If the prospect of buying a house for $450,000 — the new average price for a home in Canada — doesn’t appeal to you, an Ottawa area man has a deal for you: A house he built from three shipping containers, on sale for $58,000.
Joseph Dupuis of Carp, near Ottawa, is selling his creation on Kijiji. The home is a 355-square-foot bachelor pad that has been fully winterized and includes a kitchen and a solar-powered floor-radiant heating system, but no bathroom.
That’s because the “cabin is designed to be dismantled, moved and erected in a new location with limited resources and time,” Dupuis’ ad reads.
"I want to help as many people as I can get out of the pocket of big banks and make people more self-sufficient," he told HuffPost U.S. "I see my friends buying $400,000 houses and they're in debt for the next 35 years. It's pretty backwards — we don't need these expensive homes and all this stuff we have in our lives."
Dupuis appears committed to living off the grid (“I don't have Netflix, I don't have a flat screen television, I don't have a microwave, I don't have a kettle," he told the Ottawa Sun) and the approach seems to be paying off, at least in the pocketbook department.
He estimates he spent $50,000 on the house, $20,000 building it and $30,000 constructing the solar-powered light and heating system. The upshot is the cost of heating the place in winter works out to about $35 a month, Dupuis says.
He told the Sun he came up with the idea in 2010, while a student at Algonquin College. He began the project in 2012, working a little each day.
Dupuis values his privacy. Despite the Kijiji ad, he’s keeping the cabin’s exact location a secret.
"You would never find it, it's so far back in the bush,” he said.
— With a file from Carly Ledbetter, Huffington Post
Check out more pictures of Joseph Dupuis' shipping-container cabin.
