Camper to Container Home

This was the most exciting day of this building adventure so far! As many people call it "Crane Day"! At 8am on Feb 5th when the crane arrived it was 13 degrees outside!! We decided to leave the babies with Gramma to keep them out of trouble and I wanted to be on hand to shoot pictures.  We set the flew and set the first container without any trouble. The container was sitting adjacent to the pad so it was no problem to hook the straps to the top and move it in place.  It did take a little wiggling to get it in the exact position, but as it was on the ground it wasn't that big a deal. The crane did have to lift it off one or two times before it was square. Then the welder tacked it in place. They had bolted plates to the concrete and later the welder attached L shaped plates to secure the container on place.  Then for #2: And #3- the top one on the back stack. By the time we got to this one you can see they had tied ropes and were guidi...

Hello again! First I want to share some things that I didn't on the last post that I think will be interesting for anyone wanting to build.  Our land slopes from south to north quite a bit, and John has always wanted a daylight basement. (What we are doing doesn't have a lot of daylight though, due to his greater desire for a storm shelter and safety! 😊 John is a safety nut!) So we had to grade the pad and wound up making two levels to place the containers on. After the pad was leveled we had the holes dug for the footers. They wound up being about 2.5 feet wide by 4 feet long (the width of a backhoe bucket!) We were hoping to dig down 5-6 feet, but when they got to about 3 feet they hit solid rock, which is what we were aiming for anyways.  You can see in the backgrounds of these pictures how dense the trees were. While we were waiting on things to get moving John rented a skid steer to clear out some of the trees and brush so that we could get the cra...

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 wa...