We Had No Water, No Heating and It Was Pitch Black

The caravan was literally just dumped in a field.

That was our home.

It wasn't parked up on a nice little caravan site with an electric hook-up, a toilet block and someone called Dave two pitches down who'd been there since 1998.

No.

Ours was just sat in a field, on a hill, with the goats headbutting it and we'd decided to live in it.

The water pipes had frozen.

It was bloody windy.

And when I say windy, I mean the sort of wind where you start wondering whether a caravan is actually a suitable structure to be living inside. By about 5pm, it was pitch black. We had a couple of candles, no proper lighting and absolutely no logs for the fire, because we were not prepared in the slightest.

So, naturally, we sat in the dark.

In a freezing caravan. With no water. With the wind hammering the side of it. While goats wandered around outside.

It was less “cosy countryside living” and more “have we accidentally become homeless?”

I think at one point we just looked at each other and thought:

This is our life now.

And the worst part was, we'd chosen it.

Nobody had forced us into the caravan. There wasn't some dramatic backstory where we'd suddenly lost our house and had nowhere else to go. We'd actually sat down, thought about it and decided this was a good idea.

At the time, we wanted to live together, but we were also trying to build a business and the obvious thing to do when you're young and want to live together is to rent somewhere.

That's just what you're supposed to do.

You get a job. You rent a house. You pay your bills. You try to save some money. Eventually you buy a house and get a mortgage. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that. It just didn't really work for what we wanted to do.

We didn't want to spend most of our income paying for somewhere to live while simultaneously trying to find money to start a business. Because a business doesn't magically make money from day one.

You need equipment. You need animals. You need packaging. You need insurance. You need somewhere to work. And most importantly, you need money to put into it before it starts giving you any back.

We knew that if we had a big monthly rent or mortgage hanging over us, we'd spend most of our time trying to make enough money to pay the bills rather than actually building something.

So we started looking at what we really needed. We needed somewhere to live. We didn't necessarily need a house, and that was how the caravan came into it.

It wasn't glamorous.

It wasn't particularly comfortable.

And judging by that first night, it wasn't particularly warm, but it was affordable.

Our living costs were ridiculously low compared with renting or taking on a mortgage and that gave us something far more useful than a nice kitchen or a spare bedroom.

It gave us breathing room.

Instead of every pound we made disappearing into household bills, we could put money back into the business.

We could make mistakes without immediately worrying about whether we'd still be able to pay the rent at the end of the month.

That little caravan gave us the chance to actually have a go. And three years later, we're still here.

What started as a way of keeping our living costs low while we built the business has become a way of life we genuinely love. We never really planned to live in a caravan for years.

We just needed a way to start.

And it turned out that starting small gave us the freedom to build something much bigger than we could have imagined that first night, sat in the dark with two candles, frozen water pipes and absolutely no firewood.

Looking back, maybe it wasn't the most sensible way to start but it gave us something we wouldn't have had otherwise.

The freedom to have a go.