 Hi! My name is Jamie and I'm currently inside a houseboat. It's one of the first things I built when I got to Central America. It's a bit of a disaster right now because I've taken it over as my secondary workshop. But let me back up a little bit. So I grew up in Canada, went to school in the States, and to sum it up in one sentence, the rat race just wasn't for me. So fast forward a bunch of years, I saved some money, scooped up my little family, sold my house in Vermont, and went traveling looking for a new place to live. And we found this place in Central America and we love it here. And you're probably wondering why my shirt is so filthy. It's because I'm in the middle of a project! Here, let me show you what all is going on. So here's my computer station where I do all my upload and the videos. Token from the past. This reminds me to stay on the straight and narrow that I think is the straight and narrow. That's my kids. Over here I've got a pile of batteries that are for a project. I'm going to show you in a minute. Outside the door I've got my kayaks here. Oh, I did a good job on those things. Alright, let's put on my good hat. I made this out of a piece of garbage I found on the side of the road. Ah, great. Up here is the roof of the houseboat. And down here is an old boat I bought. A pedal boat I made. My cargo boat, which we'll go look at in a second. This is the bay. Oh, we love the bay. It's got a dead end that way. Nobody comes in here. It's beautiful. And then here's a wharf that goes through the mangroves. The mangroves aren't actually land. It's just plants in the water. And this goes right up to our island. And this is the second boat I made. It's currently not in use. It used to have a solar roof and electric motor. Oh, this boat here is a friend's boat just storing it. I've got solar panels up on the dome here. There's a nice sea wall to prevent erosion. We're just going to enjoy the view for a moment. Alright, we're going to go down here to the floating docks. We were just standing up there looking this way. And there's my dish antenna for satellite, which is about 15 miles that way. There's the houseboat. This is my cargo boat, which has been amazing. It can hold at least a couple tons. And then out here... Oh, this stuff right here. I just found a new source of scrap metal in town. Oh, so nice when I find a source of scrap metal. That'll go into my materials pile. And here's the boat that I bought a little while ago. I'm not sure what I'm doing with it yet. This is a fish trap. Throw that in the water. Fish can get in. It's harder for them to get out. It works very well. Here's some fish. Just a little tiny fish. Here's my pedal boat. Wow, it looks like somebody very clean was using it. Arggh! Who's not clean on the pedal boat? So this is where we swim most of the time. It's a dead end bay, so no one comes in here. I don't have to worry about getting run over. I got a ladder I can dump in there for the kids. Although they're getting to the point now where they just climb out. There's a bell on the floating dock. So as people walk around on it, dings the bell. Good early warning system for when people come to visit. So my scrap metal deal. I keep collecting aluminum and stainless steel and any materials that won't deteriorate over time. I'm trying to build a lot of things to be as long lasting as possible. I just want to build them once and then use them forever. Which is why I'm using a lot of fiberglass and stainless steel and aluminum. I got this pile of tiles recently, pretty cheap. Now, if we go down the wharf, we've got banana trees. This is something we can eat. I don't remember what it's called. Cranberry hibiscus, I think. This banana tree actually has some little bananas on it. But it needs some fertilizer or something. Worry about that later. Pineapples are doing great. Avocado tree. Water apple tree. Somewhere up here there's a pineapple. Hey, there's a pineapple. Alright, I've got more materials. Building materials all up and down the wharf here. Everything is under construction. Bunch of bags of cement under here. Rocks and sand for concrete and then a bunch of lumber. And the canal here is deep enough for the boats to get in, but not super deep. There's the houseboat from the front, cargo boat. There's a couple of draw bridges so water can get through. Hypothetically, when I get all this junk off here, I could lift up the draw bridges to prevent entry. Here's one house. This pile of banana trees is doing amazingly. We're using compost on that. And up here, I got some sand and dumped it. So it's a nice little beach, except the boat's in the way. The kids play on it all the time, though. So on the island now, this is actually the roof for my retired boat. I'll probably do something with it. This is a papaya tree. I think it needs more water. All the trees right over there are doing amazingly. We should get bananas from there pretty soon. Over here, I've got a 600 gallon water tank I made out of concrete. Up there, there's a little balcony with some solar panels above it. Alright, let's go in the house. Hopefully there's no naked kids in here. No naked kids? Alright, what are you guys doing? So this is the kid's zone. Ooh, nice floor, right? We got kid beds. These are dollies. Oh, you made those, didn't you? Yeah, I got this one. This one I did, though. Who made that one? Mama. Cool. This is animal toys. Oh, look at this. So nicely organized. Let's go into the kitchen. That's the counter area. Got a fancy mixer on a cart. Baby seat. Stuff. Chest freezers back there. Stairs to go upstairs. Oh, and the sink is right over here. I'll show you some of upstairs. Lots of books. This is kind of like the living room. Half of the dome. Which is all books. Not all books, but a lot of books. This one reads books like crazy, don't you? Yep. Some more stairs up to the third floor. There isn't much up there right now. Ooh, somebody made bread. And got a bunch of potatoes from the garden. Oh, those look great. Yeah. So that's where we came in the kid's zone. And now we're going to go out the big door. Hey, it's the ducks. Oh, the ducks always freak out when I walk past them. I'm not going to eat you, I promise. Okay, ducks make their water so filthy. We'll put clean water and they just jump in it and like poop in it and then start drinking it. You guys are so weird. So this half of the island has been taken over by my latest project, which is a boat. This thing. All right, before we get there, we've got a chicken house over here. That's full of chickens. We used to let them just run free, but they just destroyed all the plants. So over here, I have a composting zone that's starting to work on compost. This is those banana trees that are doing amazingly well. It's basically, it's called a banana circle from what I'm told. So we have a mound of dirt in a donut shape and in the middle, there's all kind of a hole that we throw compost into. And here's one that we just started. It doesn't have much in it yet. It's getting there. And papaya trees, that's what's under here. They never grow where I plant them. But if you just leave them, they seem to do pretty well. Like wherever you accidentally throw the seeds. So this is looking back at the house. I got my picnic table with an umbrella and then more ducks, no, same ducks over here. And this little dome, which is dry storage. And then various experiments in testing what'll grow where in what dirt. All right. And now what I'm working on, I'll be working on today as soon as I turn this camera off. I've got one pontoon here, one pontoon there. Those are basically finished. And those both go on the sides of this thing. And I'm just finishing up the arms that attach them. So this hole here goes on one of these posts. And the two arms stick out here and then the pontoon goes there. And they can swing in and out. So if I want to go park somewhere and I don't have enough space, I can swing the pontoon in. This is my workshop. And over here, I've got what some people would call a mess. And anyone who loves to build stuff would call a, I don't know, what do you call it? A junk pile. Amazing resources stuff. I've got some stainless steel pipes here, a bunch of PVC stuff. I'm always pulling stuff out of here to build. Oh, before we go into the workshop, you can see what actually powers the workshop. This is my bulldozer. It's just a little tiny bulldozer, very strong though. And it has two wires that plug into the bulldozer so the workshop can run off the bulldozer power. Let's go look at the front of it. Finally, I stopped with some dirt still in there. I've got one solar panel up on the top there. 275 watts. Four golf cart batteries in the back. And it's not a lot of power, but it has enough to run everything I have in my workshop. I can drive this thing around all day as long as the sun is out. And then back here behind the dome is where all the sweet potato plants are. That's where those sweet potatoes came from. Then over there, more pineapple trees. This is a one-do. It's supposed to make beans. I don't know how big this thing is going to get. It's like eight feet tall already. When is it going to make the beans? I don't know. Over here, we've got parts for a concrete mixer. Behind this is an elliptical machine that goes on top of a little tiny catamaran made out of my kayaks. Here, I have a breadfruit tree. There's another one over there. I walked past that's much bigger than this one. I'm slowly planting stuff to grow food. I want to grow all our food eventually. Pineapples. I don't remember what this tree and this tree are. They're some kind of fruits, though. Let's go into the workshop. Which, again, is a bit of a mess. It's not too bad, though. It's pretty good for the amount of stuff that's in here. I've got a huge lathe. I need to fix something on it. I've got a little lathe, which I use for a lot of plastic bearings and stuff. Let me just show you. Under here, I've got a milling machine. I baby it so much. I keep it covered up in plastic. I want this thing to last super long. I also squirt oil on it. Kind of routinely. Then under the lathe, more storage of tools. Tool storage, part storage. This is where I keep some of my smaller stainless steel pipes and stuff. I've got buckets of PVC junk. A lot of this stuff is just stuff I found that other people were trying to get rid of and sold really cheap. Pretty much anything I think I might use at some point if someone is selling it really cheap. I'll just take it, even if I'm not ready for it. Then I always end up using it. I've got a pile of tires here. Those are for a car. This is some of the steering. It's kind of on hold while I finish that boat outside. A bunch more of PVC stuff. I bought from a guy who just had this mountain of PVC connectors and pipes and sold it to me really cheap. I just took the whole thing. Here I've got an old broken electric motor. There's just all kinds of stuff going on in here. Back here, I've got a water tank. 200 gallons of water fills up through this pipe which has this gutter here made out of PVC pipe. It only collects water off a quarter of the building but it keeps up with anything I do in the workshop. I do drink from that. Here I've got a trampoline that is currently dismantled because the chickens took over the trampoline house. Why can't they just behave themselves and not eat all the plants? Over here, this is the mold I used for the main hull in this boat. This mold, I just made this one recently, that's the mold for the pontoons. That wood pontoon back there, that's the one I originally made to make this mold out of. Here are the chickens. They've come up to the gate because I think I have food. I did not bring food for you guys, sorry. I just came over. They make eggs. I did eat one of them because there was a rooster that he crowed at like two and three in the morning, like middle of the night, totally dark. So loud. Yeah, we ate ivory because he wouldn't shut up. Hey, what are you eating there? Peanut butter and what? Sweet. This is chocolate. This was actually full, not too long ago. So this is chocolate that was made here and I ground it up myself. It's just pure cacao. Here's the beans partially processed.