Remote Living > Housing

Shipping container home possibilities

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Frank S:
 Shipping containers are stacked by the millions around the world empty. With  a little thought they will make excellent homes either small cabins or huge Villas.

  Here are a few good points about them
 1 by using them as homes or shops you are being green for the environment, by recycling materials that are readily available and in most cases quite in expensive to purchase
 2 they can be made very energy conserving
 3 will last almost forever
 4 can be moved like a modular home in some cases
 5 will weather out most any storm that nature can throw at them
 here are a couple of designs that I have been working on bear in mind these are huge compared to how most are done.
 
 
  after shipping  the walls will be cut out leaving the end frames interior walls  will be prefabricated using steel studs
 that I will make in my factory using this

 

phil b:
Frank- Is this idea doable? Yep, I'm there and doing just that.

Shipping containers are exactly what I am currently building my new house from.

I welded and bolted three 8X40 footers together in parallel. I have arches cut inside between the rooms..

Here's some of my specs:

Anchored with 3' dia X 6'concrete cylinders on each corner. Containers are sitting on a packed bed of gravel. The gravel provides excellent drainage and reduces heating and cooling costs.

Pex in the flooring will provide the heat, in the case photovoltaics cannot keep up.

Skylights are made from 6 inch dia, 10 gauge pipe. Each provide light and are designed to blow out in case of a tornado to save the structure and its occupants. (1 sq. ft. per 50 cuft of inside living space)

Polyurethane insulation mixed with recycled Styrofoam insulation will be on the OUTSIDE of the containers, including under the floors. Six inches will provide about R-42. The insulation is covered in 4 layers of ferrocement.

Oak paneling on the inside applied with adhesive.

Electrical wiring is THHN and ran through EMT and trays to drastically reduce any fire hazard.

All the lighting will be LED. Samples of led lighting have arrived for evaluation.

4 Kw of solar on the roof. I currently have 940 watts on the roof now to power the construction and cannot use more than 600 watts per hour. Midnite classic charge controller with a 3500 watt outback inverter. A second will be installed later.

Double French doors are planned to be inside the container's doors. The big steel doors can be closed and locked from the inside during bad weather. A few electronics are in the works to automatically close the door just in case...

Here some things to consider:

The containers will probably have to be cut and welded if they are tied together. The primer and paint in the containers are "zinc laden epoxy." So if you want to live past construction, you need a supplied air respirator or at least a good respirator for organics and particulates. Period.

The floors are also laden with pesticides and preservatives.
My containers burned a few weeks after I bought them because I was using them to store furniture and other things. They caught on fire at the end of a very long hot day and I got careless with a acetylene torch while cutting doorway arches. I have over 30 years experience with a torch without anything happening like this before. I didn't like the furniture anyway.  :) The fire burned most of the paint off as well as creating a layer of charcoal on most of the floors. Now, I'm thinking that was a good thing because the pesticides and paint are gone. The plastic bushings in the doors were the only item I regret having melting. The doors are a bit hard to close.

So Frank, there you have it in a nutshell. When I get the chance, I will take pictures so anyone with a little experience with a torch and a wire feed welder can build a safe home to live in. My house will be published on the Internet on several sites in the public domain for everyone.

I'll be glad to answer any questions you may have. I'm a bit slow right now because I'm working on my house, so please be patient.  ;D

Frank S:
PHil I have been accumulating ceramic marble and terrazzo floor & mechanical tiles for quite some time now and will probably fill 1 container with the construction materials for shipment. A few years ago I built a hydraulic wall saw for a concrete cutting company it would be no step for me to build 1 for myself with a cold cut blade and coolant it would slice a side out of a container in a matter of a few hours. that way no risk of fire , a nice clean cut and usable stock afterwards instead of a rubble pile.
 A good sealer then 2 inches of floor grout then Tiled and no worries about the floor
     

AcWxRADAR:
i thought that I should chime in on this subject.  I am a newbie to this forum, but I have used a shipping container for many years.   I now have two of them.  The first one is a 40x8x9.  I bought it for a storage shed and workshop for my cabin.  It is amazing how much stuff I can put in there!

The first thing I did after the installation on the site was to coat the floor with Industrial Epoxy (just like the garage floor sealers you can buy from Menards or Lowes, etc).  I figured that I would be storing lawnmowers and ATVs inside and I didn't want the wood flooring to become saturated with oil and gas should the vehicles ever leak or I became careless and spilled. 

I first powerwashed the flooring and let it dry.  Then I rinsed the floor with muriatic acid and powerwashed it again, let it dry for a few days.  Then I went over it with chlorine bleach and powerwashed it off and let it dry out for several days.  When I applied the epoxy coating, it really soaked in deep!  It took a LOT more than they said it would, but then again, they were estimating how much it would take to coat a concrete floor, not a wood floor. 

I wan't sure how well it would work at first, but after 10 years or more, it is holding up beautifully!  I park golf carts and 4-wheelers and my Bad-Boy mowers in there.  I am always skidding rocks across the floor, but you can't tell.  The epoxy seeped into the wood and any scratch just looks like the epoxy went deep into the wood grain below. 

I built a storage shelf system along one side wall.  It is four tiered and 22 inches deep and 20 feet long.  I can put a LOT of stuff on these babies!

I have yet to run power into the unit, but I guess I really don't need it too bad.  Been getting by w/o it for ten years now, guess it isn't too much of a hindrance.

To go further, I have seen pix of people making fantastic homes from them.  I mean homes that should be 1/4 $M or higher - at least they look that way!  And of course, very luxurious cabins as well. 

RADAR 

frackers:
Check out http://www.restart.org.nz/ to see some real good use of containers..

This is what it looked like 21 months ago

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