Camper to Container Home

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...

Hi everyone! It's been a while, so I have lots to share! Today I'm going to talk about the decking between the containers for the top and ground floors, and a little bit about the holes we cut in the containers. This first picture is one of my favorites, it's a little out of chronological order, but I wanted it to be the first. One of the first things we did after setting the containers was build the decks between them for easier access to the two floors. We also started cutting doorways and windows. The first doorway we cut was between the foyer and the living room, you can see it in the picture above!! That was very exciting! John had stored some materials in the top containers on both sides so to access them we had to climb that crazy extension ladder. Whew, I was glad when they had the decks built and doorways cut. John used a plasma cutter to cut all the holes. We decided to put a big arched window between the dining room and the kitch...

This is the post I am the most intimidated to write because it has to do with all the details my hubby and the other brains behind this operation have been thinking about, while I have just been excited to see the overall progress. 😃 Today I'm going to share with you the specifications of the concrete supports on which we placed the containers and the engineering reasoning behind it all. We wanted to put a "basement" container in the rear stack for a storm shelter, so we had to pour columns to support the front two containers and bring them up level with the two in the rear. (Hindsight, it would have been cheaper and easier to use another container instead of the concrete columns.) So we poured 6 foot high columns for the front stack and dug down and poured footers in the back that are even with ground for the rear stack. The amount of weight soil can support depends on the type of soil. Clay can support about 2,500 pounds per square foot, sandy loam abou...

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...