Camper to Container Home

Hey there! I know it's been forever! I have so much to share! We have gotten so much done, and I'm so ready to burn my paint brushes! Haha, not really, because I have lots of other projects that I can't wait to get done once I'm finished with our house.  I am going to do a series of posts detailing different rooms with maybe some "before" pictures to remind me how thankful I am of where we've come from! (I didn't do any this time, but I plan to in the future.) I used to be very much a grey walls/stark white trim person. And I still like those colors, but for this house I have gravitated toward the warmer creams and ivory for my walls, along with medium grey for my trim. This color scheme is very rich, cozy and lends itself to my rustic French country (sortof) decorating style that also has a bit of industrial to go along.  Here are our large, beautiful, double front doors. I went with cream for the trim as well, because the exterior trim is the same co

Hey everyone, I want to show you guys some of the framing we have done on the interior and how it came together with some pictures before and after. I'm back tracking a bit because I already shared the concrete with you. For a long time after we cut the holes in the floors and ceilings of the containers we had (a couple of rickety extension) ladders connecting the floors!  Then we got the stairs framed in (not finished though, that just happened a couple of months ago!) The first picture below is looking at the stairwell from my kitchen. The picture below is looking at the stairwell from our master closet. You can see the reading nook window at the top of the picture.  We framed in walls inside the first container (the one with the front doors) to create the laundry room, powder room (complete with extra shower), and our master bath. We put the smaller rooms inside the containers. We used the larger width between the containers for the maste

We got our siding put up!! I already told yall that we wanted the outside of the house to look like a traditional house. We left a lot of the interior "container walls" without drywalling them. So we decided that metal siding was our most economical choice and it has a 30 year warranty on paint.  We attached it to the pole barn style framing I told you guys about. My husband wanted the exterior to be blue and I wanted cream trim. It turned out very nice.

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