My 10-Year-Old Shipping Container Home! Tiny House Tour & Design Review | The Container Guy
Do you want to check out the first container home I ever built?
Watch this video as I take you on a tour of this shipping container house and then reflect on how we built this tiny house and what I would do differently now!
This sea can was first built to be a shipping container cabin on the lake for my family, but when our business got busy, we converted it into an office.
We will show you what we had planned for this container home and how we are using it now!
This container was designed back in 2012, so a lot of the methods we used here are not how we would do it today!
We have a variety of videos on our channel that explains how we install windows and doors on shipping containers, how we frame, insulate and line the inside of sea cans, and even how to connect two shipping containers together to make your house bigger!
VIDEO
Purchase Container Modification World Products Featured in The Video
YouTube Video Transcript
Hi, I'm Channing McCorriston, The Container Guy.
In this video, we'll show you my very first shipping container home build.
These two containers here are 40-foot used high cubes with strategically placed cutouts
to provide an open concept feel inside, and also retain some of the structural integrity.
We did this mod fresh out of university.
We were young and naïve, didn't really know what we were doing,
and so I want to show you everything I did wrong, and what I'd changed today.
So, let's go take a tour of this thing.
Hope you'll learn something.
A lot of people, when they first walk in here, are amazed that this is—
They're actually standing inside of two shipping containers.
And so, when you finish these things out...
Yeah, they look nice and it's comfortable in here, and so.
The original purpose for this was actually to be a cabin
for our family to take up to the lake, and we got busy.
We needed office space, and so we actually commissioned it shortly after
and have been using it ever since.
But I'm gonna give you a tour of this thing and show you
how it would work as a cabin and how we're utilizing it today.
And yeah, just after that maybe I'll just tell you
how we built it and what we do differently, and so.
Right here, this is meant to be the living room, and so, inside of here
we would have a couch or something and then hang a TV on the wall.
We have our air conditioner there, up high. That's a mini split unit.
This would be a bedroom here, and this little build out that you see
is actually a closet that's accessed inside the bedroom.
And so this is what it feels like in a single shipping container home.
It's very narrow once you're finished
framing and lining the interiors of these things, you only got about seven feet of interior width.
So it's quite small inside here, you'd only fit like a Double bed,
you know, a Queen would be very very large in here.
So there's not a lot of sleeping quarters in this—this double wide.
We also put our electrical panel inside the bedroom here.
And one thing to note is we have high security windows on this thing,
but this window here we cut the security bars off the window, which allow for egress,
so in case you know there was a fire or something inside of here the the
people sleeping inside can still get out somewhere other than the doors.
Another thing to note is, while we're working in here, it got stuffy.
And so, the first step to try to to help, you know, the air quality or just uh
regulating the air inside of this thing was, we installed a ceiling fan,
and that seemed to help but didn't fully cut it.
And so, another thing we did is installed a... a circulating fan.
This is just a through-wall fan, Panasonic fan.
And so that actually just created a circulation inside of here, and so the air comes into this
bedroom through the front end of this double wide and then circu—circulates back around into the
kitchen through the hallway, and— and that really helped regulate the temperature and just make it
feel a little less stuffy inside of here because this thing is not built with an HVAC system.
There's no ducting, there's no air movement, it's all electric heat.
And so, yeah, we'll give you a tour, keep going.
It was gonna be a little bit of wasted space, and we needed to do that in order to keep a chunk of—
of wall in the center here to help hold the roof up.
So we utilize as best we can by installing some cupboards
to give us just, you know, storage for our goods, and now it's nice office storage.
And then we did a little office desk area here, so we could, you know,
bring a laptop or something and work, and this definitely got utilized for a while here.
Our main-man marketer was working here, but now he's in the other office with me.
And so inside of here there's the electric water heater,
and then room for stackable washer and dryer, it's plumbed for that.
And the— the dryer vents stubbed through the wall, and then all the plumbing and the stack is
in this wall, which is shared with the bathroom behind me, but first I'll show you the kitchen.
So, don't judge the appliances,
I think they just showed up in a can one day and we— they work so we use them, but.
So yeah, here's the kitchen.
There's the, up high above the fridge, we have— that's that vent that,
in the bedroom, just allows the air to circulate, it seems to work pretty, pretty well.
And so, yeah, we have the sink here and the dishwasher, which is all plumbed.
Again, that bathroom that's—sorry, the bedroom and the kitchen share a plumbing wall,
so that's a two by six wall with another plumbing stack up there.
And then all the plumbing just gravity flows down into the... the base of this thing, and
it's kind of a bit of a negative where now this whole cabin would need to be
skirted and all the plumbing needs to collect and then go to a septic tank.
It's nice sometimes in office settings, more commercial and industrial stuff, where we can
actually use, like, a Saniflo, a Macerator toilet, and pump that to a vertical tank.
But back to the... the cabin tour here.
So this would be the— the… the eating area of the kitchen,
and then you'll notice the— the garden doors on the back.
And so, with these doors here...
We actually built this whole thing on a 6... 66 foot oilfield skid.
We're planning on building the deck and everything ahead of time, and then
moving it to the lake all preassembled and built, but that didn't happen, so.
It's... the windows in here make it feel nice and open, you know,
it is only seven feet wide, but it feels bigger than that, so.
If you're building a container home
and you enjoy light, make sure you put lots of windows to make the space n— feel nice and open.
And so here's the bathroom.
It's, I think, seven feet wide and about nine feet long, which allowed us to have the full tub
and shower inside here, and a double vanity with the granite countertops, and finally our toilet.
One thing to note inside of here is we did get a ceiling fan in here, but
that causes all sorts of problems trying to ventilate that outwards and dealing
with the added capacity that the ceiling fan requires inside of— inside your ceiling, so.
What I would maybe do differently is install a custom ceiling fan that would actually direct
ventilate right out of the sidewall of a container, that would be really cool.
I worked in this for two years and it was comfortable.
Living in Canada, you know, it goes from minus 40 to plus 30,
and so we were able to regulate the temperature in here.
We did have to add the air conditioner, that was after the fact.
But yeah, it maintains the temperature well.
So things that we did wrong, and what I'd do differently today,
definitely would be the windows.
We ordered these actually out of California.
They're a single ply— or a single pane window, and that's not even the bad part.
The bad part's the framing kit, or the frame here.
It's a two by three rec tube, it's a hollow tubing
and it's just welded in, and it's not insulated at all.
So we just framed up to it, and so wherever that— that steel is,
it's condensating and sweating throughout the winter, and all of the the return trim
here in this window is wicking that moisture and causing it all to swell, and so yeah.
It's— it's a ripe environment here for mold and mildew growth, and...
and definitely the incorrect way of doing this.
Another thing is we framed here with two by four spruce lumber, and so again that's going to wick
the moisture and it's another porous material that can cause mold and mildew growth, so.
I'd be going to a steel stud interior, and this being a three and a half inch two by four stud,
I'd go down to a two and a half inch stud, or another thing we're working
on is inch and five-eighth steel studs and pulling them an inch away from the wall,
which is really good because then you get a nice even layer of spray foam behind that.
You don't have any thermal bridging.
I would also use Container Modification World's window framing kit, which allows
foam to come right up to the vinyl window and gives another thermal break between
the uh the window, the outside of the can, the framing and then the interior finishing.
So keep an eye out for future videos, we'll show you exactly how to frame your can properly.
To actually build this thing, we had to cut out the openings first, put the cans together,
and then we started doing all the construction.
So that's not a very modular way of doing it.
To move around a double wide container is quite difficult versus moving around a single...
a single 40, or two single 40s and then putting them together on site,
but it was the easier way to do it for us, especially when we were
not exactly knowing what we were going to do and just figuring things out as we went.
And so, to start here, yeah, we had the openings cut out and the containers joined together.
First step was, we did a two inch rigid foam
base on the floor and then five-eighth tongue and groove plywood on top of that, and so that
we screwed directly down into the existing container flooring.
Then we did our, I guess in this area you can do your— your linoleum first
and then build your walls on top of that with two by fours, which we would have
done differently, and then the spray foam and finally the interior finishing, so.
How we spanned across the joints was very wrong, so we—
On top of the two by four walls, we laminated two by tens together and
ran them across the walls the whole 40 foot length, and then from the outside of the
container we drilled holes and lag bolted through the corrugations into that big two by ten header.
We weren't able to get any foam in behind those two by tens other than the inside corrugations,
and so that's that's a huge area that will cause, you know, thermal bridging.
I'm actually very surprised to see that we don't have any water stains or anything in the ceiling,
so that seemed to work well but I definitely advise against that on any other future builds.
Another thing that I think was kind of intelligent what we did is we used square edge drywall,
not the reg— we didn't mud and tape everything.
And, and thank goodness because everything would have cracked by then.
And so here's an example of it.
The square edge drywall doesn't have the— the concave or contoured edge here
to allow the weight of mud and tape prior to sanding, so it's just the two ends butt together
and that allows for a narrower batten to be installed in between these, and that trims it up.
And then as these things shift and move, you know,
you might get a little cracking in behind the batten but you don't notice that like you would a
major drywall crack at a seam, or even worse right through the board.
Once you have your walls framed, your next step is to insulate this thing,
and one thing we did right was spray foam.
We put two inches of foam on the walls and three inches in the ceiling, and I think
we made sure that the foam came around our bottom plate of our walls to touch the foam
that's underneath the subfloor, so that was intelligent.
But once you're done that, everything's foamed,
wired, framed, you're basically back to traditional construction where you choose your
interior finishes like the flooring, the colors, you know, you name it.
And that's— that's up to the— the end user of the style that you're going for and
something I won't really touch on too much, so.
Now, I think the next step is, let's jump outside and take a look
at what we did to weld this thing together and jump on the roof and
show you the plumbing stacks and how we managed to deal with that in two places.
And so, here, outside, you'll notice that we have the container doors
connected to the end wall side of the other can,
and this allowed us to have the front door on one end and then the patio doors on the other.
But when we put these two containers together, we welded the corner castings together and then
afterwards, to get it fully welded, we took a half inch round rod and welded both sides.
And so that was able to, you know, connect the containers in a rigid manner,
but we had to outsource that welding, we didn't even know how to weld ourselves at that time, so.
Yeah, that— that's one way to do it, but it's a labor-intensive way to do it and it
costs money to hire welders to do it, so that double wide kit that we have
now that uses the high-capacity bridge fittings and then the structural kit.
And then it also gives a three inch gap in between here, which is actually very useful for...
dealing with the— the spray foam and the envelope on the inside when two containers come together.
So that's nice there, and then the final thing before we jump up top is the air conditioner, so.
We use a mini split A/C unit here.
This is the way of the future: heat pump air conditioner units.
They're very efficient, and the best part is they only cut a tiny hole.
So there's a three inch hole that the plumbers and electricians had to drill through the wall,
and they did this after everything was finished on the inside just to run their—
their freon lines, the condensate line out and the tech cable in for power.
And so that's definitely the way to do it if you're looking
to build a container home, cabin, or office.
Mini split A/C units, look them up.
Now let's jump on the roof of this thing.
So up here on the roof, you can see that we've taken what looks like a quarter inch
flat bar, it's probably about four inches tall, and we've set it between the... the top
tubes, or this is actually the flat bar style of a 40-footer, which is worse for mods,
and then welded both sides of it again.
So there's another 80 feet of seam welding here.
This flat bar will provide some structure to the roof, so that—
that added to the... the two by ten spanning those gaps, but still, like,
there's no— there's no design review on this, and I guess it works in real life.
We can actually grab one container and the other one kind of comes with, so
these things are, they're— they're rigid and they're together,
but, you know, the way of the future: you got to get things engineered nowadays.
So another important thing I'd like to talk about is container selection.
And so, typically, if you're spending all this money on a can, like why we didn't use a
one-time-use or a new shipping container and chose to do this on used containers, it blows my mind.
Like the rust has already started on these things,
and now it can penetrate through them and ruin all this money that you spent on this container.
Another issue is the floors. Like, throughout their past life—or sorry, the ceilings.
It's concave downwards, and so
this ceiling here holds water and that's why the paint's chipped off, there more in other places.
And even here, there's not really much for water shedding, so we're really putting these welds to
the test by— by pooling water here, especially over the winter and just asking for problems.
And so, another area where we're probably asking for problems is
where the plumbing stacks are coming out of the roof, so let's go take a look at them.
And so, here... we welded in a pipe prior to bringing the three inch ABS out.
I believe the theory behind this is we were gonna put a Fernco over here so that no
water got in— in between, and it seems as if we just never did that.
Interesting thing to note is we don't have any water stains on the inside, so that's a bonus.
That's definitely a quality control thing there back in 2012 that I probably should have
The other one, we can also see that the welds didn't work so well,
and the welder had to keep trying to build out welds, and so.
You know, maybe he just wasn't experienced in welding with the
lighter gauge metal, but really just chewing away and trying to get that weld seamed up, so.
Better way to do this, potentially, is to have
a flange with a pipe already welded together, you know, sandblasted, powder coated
that matched the corrugation profiles, and then it just set right in over top.
And, whether you'd seam weld around the flange—I hate welding—or if there's a way to fasten it
and seal it and not wreck the paint, especially if you've selected a one-time-use shipping container.
So that pretty much wraps it up.
We'll probably have videos to follow, please feel free to leave comments
down below and ask any questions.
I'd love to shoot follow-up videos and just help people if you're looking to
build a shipping container home, because there's so many ways that you can go wrong.
Even with this one here, we ended up framing it with two by twos, came back the next Monday
or whatever, and every board was warped like hockey sticks and we had to go to two by fours.
And so, that's a lesson I learned in 2012.
I've learned a lot of things doing mods for the last...
Well, I guess I've been doing them for 13 years now, so.
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