Another Container Home

Hey, it's another blurb about another shipping container home!

Container Housing in Australia

Here's yet another article about container housing, this time in Sydney, Australia.

Shipping Container Housing: Another Tiny House

A friend posted this link on Facebook a few days ago. It's yet another example from the so-called "Tiny House Movement". Something like that, particularly out in the boonies, would be a great interim step prior to my shipping container dream home.

Shipping Container Housing: Maybe Go Small?

I've posted previously about my goal of building a gigantic dream home out of shipping containers. However, one thing that's become abundantly clear from the last few years of near-constant interstate and international relocations is that I accumulate way too much stuff, and could stand to simplify my life and reduce my overall footprint. One thing I've considered is getting a trailer or an RV, though I'm not sure whether that would give me enough room for the stuff I'd actually want to keep. However, as mobile as I've been, and could potentially be in the next few years, it might be nice to have a mobile home - not one of those manufactured homes that starts out mobile before becoming static, but an actual mobile home - that could be moved as necessary.

Via Facebook, I recently saw this article, which linked to this article. I'd probably go a slightly different way than either of these, but the idea is a good one. I could easily see taking a twenty- or forty-foot shipping container, wiring it up for electricity and climate control, installing a self-contained plumbing system, and then outfitting sleeping and living areas, a small kitchen, and a small(ish) bathroom. I've previously mentioned CMOUTs and Allied Container, which make a variety of container-based structures for the military and other customers (plus there's Strategic Operations, which essentially decorates such structures). Safecastle also makes a variety of single-container shelters that would be similar to the concept that I'd be going for; the difference would be that my notional small home would be designed around portability, rather than survivability for the kind of conflagration that I doubt we'll ever see. (I've also looked at the Atlas Survival Shelters website, but they don't use containers, and they appear to have gone slightly off the rails.)

I've thought for a while that I need to follow my layout schematic of my dream home with a more detailed blueprint detailing wiring, plumbing, HVAC, and data lines. Maybe I should start with a small version based upon a single container? The effort continues.

Topic: Shipping Container Housing

I've written previously about my efforts to design my dream home, the structural basis for which will be intermodal shipping containers.

I was first introduced to the concept of using converted shipping containers to build homes while working for the Army in California. As you can see from this view on Wikimapia, and these ground level pictures from Wikipedia (1, 2), the military uses lots of shipping containers to build villages for realistic urban warfare (MOUT) training, or for use as modular, purpose-built structures for locations where the military deploys overseas, or for various other purposes. A couple of the companies that provide these modified containers are CMOUTS and Allied Container. Other companies, like Safe Castle LLC and Atlas Survival Shelters, convert shipping containers for use as various types of emergency shelters. At least one company, Strategic Operations, provides conversion kits to alter the appearance of containers to make them more realistic for military training. Outside of military circles, there's a big Wikipedia article on shipping container architecture, and it's become a sort of darling of the environmentalist crowd due to its low cost and reuse of existing materials.

Posts on this topic will likely be sporadic, and I certainly won't be the best source on the Internet, but it's something I'm interested in and I'll be eager to share my thoughts and anything I find.