Home Tour Intro

Hi everyone! I am so excited to share our crazy adventure with you! 

I'm Stefanie. My husband, John and I are in the process of building a container home in the boonies! Currently we are living in a vintage 34' Avion camper, with 4 kids. (I know, I'm nuts....well I wasn't until we moved into the camper, but the trip was a short one, ask my kids!) This is our camper (no slide outs!!) and my laundry room (the container on the left).

Yours truly with the rest of the "Rowdy Dowdys" sitting on our couch/master bed. 

 We have a total of 7 containers, 5 of which are 40 feet long and 2 20 footers. Most of the long ones are "high" containers meaning they are 9.5 feet high, and a "higher" cost than the typical 8 feet high ones. We are only using the long ones for our home, the short ones are storing all our junk!

They are all 8 feet wide and thus posed a bit of a challenge for designing the layout of our home. We wanted large, open living spaces and master bedroom.

 It took us months of debating pros and cons and compromising before we settled on a layout, and even this picture isn't the final product! (It's very close to what we decided though so I shared.)

Here is the drawing we had drafted. The red squares are the ends of the containers so you can see we have two stories and then a third "basement container". We jokingly say we have a 2 & 1/3rd story house. We will frame in the space between the containers and those rooms will be the larger ones. The basement container will be mostly open, with about a 8' room on one end as an Oklahoma tornado shelter, and the rest of the space will be a bedroom. 

As a side note, our county must be the freest in the nation, they require no permits for building! Let freedom ring! 🇺🇸🎆

August 2017 we moved the camper to our new land full of woods and ticks and a creek and lots of brush and undergrowth. It's hard to get financing on such an unconventional method of construction, so John bought a few containers on credit. Life moved slow. We had an idea on where we wanted to put the house, but changed our minds. 

FINALLY on November 2nd, 2017 we "officially broke ground" on our home! My two younger sons supervised from the safety of a couple of "parts mowers" my older son had acquired from a nice old man we used to live across the street from. 

A week and a half later the front end loader guys came out to dig footers to set the containers on. Moving along nicely, huh? 

Not quite. The next picture was taken Jan 20th 2018! I wasn't there for the initial concrete pour. But something went wrong and the form for one of the footers did not hold. It bowed out really bad and so they did not finish it. We had a big lump of concrete my husband took to calling a mushroom. It took two months to figure how to salvage the situation. 

November....December....January. 

We had a super mild winter, thank the Lord, so the kiddos were able to be outside the camper a lot, otherwise mom might be more than just a little nuts today. 

Then on January 20th and after my hubby consulted with a great group of minds, we decided to form around the mess up and finish the other footers. YAY!!

John ran into an amazing man at a concrete company and asked him if he had time to do this work for (and with) us. He did. And he and his wife have been with us almost every step of the process. 

John said they were angels. They are the sweetest couple: with a 15 year old girl, a 14 year old boy, an almost 3 year old and a 20 month old under foot, it really did take a special couple to work for us, get as much done and keep an eye out for curious kiddos. They involve the 3 year old in as much as they can, which I am so thankful for, living in a camper. 

I will leave you hanging for now! Thanks for coming along!