Living in a caravan, with a toddler and a baby in nappies, is allowing Catherine and Kyle Houten to invest in their children’s future.

Even though she changes up to 15 cloth nappies a day, Catherine Houten, 26, says it is a good life.

The couple live on Houten’s parents’ farm near Warkworth, about 45 minutes north of Auckland.

As well as the 1970s Anglo caravan, they have a shipping container and a unit that Houten and her father built years ago from scrap wood.

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They own their own home further north in Wellsford but have rented that out and are living with next-to-no costs in the caravan so they can invest in Kyle’s fencing business.

They were living in Wellsford when their oldest child, Toby, now 18 months, was born three months premature.

“Basically, I had my son and I just needed support from my family. I was really lonely,” Houten says. “I’m not a single mum but I do it all myself. That is what happens when you own a business.”

They moved to Houten’s childhood home in July last year, adding baby Bella to the family this April.

The financial benefit is huge. “It doesn’t cost us anything to live in the caravan,” Houten says. “It gives us financial flexibility to invest in the business. Our house (in Wellsford) pays for itself and we can focus on the business. We can give our kids a future.

“I don't want to have to send my kids to daycare and never see them, and not be able to save.”

But the main benefit is being near family, with parents Jenny and Doug Houten close at hand. “My mum had my boy every single weekend for the first six months of last year. She was such a big help to us.

“I just love being close to my parents.”

Houten’s father often takes her son for her on the weekends or in the evening when he gets home from his full-time work as an engineer.

“Toby will trash the garage and Dad will pull his hair out but it gives me a break,” she says. “Dad is like another parent to my little boy.”

The living arrangements are fairly basic, with an outdoor kitchen and no indoor plumbing except for a shower.

Houten estimates they are 90% off-grid, with gas hot water for the shower, and 12V solar power but also with an extension cord which means they can run one appliance at a time (“you have to turn the heater off if you run the oven”).

The washing machine, in frequent use with so many nappies, is in the garage and has its own 20,000L tank.

Houten says they are used to the work-arounds. “It’s just our normal now because it’s been so long. People come over and say, ‘How do you turn the tap on?’ You have to use the pump.”

Houten says cloth nappies don’t make her life harder.

“For us it’s the easy route. We don’t have kerbside rubbish collection. And besides, I quite enjoy it: Some people get obsessed with baby clothes, I like cloth nappies.”

She writes about her parenting experience on her Instagram @caravan_with2_clothbums. “I just try to remove the stigma that cloth nappies are hard. In the 90s you had a sheet to wrap your kid up in. Now they’re just like padded undies, they’re really cool, and they’re easy to clean.

“I’m not up to my elbows scrubbing and soaking. I don’t do any of that. If it was hard, I wouldn’t do it.”

She guesses she has saved more than 5000 disposable nappies going to landfill to date. It is also cheaper, she points out: “At around 50c each, that’s a heck of a lot of money saved.”

The family’s plans for the future include moving back to a regular house. Houten’s parents have bought a three-bedroom 1980s house from South Auckland and relocated it to the property. Getting building consent for it to be placed on foundations took 14 months.

The house also had to be cut in half length-wise to be moved up the narrow dirt road to the farm and needs a lot of work before it is habitable. They hope to be in before next winter.

Meanwhile, family life is busy, and also includes five cats, two goats, three farm dogs and a wild rabbit that Houten found.

“I brought it home and Kyle fell in love with it. The dogs were going to eat it, so now it lives in a bunny mansion with its own home security system, an electric fence.”

Houten says she was a “terrible teenager. My life went off the rails and my parents wanted to bring me home.”

She has moved away and come back several times, including when she was 18 and she and her dad built the unit from salvaged timber to give her a space of her own, not then imagining she would one day be living in it with a husband and two children.

“I was couch-surfing because I didn’t want to be at home. And so we built this place from scratch. The unit that the caravan is attached to is 6 by 2.5m, and it’s all recycled material – we knew a demo guy.”

And, while she has had tough times in the past, she says husband Kyle is “the nicest guy you can probably imagine but double it”.

“I’m putting all that behind me and trying to build a good life for our children. This has always been home to me. It made sense to come back to it.”