Living Off-the-Grid
By Judy Gerstel
The dream was to live year-round on the water in a spacious fourseason floating cottage untethered to the land, travelling the waves whenever the whim and winds beckoned.
The first thing to figure out was how to float the cottage.
Some people dream about castles in the air. Joe Nimens dreamt about a cottage on the water.
The challenge was to float two conjoined shipping containers and their household contents, a total of about 30,000 lb.
“We thought about building a standard steel barge and a house on top of that,” he says. “We considered every imaginable flotation method, from thousands of two-liter pop bottles to plastic or steel barrels to foam filled things. There are a million ways to make things float — and we thought about all of them.”
Not near the water. Not beside the water. Not perched over the water. His dream was to live year-round on the water in a spacious four-season floating cottage untethered to the land, travelling the waves wherever and whenever the whim and winds beckoned. A year ago, on Labor Day 2020, after selling their homes in Coldwater and Orillia, Ontario, Canada, Joe, 49, and his partner Erin Morano, 59, set out to build their dream.
Photos Courtesy of Live Outside The Box
Even though Joe had worked on building cottages, barges and docks for decades, he was unsure about how to achieve the results he wanted. With no prototype or instructions to guide him — his research failed to turn up the structure he envisioned –- he had to rely on his mechanical engineering training and resourcefulness, and figure things out for himself every step of the way. “For every bit of steel, nut and bolt and wood, I’ve done the analysis,” he says, “how thick the installation should be, the
Now, a short ramp over the water leads from the shore to a charming shabby chic, Muskoka-style, fully outfitted cottage that can float to islands in Georgian Bay or all the way to Toronto. In the meantime, it’s docked at Severn Marina, where Erin has decorated the large attached floating patio with pots of colourful flowers and herbs alongside the barbecue and deck chairs. The cottage started as massive shipping containers measuring 53 ft. long by 8 1/2 ft. wide by 9 1/2 ft. tall. They were sourced on Kijiji from a container broker in Bolton, Ontario, and delivered to a vacant area on the shore near the boat launch of Severn Marina in Port Severn, Ontario.
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He explains that on the west coast, logs bundled together provide enough flotation to build a house on top, but that method is expensive and floats too deeply in the water. “What we wanted to achieve was less than a foot of draft so we could easily bring it close to shorelines and step on and off with a short ramp.” The solution was to build floating platforms layered with expanded polystyrene, similar to the Styrofoam used in coolers. “We used R70 on and under the floor and R35 on the walls,” Joe explains. “The floor blocks are 4 by 8 by 1 inches thick, and the ones on the walls are half that.”
strength of the window frames and what it takes to hold the roof up if you put glass on one side.”
The couple were also determined that their floating cottage would be able to pass through the 45 locks of the Trent-Severn Waterway, which connects Georgian Bay to Lake Ontario.
He adds, “I wanted to find a way to build it in the most indestructible way possible so if everything goes wrong, there’s still no water in the living room.”
The locks are 22 ft. wide and so they ended up building two separate floating structures. One double container structure measuring 17 ft. wide is the
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