Friends – for those of you who have read our story to this point, I apologize for the long delay between this and my last post.  We have been so busy these past 6 months LIVING!!! That’s one of the perks of tiny living; it means you get to REALLY LIVE 🙂 I will write more later on our many adventures and additions to our property, but for now, the OCD in me is requiring that I continue telling our story and how we built ‘That Tiny Life Love.’

 

Legos?

To start, I think that many people, us included, think that building with shipping containers is a lot like stacking Legos.  In reality, it couldn’t be further from the truth. I can’t tell you how many times people have said to us over the years – ‘Well, at least you can just stack up a couple more when you want to add on or remodel.’  Since we built our home, we have seen where there were added features to a shipping container home that allowed for the possibility of a future addition. Unfortunately, we didn’t know this information when we built our home, and so our home is not easily adapted to additional square footage.  If we could do it again, we would have put in a floor to ceiling style window that could be have been removed and acted as the transition between our current containers and a future addition. But, as our home sits, it would take an unreasonable amount of work and welding (welding that would create a huge fire hazard because of our insulation) that makes adding ‘Legos’ onto our home unfeasible.  And that is okay – but I am glad that we have gathered knowledge and information over the years to possibly help others along the journey of their build 🙂

Well, we finally had approval and after almost 8 weeks of design and engineering, we honestly felt that getting our building permit in only 3 weeks after all of the hoops we had to jump through was a sign of good times to come!

 

Choosing our Shipping Containers

As I’ve mentioned in a previous blog post, our structural engineer recommended that we purchase (1) tripper containers.  For those new to the shipping container building world, it means our containers only made 1 trip across the ocean. Some of the benefits of these ‘newbie’ travelers included less dents, more structurally sound, less rust and easier acceptance by your local B&P, just to name a few 🙂  Another thing that we decided on when choosing our containers was to go with high cube containers. This added additional ceiling height and helps our home feel much larger than it’s 83” finished width.

We purchased our containers from a local shipping yard in the Portland Oregon area, as it is only about 50 minutes from our home.  Once again, we worked well with our sales guy and he gave us outstanding customer service and hand picked our containers after learning that we were using them to build a home with.  We met him onsite and looked over the containers he had available, but there was only our 20’ that would work well for us. He spent the next week looking over all of the containers that he received to find us the best 40’ container he could find in his inventory for our home.  4.5 years ago, when we started this journey, building homes with them was still pretty new in our area and so, once again, there was enthusiasm from the people that we worked with to help us succeed in our dream of building a home! He also helped coordinate a great trucking company that was willing to deliver them to our hilly, goat country property.

Side story – when our 40’er (1) tripper was delivered to our property,  it already had a ‘skylight’ in it. Mind you, we had just paid 2x as much for it and bought them on the recommendation of our engineer from a reputable dealer.  The container had been damaged when loading and their was a 8” x 8” hole in the roof. The dealer sent his mobile field team to attempt a field repair at our property, but were unsuccessful. Unfortunately, they had to reload the container and haul it off for repairs. As I mentioned earlier in our story, our property is a rocky goat trail on the side of a cliff. It was an anxiety ridden day the day the containers were dropped off and even more so when they had to reload the damaged container and haul it away for repairs.  I prayed – a lot that day! Thankfully, it was re-delivered a week later, good as new. An early lesson for us that no matter how much you plan and what you pay, we weren’t really in control of the process, we were just trying to mitigate the outcome to our benefit.

 

The Schedule

I am a planner, and we wanted our containers delivered around the same time as our foundation was going to be formed and poured.  Our foundation needed to cure for 30 days prior to placing any weight on it, and we knew that we could use that time cure time to modify the containers per our design.  We received our building permit at the end of May, our foundation was poured on June 28th and our shipping containers were delivered on June 29th. Things were happening fast, and it was starting to get really exciting – and really hard.  Working with metal and steel is dirty, exhausting, hard work. Maybe not for you life long fabricators, but for desk jockey accountants like myself, it was back breaking work! My learning curve was steep, but my hubby was patient (kind of) and I quickly learned how to cut, grind and prep steal for the welding process.

 

The Foundation

We hired a local company to form and pour our foundation.  We decided to go this route, because after doing the math, we realized that after we purchased the form material, did the extensive homework necessary to learn how to form our foundation correctly and then spent many, many weekends laying it all out, we realized that we could hire a professional, and they could have it done within in a matter of a week or two, for only slightly more than we would have paid doing it ourselves.  Sometimes, even diyer’s have to accept that there are better and more cost effective ways of achieving your goal 😉

Once the foundation was poured and as it was curing, it was time to start fabrication on our containers.  Most of these modifications could have been done by the company that we had purchased our containers from, just and FYI, but we wanted to be hands on and do the work ourselves.  Also, we thought it would save us time and money to do the work ourselves. In hind-site, it probably didn’t save us much, just another lesson learned along the way.

 

The Windows

The first order of business once the containers arrived was to remove the cortex siding for the window placement.  What we quickly learned is that once the cortex is cut, the structural integrity of the containers are VERY compromised.  It took little or no effort to have the entire side of the container ripple in the wind once just one window panel was cut.  We knew that we couldn’t move the containers again or place them until we had reinforced the containers with our window design.  We had A LOT of work to do in the next 30 days to get these ‘Legos’ ready to set in place!

Remember the old saying – measure, measure, measure and then cut?  Good advice. As our entire home had been designed within inches, it was vital that we measured and removed the container wall exactly where we planned on placing a window.  After measuring, we created a cutting template with blue painter’s tape and used a grinder with a cutting disk on it to cut the steel. Once we removed all (7) window panels of differing sizes, it was time to start reinforcing.

The window frame design was my husbands, and our engineer signed off on it.  To create the window frames, we used 1.5” tube steel and 1.5” angle iron. We had purchased all of our windows at this point so that we had the exact finished dimensions of the windows themselves.  Again, for those like myself who had never worked with metal, metal isn’t like working with wood and you can’t ‘recut’ or ‘wedge’ any errors. It has to be right the first time – thankfully, my hubby is very OCD about these things and I was confident that our windows would be exactly where we wanted them 🙂

After we had the exact dimensions of the windows, we fabricated the tubing into a rectangle, allowing for the thickness of the angle iron.  The angle iron was welded to the inside of the tubing to create a ‘lip’ for the window to sit on and be attached to when the time came to install them.  When we cut out the cortex siding from the container, we cut out our template allowing for the dimensions of the tube steel and angle iron, so approximately an additional 1.625” on each side of the window. Example, if the finished window dimensions was 24” x 24”, the opening that we cut was actually 27.25” x 27.25”.  We then built this back up with our 1.5” tube steel & ⅛” angle iron to create the finished opening of 24” x 24” that we could attach our window too. I know – as clear as mud 😉

To fabricate the window boxes, my husband welded the tube steel into a box and then welded the angle iron inside of the box.  He welded both sides, front and back so that there was a complete weld all the way around. This allowed for a watertight surface since this was our finished product and we weren’t going to side our container.  Cortex is a challenge when welding. It has a low melting point, and can be difficult to attach to. To successfully create the window openings, Dave first welded cool on the inside of the window opening (inside the container).  This held the frame in place and secured it. He then moved to the outside of the window and welded completely around the tube steel frame to make a weather tight seal. Essentially, each of our window frames were welded 4 times – a long, tedious process, but completely worth it!  We have been in our home for 3 full winters now, and we live where it rains and is windy 9 months out of the year and we have had no water or moisture problems around our windows or the frames. Word of advice – Don’t cut any corners; take your time and make sure you have an airtight seal – you will appreciate that you don’t have any mold, mildew or moisture problems later 🙂

During this part of our build, my husband and I were both working our ‘day’ jobs.  My, but those really got in the way 😉 We would work Monday – Thursday at our paying jobs, and then work 12-16 hours Friday to Sunday on our home.  It took us every single working minute of 3 weeks to fabricate our window wells and prep for the placement of our containers. Hard work, but because of the tiny footprint of our home, there was an end in sight.

 

Sealing the Gap

One of the challenges we were facing was figuring out how to create a weather-tight seal between the 2 containers.  Our containers would be open up to each other through the roof/floor section for our interior stairwell. Our engineer had written into our plans that there would be a cedar ‘faux’ sill plate and Volcom caulking between the 2 containers to see the air gap.  We spent an entire day, laying out this per design on the back 20’ of our 40’ shipping container in preparation of placement. Unfortunately, the reality we discovered after placing the containers, is that this sill plate was not going to work as designed. And so, after the containers were in place, we began the hard job of chiseling out the cedar wood and volcom caulking between the 2 containers.  What we ended up doing to make our containers weather and air tight between the 20’ and 40’ers was to weld an 8” piece of flat plate as a band around the 2. This not only sealed them completely, but looked much better than what our engineer had designed. Common sense, and onsite problem solving are so important when building a home that is not traditional. Don’t be afraid to think outside the box when building tiny!

 

The Sub-flooring

The final step in preparing our containers was to address the pesticide soaked marine plywood that come standard in shipping containers.  While this floor is stout, and already there, we were concerned about future health problems if we left the plywood as it came. There would be absolutely no way in the future to remove our subflooring if it caused health problems, and we were pouring way to much of our heart and soul into our home to take any chances that it wouldn’t be livable for us in the future.

Decision made – we removed it ALL.  Every last bolt and washer and 1-¼” piece of the heaviest plywood you have every carried in your ENTIRE life.  (This stuff still lives on at our property for various hard tasks, and so I am occasionally called on to assist with moving it.  I usually give my hubby the stink eye when he asks me – this stuff is that HEAVY 😉 ). We didn’t replace the sub-floor prior to placing our containers on our foundation, but by removing it prior to craning them into place, this lightened the overall weight of our containers. The containers have C-channel or I-beams along the bottom, so removing the sub-flooring didn’t compromise the integrity of the containers – not like cutting out the windows did :).

Next up – placing our future home!  I know this I am covering a lot of information, but for those of you that are considering a shipping container home, I wish that we would have had the information I am sharing when we started.  There is so much that we had to learn along the way, and if we can help even one person, then everything I am sharing is so worth it!

Comment or send me a message and let me know if this information is helpful 🙂

Until next time ~ keep chasing your dreams!

Jaimie & Dave

 

The Rejection

They already knew us; we had been talking for weeks.  They had assisted in some critical design pieces. So, when the BIG day came and we headed to Building & Planning and attempted to submit our design and supporting documents to build our shipping container home and were told NO, we were shocked.  They had ‘dropped a surprise bombshell’ on us. To cover themselves, I am sure, they were requiring a structural engineer to provide calculations on the strength of our sheer walls and container.  They wanted to know if they would be strong enough to be a home. Hello, they are metal boxes!!! Of course they are strong enough.

Seriously?!?!?

Why hadn’t they mentioned this before? Would it have deterred us from our goal? Probably not, but still – nothing like last minute notice and a huge delay.  Couldn’t they tell we were beyond ready to start building our shipping container home?

This was our first real lesson in the expense of building an unconventional home. This is when people & the internet say, ‘It’s cheaper and more cost effective’ didn’t really feel cheaper or more cost effective.  Thankfully, Google was already my friend and had gotten me out of a jam on the spiral stairs, so I knew Google had my back 😉

I immediately started researching an engineer who had taken on other similar projects – none were to be found within a 60 mile radius of our home.  I dug deeper. Google’s game was strong. What I found was a couple of news articles about an structural engineer who had taken on an impossible ‘Tree House’ project in our county and gotten it to pass through B&P.

Within days of being told that we needed an engineer, I contacted his firm and shared with him our dream.  He graciously agreed to take on our project, even though his schedule was full. The only hiccup – he wanted a small fortune. Now remember, I already had the entire home designed to the inch, I just needed the calculations.  He initially informed me that it would be $9,500 for the calculations and design. I countered that I only needed the calculations on my design. He finally lowered his price to $5k – for the 4 structural points, the 8’ wide sheer walls and the foundation. The bare minimums that the county was requiring. If we weren’t already so emotionally invested in our home build, this would have been a good time to run for the hills.  But wait, we already had rocky, goat trailed hills that we owned – we owned the hills 😉

In reality, the engineer took a real fascination to our build – probably, because once again, we built rapport with him and he liked us 🙂  Told you, it never hurts. He advised us to purchase (1) trip containers for our home -meaning that they had only made (1) trip across the ocean.  This helped to ensure that the containers where in as new as condition as possible, validating his calculations. While this wasn’t an expense that we were expecting, purchasing containers that were very structurally sound, with little or no dents is something we have never regretted. (1) trip containers cost more than 2x as much as multiple trip containers and so we paid almost $10,000 for our home’s outer metal shell.

My Homes Stronger Than Your Home

The truth, according to my very expensive engineers calculations, is that our home is almost 5 times stronger than a wood built home.  Not sure why B&P doubted 😉 My baby sister showed up shortly after we had our containers delivered and said – ‘your house is rusting (there was a rust line on the side from metal welded to the top)’  I responded with ‘your house is rotting and I guarantee that your house won’t still be standing in 100 years, and mine will still be standing in 500 :)” Our home is strong and really will be standing right where it is today, long after we are gone. Those ridiculous and expensive calculations just proved it.

The foundation Design

 

The engineer designed our foundation based on our input.  We wanted room underneath to work on and install the utilities.  We ended up with a 3 foot foundation that our containers sit on, leaving a large crawl space under them where all of our plumbing and venting are located.

Side note – What the engineer didn’t take into account, and what we never told B&P because we fixed it before it was inspected, was that the foundation was inadequate for our containers.  A container does not have the weight dispersed evenly along all four sides. There are 4 feet, one in each corner that hold all the weight. When our container was placed upon our foundation, instead of the weight being dispersed along the length of our foundation, it was centralized in the four corners.  The front of our foundation has a 4’ x 8’ x 3’ concrete slab that helped to support the front of the container weight on the front 2 feet. But in the back, where there was no additional slab and the weight of the 20’ container was also placed on the back 2 feet – our foundation failed. Within a week of placing our containers, the back of our foundation was cracking and settling.  

But, we are problem solvers – especially my husband.  So he went to work fabricating a corner support for both the inside of the foundation and the outside.  It looked like something right out of the movie, Mad Max. He then drilled and inserted rebar into the foundation at the back corners and built a grid of rebar around his metal support.  Once this was completed, he formed it in and we re-enforced our foundation with an additional yard of concrete at each corner. Additionally, we installed wedges or spacers along the entire length of the container that filled in the void and placed positive pressure between the concrete footing and the metal I-beam.

Another hard lesson learned, but thankfully we were able to isolate and fix the problem before B&P discovered it.  They would have forced us to remove our containers and re-engineer and

Securing The Containers To The Foundation

Unlike a traditional wood home, there is no ‘sill’ plate when placing shipping containers on a foundation.  A sill plate is the mechanism that is used to secure a stick built home to a traditional foundation. In order to secure our bottom container to the foundation, our engineer called out for (4) 4″ x 2″ x 1/4″ flat plates, bent and welded to a piece of #5 rebar. One for each corner. The rebar was to be placed inside the foundation prior to being poured. Once the foundation was poured, the plate would be welded to the 4 corner tabs of the bottom container. To attach the upper shipping container to the bottom shipping container, the same size tabs (excluding the rebar) were to be welded in the 4 corners of the 20′ container.  Obviously, they needed to feel confident that the containers were not going to move, but sheer weight alone will hold them in place 🙂 I am not sure the small pieces of plate are doing much good, but at least everyone at B&P could feel better about our build.

The Exterior Stairs

Totally overkill – ridiculously large, heavy and expensive.  But the engineer added them to our exterior design as additional structural support and we fell in love.  They are fabricated from a solid piece of 12″ C-Channel. Dave & I spent 3 days of his vacation in July building those stairs at his job.  His employer is awesome for letting us fab them there – because they were entirely too large to fab them on our hillside.  Once we had the frame constructed, we loaded them with a crane and hauled them home on our triple axle trailer.  On the day the huge crane lifted our shipping containers in place, it also ‘flew’ our stairs across the skyline and set them on the custom slab built for their mammoth weight.  Complete overkill – and one of our favorite features to the exterior of the home 😉

Second Attempt & Another No; WABO Certification

Our engineer’s firm was awesome and fast-tracked our calculations.  Within 2 weeks of contacting his office, we had our structurally engineered plans in hand.  All of the requirements that B&P had requested were addressed. Calculations, foundation and securing the  shipping containers to the foundation. We were ready to try again for our building permit. So back we went… But you guessed it – rejection 😦

Our welding had to be done by a WABO certified welder.  That was the other curveball they threw at us. Would the curve balls ever stop?  Lucky for us, my husband had been welding for over 25 years and once upon a time, he had been WABO certified.  The job he was currently doing and had done for the previous 5 years didn’t’ require that qualification. But, again, refusing to give up, Dave got to practicing and after a couple weeks of 1” thick vertical test plates, we arranged for him to take his WABO exam at our local college.  SUCCESS!!! On the first attempt – the man really is my hero 🙂 Dave was officially WABO certified, again – yet another obstacle removed!

Third Time’s The Charm – Or Not; Third Party Inspection

Seriously, would the crazy requirements ever stop. It seemed that each time that we went back into our planning department with the previous requirement met, they handed us anther.  The newest one – we would have to have all of our structural welds inspected by a certified 3rd party welding Inspector. Not to be deterred, Google will forever be my friend. Thankfully, I found a local Certified Inspector who was also an instructor at the college. He agreed to inspect our welds for the County per their request for a nominal feel.  Take that B&P – Nothing is going to stop us from reaching our dream of building a shipping container home!!!

Fourth Time & Finally, Success!!!

After jumping through their design hoops for our stairs, paying $5,000 for a Structural Engineer, WABO certification and finally retaining a Certified Welding Inspector, Building & Planning accepted our permit fee and our plans.  In our County at the time, it was taking on average 60 days to receive a building permit. Maybe making friends with the county helped, maybe it was sympathy for all the obstacles they put in our path that we refused to succumb to… regardless, our B&P came through for us and within 3 weeks we had our building permit in hand and were ready to start. The time had come to make our dream a reality.

To be continued…

Chasing our dreams,

Jaimie & Dave