Living in a horse box in Devon

[NorthernRaider]

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/articl...Devon.html

[Lightspeed]

Bloody well done to them.

In spite of the appearance of new-age hippyness, it looks like they have pulled it off.

Quite an inspiration eh?

[Devonian]

I had a mate in the Isle of Man who did exactly the same thing. The Horse transporter lorries are constructed much more robustly and rigidly than your average Luton/box van (for obvious reasons) and the internal timber frame work lends itself to the installation of further cladding (and insulation), internal walls and the bolting on of cupboards and other features. In his he had a fully functioning kitchen; shower and wood burning stove.

[Steve]

He looks well for 38 eh ? Joke.

I like what they're doing, there would be many more like them if the planners would get their heads out of the sand.

That £50k investment in land has provided them with a home for life, it could feasibly provide both their children with homes too. When you look at it like that, agricultural land doesn't seem too expensive.

I don't know whether they are managing to be self-sufficient or are in fact working their smallholding whilst claiming unemployment benefits. I suspect that they are not generating any money, or at least not enough to pay for their share of the infrastructure, however they are not filling a council flat.

[Tarrel]

Their lifestyle is the future. They are resilient:
- Low / no energy costs, meaning they are insulated from wild fluctuations in these costs
- No mortgage, meaning they don't have to worry about the housing bubble bursting, leaving them underwater in debt
- Partly self-sufficient in food, further reducing reliance on the financial and food-distribution systems
- A modest amount of land, which I assume they own freehold, which they can do all sorts of things with.

They could have done it for less if they'd been prepared to move north or to Wales.

Many people could do this, if they could just overcome the mental barrier of "life becoming too hard". The media doesn't help, e.g.; "They have a compost toilet which Stig has to muck out regularly". If correctly used and constructed, a compost toilet doesn't have to be "mucked out"; merely emptied of compost periodically, which is not an arduous or unpleasant task.

Their total set-up costs were a quarter of what my son just paid for a two bedroom flat on the edge of Woking!

[Sunna]

how can they live on their land without planning.

[T-oddity]

Planning was their biggest stumbling block they had to leave the land for awhile, it was only a change in legislation that allowed them to convert the old barn on their land to live in.

[NorthernRaider]

It looks rather posh for Devon

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You can tell they are not Devonians originally they only have 12 toes

[bigpaul]

its Willand, right on the M5, hardly "middle of nowhere" is it?

[Smudge]

Kevin McCloud built a house/shed on wheels to bypass planning legislation, I watched the show and tbh fair play to them.

Many people especially in the prepping community talk the talk, here we have a couple walking the walk. They are way ahead of me and I've been prepping since 98, from what I've seen and read they're way a head of many.