20 Shipping Container Home Floor Plans

container plans

by Tom Woods Today we’ve got something perfect for anyone looking to build their own tiny shipping container home. As most of you probably know the shipping container home movement has grown considerably over the last several years- in fact we’ve covered some on them on the blog here and … Read more

Kottage RV Shipping Container Home

For anyone who can’t decide on a park model home or a shipping container home, Kottage RV of Canada has combined the two into one compact hybrid made of solid steel—with all the comforts of a park model. Kottage RV offers these fully customizable units for several functions including remote … Read more

Sarah House Project

Named after a San Francisco sculptor who could not afford a permanent place to live in her expensive city, the Sarah House Project in Salt Lake City, Utah is one man’s attempt to build an affordable home out of castoff shipping containers. Sara Putnam, (the “h” for the project had … Read more

Salt Lake City Small House

rendering of completed house

I am Jeff White the director of the Sarah House Utah project. We are a small non profit community based organization. Our goal with the Sarah House project is to provide fast, green minded, safe, affordable homes for the underserved using salvaged material and volunteer labor. We are also providing … Read more

My Home in a Box

My Home In a Box is a blog dedicated to shipping containers and how they can be used as the basis for a small or tiny home. With its various photos, videos, information on exterior and interior design, the blog is a great reference.

Livin’ Large, Living Tiny

Guest Post by R Blank (this is a repost from his original blog)

My wife and I have now been living tiny for several months. For those who don’t know, tiny homes (living units under roughly 200sq’) have become increasingly popular in the past couple of years. When we researched many options for different types of tiny homes, we found a lot of information — but very few first-person accounts of the experience.

And, after all, that’s what tiny living actually involves — a fundamental shift in thinking about consumption and space utilization — the rest (what type of tiny home, whether its mobile, how its built, etc) is all just details.

Our Shipping Container from LEED Cabins, in Place, with the Completed Porch and Privacy Fence

Given the increasing popularity of tiny homes I thought it might be valuable to someone out there considering the same to read some of my thoughts on what this experience has been like for us.

In our case, this isn’t a tiny home, so much as a my home-office. But we decided to place this small office structure on the land first, before building our home. Our land is 30 miles away from the nearest town (where ‘town’ is quite loosely defined; we’re literally 20 miles away from the nearest service at all, which is our post office), which makes development quite challenging. So we started small, so we could establish a base of operations without too much trouble (that it took us a year to even get this far, is an entirely separate story).

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Cargotecture by HyBrid Architecture

Sunset Magazine’s Celebration Weekend in Menlo Park, Calif. was held at the beginning of June, and one of the stars of the show was the cargotecture c-series Sunset Idea House by HyBrid Architecture. The c-series represents a group of pre-designed, factory built units made from recycled cargo containers that can be combined or customized as desired by the owner.

Hybrid coined the term cargotecture to describe any structure built partially or entirely from recycled cargo containers. The c-series consists of five models ranging in price from $29,500 to $189,500. The home featured at the Sunset show was the c192 nomad which costs $59,500.

The prices of the c-series include:

  • Recycled ISO cargo container with new paint
  • Soy based spray foam insulation
  • Aluminum clad wood windows and doors (one 10 feet long opening and one side door)
  • Bamboo finish floor
  • 5/8 inch drywall ceiling and walls
  • Panelized wet room bath with redwood decking.
  • Duravit bath fixtures
  • IKEA cabinets and kitchen fixtures and lighting
  • Summit appliances
  • 30 gallon electric water heater (gas if available on site)
  • Convectair Apero heat
  • Factory plans, State L&I permits and inspections

Green and off-grid options are offered including solar panels, composting toilets and “green machine” sewage treatment and roofwater harvesting.

All the models are insulated about 15 percent above IBC and UBC building codes in the floors, walls and roofs. The building can be placed in cold climates as well as moderate to hot climates. The recycled plastic and soy sprayed-in insulation creates R24 walls, R44 ceilings, and R32 floors. The roofs can handle 60psf snow loads.

The HyBrid homes are shipped complete. A local contractor will need to be arranged for electrical and sewage hook-ups as well as foundation work. In many jurisdictions, if your project is less than 200sf there is no permitting process required. HyBrid has completed residential and commercial cargotecture projects in California, Oregon and Washington and has designed over 20 projects on 5 continents. They will ship their cargotecture homes worldwide.

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Shipping Container makes All-Season Suite

Tara discovered this article in the Winnipeg Free Press and noted that a city spokesperson claims it could probably be a legal residence within city limits. She says, we appear to not have the same minimum-size restrictions that afflict so many places!

“There is some interest out there,” said Vern Hiebert, a Winkler area man who is selling a refurbished, made-to-live-in container on the Kijiji website. “We have had interest from people wanting to build homes out of the containers with multiple units.”

Hiebert is selling one cube, 14.6 by 2.6 metres which provides about 37 square metres of living space. Split into three rooms — bedroom, bathroom, and kitchen/den — the recycled container has all the modern necessities of a typical dwelling.

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Jimmy’s Container Home Update

Jimmy from Costa Rica contacted me about a new home he has developed for his business ContainerHome.net which we covered in a post back in July. There seems to be lots of container homes being developed lately, it’s good to see these used containers being recycled.

A 20ft standard ISO shipping container converted into a small apartment.

A shipping container with a giant unfolding door. The size of the opening of the unit can be done with several options depending on the client’s budget.

Close 3

We will be installing the motor next month, so for now we are using a long cable and my truck to open the sidewall.  A 12V wench should lift the 1000lb sidewall. This is the total  weight of the cutout, the reinforced steel and the wooden deck.  With this particular project, we are going with a pulley system most commonly used for small bridges and very large doors.

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Shipping Container Homes in Costa Rica

Are you looking to become an expat in Costa Rica? How about living in a shipping container? You can do both in one tidy package from Container Homes by Jimmy Lee. Lee designs and delivers surprisingly airy and open shipping container homes with a full kitchen, bedroom and a small … Read more

Ecopods

Building houses from shipping containers is not new, but I think this might be the first company I have seen that builds smaller homes that are environmentally friendly and can be secured tight like a tiny little bunker. Ecopods are built from recycled 8×20 steel shipping containers transformed into living, … Read more

Shipping Containers

Shipping Containers ‘Dream’ Homes for Thousands I was planning on writing about composting toilets today but came across an article on the CNN website that I just had to share with everyone. So toilets will have to wait for another day. It was a side trip through a destitute, ramshackle … Read more