14 feet wide by 34 feet long on the main floor and then 12 feet by 24 on the second floor, so there is about 700 square feet of heated living space and then there is some storage . inside the hull so when you walk in you are in the main living room where there is a sofa here and a kitchen and then I have a bathroom here with the shower vanity and the composting toilet. It's unfinished at the moment, but it's in progress and then there are two good sized bedrooms upstairs, I think thirteen by fourteen each, so the good sized bedrooms upstairs don't have access to the terrace above.

I didn't want to put in a door because often in the winters we get quite windy and a door is just another place for air to leak in so we access the upper deck from outside on the floor deck now at the main door here and then There is full 360 degree access to the upstairs from there, ultimately there won't be a staircase here. It will be a space-saving set of alternating stairs constructed from spruce under the couch. There is a sealed battery bank here and there are seven hundred and forty amp hours of batteries and they are currently running on four hundred.

Watts of solar panels on the roof and we will expand it as time goes on. It is not connected with household wiring, it is connected like a yacht or boat wiring, which is a multi-wire tinned anti-corrosion wiring found on boats. That wasn't a requirement, but I knew it would help me get insurance and being able to have it fully insured was definitely a high priority on the project. My main heat source is a pellet stove. The pellet stove has a hopper. in the back so it can hold a full bag, about 50 pounds of pellets and that will last me about a week, I put in a ton so 2,000 pounds of pellets come in 50 pound bags in the aisle and I went through 14 bags last winter, so it's pretty efficient.

I have almost two winters of meat left on board here, the amount of waste is so minimal that it could be, you know, a quarter cup of ash after a week of use, you can get them, so there they are. Resetting the thermostat, mine is the simplest you can get, you can just set the settings right there and you can turn it high or low so there's access right there and there's some pellets and then I have secondary propane. The bulkhead furnace is used as a backup heat source, so outside in a locker I have 260 pound propane tanks to heat the furnace.

I'll set it up here. I just have these frames here where I'm going to be. tiles behind the boiler and the pellet stove so the LP system feeds the boiler and then a small stove that came from a motor

home

and then I also have gas lights, one down here and one in each of the rooms, which there's more it's just a convenience if i come back oh no after a weekend it's a little cold here we can turn them on and they heat things up pretty quickly also last year i think i spent about $700 on propane and pellets and ended up with 2 / 3 of the pellets are left over so my heating costs year round or pretty minimal monthly for safety, each room has carbon monoxide detectors and then in the hallway I also have explosive gas detectors for propane because the Propane is heavier than air and if it leaks anywhere, it will leak through the hole.

I have a halon system, so there's a 7 pound canister right here, so if it gets to 135 degrees Fahrenheit, it will extinguish the flames within 16 feet, so all my heating appliances. They are pretty close to that part of the reason I wanted to live here was because I can walk to most of the services and businesses in the city, but it is a long walk, which is fine when the weather is nice. It's now, but it's November and the rains are coming sideways and you know it's just you have to be prepared for it, it's the mentality you have, it's okay, I don't care, challenges are all I consume, I have to carry this far . and I have to take away, so it really forces you to monitor or be aware of what you're consuming.

I don't have a garbage collector that comes to the end of the road and takes everything and makes it disappear. I still use it. for heat, whether it's pellets or propane, I have to go get it and I have to bring it back here, so it just forces awareness of consumption. The houseboat is insulated with spray foam. The spray foam was the most expensive and I was hesitant. but I ended up going with that and I'm so glad I did as it provides the vapor barrier and since I'm here at the end of the dock and in the winter we get quite windy it really keeps the house nice and tight, I'm in my 30s and the walls are 40 on the ceilings, but other than that, it blocks the entire structure, so when I swing there are no creaks or twists, the whole house moves, but it moves. all as one unit, so for my water systems and utilities I draw water from the lake.

I am verified with the province for a water license and since it is not terrestrial it is not necessary, so I draw water from about 25 feet deep. and I'm pretty far out on the lake here, where a lot of current goes through, we're basically a river and a large volume of water goes through, so the water gets carried away and it sneaks in at its entry point. and then goes through a sediment filter from there, it also feeds a five stage reverse osmosis water filtration system that feeds the water for drinking and cooking as nothing is thrown overboard on the float.

My gray water system is autonomous, it goes through a series of filtrations that are then pumped to the planters and evaporation takes care of it. From that point, there is a grease trap under the stove that collects any grease or food waste that goes down the sink, from there it goes to a 50-pound container that has filtered and cleaned maple wood chips and there a microbial community is established that provides initial treatment from there, the gray water flows to another 50 pounds of activated carbon and the activated carbon flows to a sump that pumps all the gray water from that point that has been treated into the pipe at the softening that then goes down and feeds the planters and the hanging baskets and the window baskets that have all the flowers so that the mulch and the soil and the flowers provide the final treatment and then the evaporation takes it from there, 40 gallons per day, which is the most I could possibly process with the flowers in the heat of summer for the winter when things are too cold for evaporation to work, but I take waste heat from the pellet stove to evaporate my gray water into water vapor.

We have a circuit that runs through the firebox and pellet stove, which then enters a sump into which the gray water is pumped, heated, and evaporated that way. and then for black waste, I have a composting toilet that has been running for about a year and is working quite successfully, so my motivation for building it was that I had a house about 20 minutes from the city, which It was wonderful when my children were younger. They lived in the woods, but as they got older and their city activities required us to come and go a lot more, it was becoming more of a challenge and then as a single parent, it was just taking care of a house. plowing the garden, shoveling, mowing the lawn and I just felt like the house owned me.

She didn't own the house. I just felt like I was limiting the lifestyle I wanted to have and the expense was overwhelming, so the only thing I felt I could choose was to find a way to reduce my housing costs and I thought about living aboard a boat, but with a couple of kids who were entering their teens, that didn't seem very practical and it was in Vancouver. Walking along the docks and I saw some houseboats and I thought wow, I can do that, so that's what got me thinking about the project: one was to reduce my housing costs and I knew that if I built it my

self

I could maintain Low cost, I thought.

I was able to build it in a way that used as many local materials as I could find. I also felt like I wanted to have a lifestyle that reduced my footprint and set that example for my children. I wanted to show them that it was possible to have a really great quality of life, but maybe not in a traditional way and this is what I decided. Share this video if you liked it. Also be sure to subscribe to explore alternatives and check out our playlists for more stories like this. Thanks for watching.