Creating Outdoor Living Space for Our Shipping Container Home

We were officially dried in, but still had so many outside projects that we needed to wrap up before we were ready to move inside and start finishing our home.

 

The Roof

A shipping container doesn’t need a roof, but I wanted a unique roof to create a dry space over both our deck and our front door.  We have a 20’r sitting on top of a 40’r, leaving 20’ of deck space off of our master bedroom. We roofed 10 of that space creating one of our favorite places in the entire house – living space right outside our bedroom door – and the view 🙂

Dave’s friends came and helped us complete the roofing.  Our roofing is called Rusteel and is unique in that it rusts almost immediately upon exposure to the elements.  Yes, I paid extra for metal that will rust – Dave still questions my sanity at times 😉

 

Turning a Ginormous Gravel Pile Into Access

In order to meet code, we had to have access to the front of the house that didn’t exceed certain tolerances.  The only thing we had infront of our containers at this point was a huge pile of gravel that had been used to park the crane when we placed our shipping containers.

But Dave and our son, Bryce, got to work and upcycled some 4×4’s that had been salvaged from a project on the Canadian border.  He reused the brackets, the boards and designed the large pile of gravel into our home’s approach 🙂

The Deck

As I’d mentioned before, Dave’s OT set up therapy for Dave.  The upstairs deck and exterior stairs were a project that Dave meticulously worked through as part of both his cognitive and functional therapy.  From laying out the deck boards, screwing them on (a challenge when he couldn’t feel his right hand), cutting and laying the final stair treads, upcycling and designing the outside stairs and access.  All of these steps needed to happen to make our shipping container legal and meet building code.

 

This was a project that would have taken us a couple of weekends before Dave’s ICH.  But even working on it 6 days a week for a couple hours a day in the beginning and then longer as he got stronger, it took him almost 6 weeks to finish.

 

Outdoor Living Space

When Dave had sealed and laid the last board, he was so proud of the deck and stairs – and he should be.  I was so proud of him. I had seen him struggle through the processes in a way that tore at my heart, but he preserved.  It turned out amazingly gorgeous. The biggest victory was how much he was able to regain his dexterity and skill level during the project.  The project may have taken weeks and weeks, but to this day, it is one of the areas of our home we are most proud of!

Still Persevering!

Jaimie & Dave