Couple Builds Low-Cost Shipping Container Tiny House on a Budget – FULL TOUR

Welcome to our tiny house. We decided to turn a 40-foot shipping container into our tiny house. The container is 320 square feet, so it's 8 feet wide, 40 feet long. Shipping containers are great to build a house out of if you're on a constrained budget. Like Luke and I, we didn't have the means to build a conventional house, so we scaled back and bought the shipping container used, and we did all the work ourselves, so we saved a lot of money that way. Building with a shipping container kind of feels easier getting started. We didn't have to do any major foundation work or anything like that. They're so structurally sound. Cutting the container itself is a pretty hard job, just cutting all the metal. We kept the original shipping container floor, and we tried to build everything with as much recycled and upcycled supplies as we could, and we made sure we went to the Habitat for Humanity ReStore. And all the wood and stuff, it came from this local mill here. They have mill ends, which is basically the side of the tree, which they don't use, and so we were lucky enough to actually reclaim a lot of that. So that was a big cost saving for us, saving a lot of money by not having to buy all these materials. Luke is a fine furniture maker, and he made all the wood furniture that you see out, as well as the windows, which are really beautiful and totally custom. We had this idea in our head we were going to knock it out in two months, which is just never the way things play out, you know? So it ended up taking us a little over four months. Our working budget was $35,000. We originally wanted to do it for a bit less, but then the septic tank and the sauna and the electrical hookup bumped it up to about $35,000. The container itself was $12,000. It was already spray foamed and had ply walls on the inside, so it was actually a really good starting point, and that saved us a lot of time. You can obviously buy a container for a lot less, but it was worth paying the $12,000 for us. We didn't really have the money to build that big house, so we thought let's build a small house, and then as time goes on we can upgrade to the big house, and then keep this as a guest space or rental, you know, at a later stage. We live on the west coast of Canada on Vancouver Island. We bought this property quite a while ago. It was just raw land, there is nothing on it. We feel super lucky to live here. We're just a short walk from the beach where we can go surfing and kite surfing, and this build kind of just perfectly encapsulates our indoor-outdoor lifestyle, and getting to go on adventures, but it's really nice coming back inside to having this beautiful space that we can just relax. Yeah, we love it out here. So the goal was to build a tiny home out of a 40-foot shipping container. We wanted to basically build a space that felt spacious, so not so much like a full tiny home, but more like a studio apartment. So we just stuck to an individual 40-foot shipping container, and modified it just with windows, but no major big cuts combining multiple containers together, or welding or anything like that. So there's a lot of very minimal amount of welding that we did, and we basically just cut the openings into it, and then framed it and created this little house. So the exterior is the actual shipping container. We've left that as the exterior finish. We've repainted it, and we built a roof over the entire shipping container. We wanted to create that eve, especially living out here in the rainforest. We get a lot of rain, and so it's nice to have all the water off the side of the sea can. So the roof was actually our own trees that we had milled up. When we very first got the property, we had to cut our driveway in, and so we milled up a whole heap of wood, and we thought, what a great way to use it. And we've just welded brackets to the top of the shipping container, and then just bolted that straight on, and just with your regular roofing on top of that. This particular container was slightly unique in that it was double end opening. So both ends of the container actually have container doors. So we just framed in both ends, and we've just folded the doors back, and left them in position. So if we ever want to move the container, we can actually close both the ends, and crane it out of here, or move it, or even lock it up if we're going away for really extended periods of time. We wanted to create as much light as we could in the shipping container without taking too much of the integrity out of it, and so we cut these openings. It was a reasonably straightforward process. Cutting metal is pretty slow, and noisy, and sparks everywhere, but we got it done, and then we literally just framed in the doors and windows like you would a normal house. And so we flashed everything. We decided to put a deck around the front and to the side, so that we'd create this little patio area to sit and just look out into the forest. The decking is actually all yellow cedar, which we got from the mill. This is a big stack of wood that was actually destined to be burned. The fact that we saved it from the burn pile was really nice, and took us a lot of time of course, but it's come up really well. So as we head around the back, the shipping container, because they're so structurally solid, we basically just put it on pavers, so we didn't need to build a foundation for it. So it was a really easy install. We just jacked up the entire container until it was level, packed all these pavers underneath it, and just rested it straight on, and it's been as solid as anything from there. So at the back of the sea can, like I mentioned, we have the opening doors as well. So we basically just framed in this wall, and put a big picture window in there. It's a beautiful space actually to wake up, and to be able to look at all of these trees. So if we head around back to the front. So this is the front of the house. We basically have a single car park, that we pull up the car right here, up the stairs, and into the living area. Welcome to our tiny house. So this is the main living area of our space. It's really nice to drink your coffee as well, and the couch folds out into a sofa bed. So if we have guests, they can stay comfortably. So this entryway table, Luke did such a good job of. The wood came from our property, so it's a little bit special. But yeah, I love it. This one as well actually, and this is one of our trees too. Moving on into the kitchen. This is our concrete countertop, that we just love. It was really fun to build. And of course the highlight of our kitchen, is our coffee maker. Yeah, we love that. Under the sink, we've just got storage. And this drawer here, is where we keep our induction cooktop. So if we were cooking, we would pull this out. And that plugs in right here. We like to keep it off the counter however, because we really like that minimal, like clean line. So that just lives in the drawer. This is our breakfast bar. This is where we spend most of our time. It's our favorite place to have morning coffee. And yeah, we spend a lot of time on our laptop sitting up here. And it's so beautiful. Looking out into the forest. This window is completely custom. Luke built it from scratch. And it opens up completely. So you can get that real indoor, outdoor living kind of vibe. So moving down from the main living space to our house, we've got our bathroom. Which we tried to make as luxury feeling as we could. So we decided to tile the whole thing. We did a pocket door to try and save as much space as we could. And this was probably one of the hardest parts for me, was doing the tiling. One because I had to learn how to tile. And using the tile cutter is quite challenging for me. But we got there. These tiles were, we got secondhand, the white ones. The black ones, we, is one of the only things that we bought brand new in the whole construction build. Just because of the exact quantity we needed. It was hard to find that secondhand. But the vanity, the toilet, came from the restore. The shower glass is upcycled as well. And then this is our hot water on demand system. So this runs the whole house. And it works great. We're really happy with that. And this is our master bedroom, I guess you could call it. Our tiny house master bedroom. Queen size bed, big picture window. We wanted it to try and make it as light as possible. This is another opening window custom from Luke. So he did that as well. And this is our split cycle. So heating and cooling, extraction fan, does it all. The dresser we got from a friend. Just going on with that upcycled theme. I love having like the big picture window and the outdoors right at your fingertips while you get to be inside cozy. And yeah, we have the best sleeps here. We're really happy to have such a nice bedroom. It's home sweet home. But when we're not here, we put it up for rent on Airbnb. And it's really nice to give other people the experience that we love so much. And out the window, that's our sauna there. So the sauna again is all cedar that we actually were lucky enough to get from the local mill. We decided to do a concrete floor and the one glass wall. We've got a wood fired sauna wood stove. This was basically a big shop stove that we modified to make it a sort of the right size for this sauna with some rocks on top and also a folding bench. So basically we just can put this up if we want to stretch in here. We've got just enough space to do that. So then this is where we basically have just the cold shower. The water itself coming out of the well here is around about eight degrees Celsius. So it's pretty fresh straight out of the shower. So we get nice and hot in the sauna, come around, shower back in sauna and repeat. Another thing that we decided to build after we finished the container was just a small shed out the back so that we didn't have to try and fit all of our water filtration and any other utilities in the container itself. We've got an on-demand hot water heater inside but everything else we've put in a small shed out the back and that actually made it a lot easier for us to be able to live comfortably in the space without trying to build too much storage and trying to fit all these things within the container itself. Around the side we have our septic system. We will be changing that this year actually. We're putting another field over there but for the moment we use that for all of our wastewater and this is a thousand gallon tank that we actually have pumped out every few months. The water, the property came with a well so we've got a well pump that we then pump into a holding tank. We actually installed a heat pump. It's a reverse cycle air conditioner so it does cool in as well in summer and it's been great but in the winter it does get a little cold and so we've put some baseball heaters just still electric heat. It was a bit of a learning curve as our first ever shipping container build. One of the complications with building with a secan is that there's so much steel so there's so much thermal bridging so that was something that we really had to pay a lot of attention to. Essentially if you have cold outside touching an area of steel and that still runs to the inside of the house then it will draw that cold into the house and one of the concerns with that is condensation. It really can be a major problem and so you have to consider all of that when you're building the secan and so that's why it was important for us to use things like spray foam. They essentially are vapor barriers and they really help to reduce those problems along with having your ventilation fans and dehumidifier to manage your humidity inside the building but we haven't had too many problems. It's a really nice airtight building envelope. It has worked really well for us. So building a shipping container home was always something that we were looking at. Now that we've done it and we've learned a lot of things about it it actually has been amazing. I think some of the pros of it is that you start with this building that you put down and you can just start basically renovating it and building something that you like knowing that it's structurally sound. Once we're finished now that we look back on it it really doesn't feel like the shipping container that we started with and so it was nice to actually transform that into a little house and a comfortable space. Subscribe to Exploring Alternatives and please share this video if you liked it. If you want to find out more about Francis and Luke's shipping container we'll put a link in the description. Thanks for watching.