- [Man] You said that he felt a little bit
like he let people down.
And I didn't know if he felt comfortable
to elaborate on that,
like where those feelings were coming from.
- Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, it's hard to end the...
Hard to end the film this way.
This will feel like for some reason
the story isn't maybe what people wanted.
The deal was we had $100,000
and roughly a year to complete this project.
It got hard.
- [Man] And we're ready to rock and roll here,
if you're willing to go.
- [Brook] Yep. - Sounds good.
- [Man] Okay, great, alright.
Now we're gonna go in three, two, one.
I'm really excited about today's program.
Today, we have a couple who is building a house
out of a shipping container.
Something that I think a lot of our audience
will find fascinating.
Welcome to the show, Ryan and Brook.
- As a high cost of living puts a strain
on more and more people...
- [Male Reporter] Soaring rents in the metro area.
- [Female Reporter] First-time home buyers
are going to have a very difficult time.
- Gonna be facing eviction if the prices continue to rise.
- I didn't realize how hard laying block was.
- [Woman] People have gotten this idea
that big mansions are American.
- It all starts with a 20 foot long
steel shipping container.
- And you put it all together yourself
like a piece of Ikea furniture.
- This has been my little love project.
- Brook and I decided a while ago, when we first met,
that we wanted to build our first house
out of reused and recycled materials.
We do wanna do something environmentally responsible,
but we also want to conserve our money.
So, we'd love to be off the grid,
but right now we don't have the finances to do so.
Our thought is that if we can be an example
to other small families
of how to build their first home in a cheap way,
we'd like to pass that information on.
This will be our kitchen,
so our fridge will be here,
our sink will be right here,
our stove will be right here,
and our spiral staircase will be
where Brook is standing right there.
Right here will be our master bedroom.
This will be our walk-in closet.
- [Brook] I can envision it,
but not like Ryan.
- Yeah.
I can see every piece.
I can even see the outlets.
(laughter)
- We're a little bit behind where we wanted to be.
We figure about two weeks off of our ideal schedule.
But by Christmas,
hopefully we'll have a...
A foundation. - Foundation.
- Yeah.
- We'll have a 40 foot container at the back
and then we're gonna build a window wall on top of that.
The concrete slab that we're gonna pour in the center
will be like our living space.
So that'll be our living room and our dining room as well.
- There once was a house well-contained.
Its happiness was real, nothing feigned.
You must come to see it.
The love of three, so be it.
A warm kitchen and garden well-maintained.
Ryan, Brooke, Solei,
may the sun shine always here,
and your home blossom.
- We're having people write just loving statements
about our first home
and then we're going to be burying them
underneath the footer.
The intention is to build our home
literally on love and joy.
Alright.
Almost.
There's the first dig.
Construction's underway, thanks to Solei.
We thought it would take a day
and it's taken four.
- He's like super intense,
I have to take breaks from him.
- You can get wrapped up in it
and then it becomes a total pain in the ass.
I don't want that to be how this is.
- [Man] A little nervous about this?
- Yeah, I've never poured a footer.
And we don't have anybody here that has.
So this is totally new to all of us.
We've done a whole lot of work here
and we're kinda keeping our fingers crossed
that we don't screw things up.
- May you see lots of rainbows and love endlessly.
- May your home be filled with joy, love,
sunshine, puppies, and unicorns.
Hi, there's one house well-contained.
Actually, let's just put them in.
It was a long week.
I'm very, very glad that we're done with the concrete.
It's time to go grab a beer and head to bed.
I like adrenaline.
Everything else seems to disappear when I'm on a mountain
or in the water.
I was a snowboard instructor
and every New Year's at Sugar Mountain,
they do this thing called the Torch Run.
Basically, they hand out military grade flares
and then you ski down the mountain,
and it looks like there's a big snake on fire,
going down the mountain.
I had had too much to drink,
skied straight down the slope full speed
and headbutted the corner edge of the electrical box,
and put a big old hole in my skull.
And when I fell in the snow,
I fell in the snow with my head in the snow,
and it constricted the capillaries
and kept me from bleeding out.
I didn't really know what I was doing anymore.
All the plans that I had kinda got thrown up in the air.
Decided to just be open to whatever came my way
and I met Brook.
- Our lives got going together really quickly.
When we found out we were having a child,
we weren't really in the position to have a child.
And so, when she was born,
we were on food stamps.
- There were like a lot of things up in the air at the time
and me and Brook had a really good,
really deep conversation about,
"Do we want this to be the real deal
"or do we wanna just kinda call this it?"
And we both agreed that we loved each other too much
to just let it go.
Aww wow, thank you, Solei.
Thank you, Solei.
I love you.
That was really nice of you.
- Solei told me what to say and I wrote it down.
You want Dada to read it?
- Let's see.
Wow, look at all the pigs.
That's awesome.
Dear Dada, Valentine's Day, cow, sheep.
I love you because you are fun.
I like you because of bumblebees.
- [Brook] That's what she said.
- Awesome.
Happy Valentine's Day.
I got you a couple of shipping containers.
(banging)
- [Brook] I'm warning you, they smell really...
- They smell like mulch. - Strong.
- This wall right here is gonna be chopped out.
We'll be looking over a freestanding bar
and we'll see the living room.
- [Brook] They're definitely beat up,
but compared to the other seven we looked at,
they're significantly better.
- Now that we've welded together one of the frames
and we've put the window frame in it,
it's way easier for me to see how it's gonna look
when we actually cut the hole out and put it in.
- When you have all of these open
and that coming through,
it's not really a shipping container anymore,
it's another house.
So, we are over budget
and we're trying to figure out how to bring it back.
- We're gonna get this house done,
it's gonna be a beautiful house
when everything's said and done with.
That's the goal here,
is to have a beautiful house.
- [Man] What's been the hardest part of it so far?
- [Ryan] The whole house?
- [Man] Yeah.
- I think we're in the midst of the hardest part
of the whole process.
Think relationships,
that's emotional ties are hard.
They're hard things to deal with, you know.
- It is 9:30.
Getting ready for the final stretch of the day.
And usually, we'll just...
This is the first...
Hi, Ryan.
This is the first time that we usually see each other
after going to work and working on the house.
- It is really hard sometimes, though,
at the end of a busy day,
to be done,
and then come inside and realize you're not quite done yet.
- We've updated the blog everyday, except one.
The responsive blog has been
so much more than we could've ever imagined it would be.
Maybe it's just hitting a chord.
I mean, we're just a normal family
and we just want a home.
We want a little place to grow some food,
raise our kids, have fun.
It just seems like everyone should have a place
that when they...
All of their actions into the world
start from the really inspiring place that they call home.
- Lots of people go dumpster diving for food,
while we're going dumpster diving for building materials.
As far as constructing our house is concerned,
we're literally counting pennies.
And so any extra materials that we can score
out of a dumpster that somebody else
is just gonna be throwing away, why not?
Oh, nice.
Alright.
It amazes me how much waste that there is.
And there's so much stuff in there
that we didn't take
that somebody could still totally use for something.
And that's like one of the big things
that we're trying to get across with this house
and share with other people,
is it's totally possible.
It's not something that's far out of reach,
it's something that we can all be a part of.
We can all reuse, we can all recycle,
we can all repurpose items that would normally be wasted.
- Once we decided,
"Oh, we're just going for certificate of occupancy,"
brilliant, finished house in a lot of ways.
It's like, "Oh okay, that takes care of budget.
"We're good to go."
And then, "Oh shit, it's 75,000 to move in."
It's not super depressing,
but it's a little bit like, "Dang."
Our goal is proving that
affordable housing is possible.
And so it felt like not only were we personally struggling
to make this happen,
but our belief that this is possible is being...
Challenged.
- [Ryan] Solei, do you like the goats?
- I only like the little ones.
- I just like the air here.
It smells so clean.
I've kinda been brought up
with the repurposing, reuse mindset.
My parents were always reusing or repurposing things,
or passing them on to someone else,
so that someone else could reuse them.
So, it's just how we were brought up.
Yeah, and now we're kinda passing that on again.
Right, Solei?
Can you say recycle?
- [Solei] Recycle.
- [Ryan] Yeah.
- [Brook] To be very comfortable,
we probably could use like $10,000
to finish up what we need to finish and move in.
- We've still got to finish the plumbing.
We've got insulation,
we've got drywall,
and then we've got the siding.
So we started up the fundraiser to see
if we could raise enough money
to finish the house.
And we were able to raise a quarter of it.
So that's a lot to us.
- [Man] So you have the 2,000 from the fundraiser.
So how do you think you're gonna get the other six?
- Well, we've got $4,000
that we've been saving up for Solei's college fund
and I think we're just gonna use that.
We've also got $2,000
that my parents have been saving for us
for if me and Brook eventually did have a real wedding,
to be able to do that.
And I think we're gonna use that too.
- We wanted the move-in date to be August 7th,
because that's Ryan's birthday,
but we're gonna have to get him a t-shirt instead.
Technically, the last day of September,
that's like the technical cutoff.
The day is September 27th, my birthday.
And it looks like for my birthday,
we have running water.
There's still so much to be done at the new house,
but once we got our certificate of occupancy,
we just committed to a house that's unfinished
but completely livable.
Hopefully, by midnight tonight,
we'll be out of this house
and busting a move.
You're building this thing
and you love your plan
and you think you know what you're building
and how it's gonna feel,
but you really don't, until you're there.
- May our presence here...
- [All] May our presence here...
- Imbue a blessing...
- [All] Imbue a blessing...
- That stays forever.
- [All] That stays forever.
- For me, the home was definitely a coming together
and I think it was like our best selves, actually,
that came together for that time and that project.
- One, two!
Oh, he's not coming down!
- [Brook] It was just like a really great adventure.
That year was a great year.
It was challenging, but we did it.
Almost a year to the day,
we built the house.
And then when we moved into the house, it got hard.
- Once the house was completed
to a point where we could move in,
there weren't any real fires to put out.
Brook definitely had more time
to reevaluate, I guess, our relationship.
She just wasn't happy.
- I think the irony was
that when we had the safety of this home,
what it actually provided was a safe place to...
Yeah, start our lives, but not together.
I lived in a different part of town.
Our little bedroom.
Also had to keep building,
so built Solei
her lace teepee.
- It's been really hard.
It's been the hardest months of my life, you know.
Was it worth it?
You're in the most debt of your life
and you've built this thing
with someone that you're not with anymore.
Yeah, it was.
'Cause I proved something to myself.
This is our footprint on Earth,
it's a big deal.