Camper to Container Home

Our concrete floors! Hello again! I have enjoyed sharing this crazy project with you, I hope you enjoy it too! Today I wanted to fill yall in on our concrete floors! (Pun intended.) Since we had decided not to drywall our interior container walls, we thought it would be best to pour concrete floors on the top two levels. We knew we needed to put a pretty good vapor barrier down because of the pesticides in the container floors. Also, any other kind of flooring (short of just applying a thick epoxy) would have required a lot of custom cutting to accommodate for the corrugation of the container walls. A "before shot of the container floors" We didn't have to reinforce the floors in the containers to accommodate the weight of the concrete, but we did have to in the open area between them. In the sections between the containers, we screwed 2x12 sections between each joist as blocks to prevent the floor joists from twisting. We put in 2 rows that were each 1/3 the l...

Insulation!!  One day my husband found some 2.5 inch foam insulation panels on craigslist for ahway cheaper than retail. He needed them ASAP. The only people who were available asap to travel the 2.5 hours to Arkansas to get them was me and my mother. So we hooked my mom's 16' stock trailer to our Excursion and hit the road Thursday morning. It was raining when we left. It didn't stop raining. We finally got into Arkansas and found the chicken farm where they were dismantling some industrial size chicken houses. (I am not an industrial size chicken farmer so please let me know if I do not refer to something by its proper technical term.) I was in sporadic contact with the owner and he told me there would be a "crew" to help load the foam boards. Still raining. We pulled in, and a dampish gentleman met us at the gate. He was upset, because his "crew" didn't show up, but he pointed the way. The chicken houses are long, maybe 100 ft ...

Hello! I have a confession to make. As of this post we have been moved into our house for longer than we were in the camper!! 10 months! So (belated drumroll....) we are completely transitioned FROM camper TO container home!! BUT..... I'm still gonna post updates as though we are still working on it! And here is my reasoning- We have moved way faster than I have had time to update. Finding the time has been the main challenge to keeping yall up to date. With 4 kiddos, (two teenagers and two toddlers!), my hubby and church activities, plus I have been doing a lot more of the finish work, caulking and painting. Also I was way behind to begin with because I didn't know how easy it would be to post on the blog. (I had a mental block on it so i just didn't start blogging until after we started.)😶 So, without further ado, I will share the info on how we did the framework and the roof. We had decided we wanted the inside to have the container feel and ...

Hello! It's been forever!  I wanted to share our progress, specifically cutting all the holes for the doorways and windows and how we framed the open doorways with steel tubing! We have a lot of windows and some quite huge, they were one of the few things we splurged on, we love the views of our property. Also the way we had the containers laid out, the middle rooms could have ended up feeling rather closed in, but we were able to open them up quite nicely. You do have to be careful with the containers, because the soundness of the structure relies a lot on the walls. The corners are extremely strong, and when they stack them on the ships they are stacked on the corners. But if you cut too much of the walls away without reinforcing them you run the risk of them twisting and bending. We do have several large windows and doorways, but did not cut any that were big enough to need reinforcement. My husband invested about $200 on a plasma arc cutter and they use...