Camper to Container Home

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

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