update, December 2021:
For a variety of reasons, I’m not finishing the container build project. I’m turning it over to my friend’s capable hands and consolidating my home base to the family land. I learned a lot on the project and am grateful for the experience, it’s just not the right place for us to be.
I was never very interested in building out shipping containers, for a variety of reasons.
But when a friend offers you to come to his land and build out his already-on-site full size container, and you’re currently living with your entire life stuffed in to a 68sf cargo trailer with your partner, you say yes. Having spent all of 2020 bouncing between the road and "family land", which is a euphemism for "moochdocking in our parent's yards", the idea of a little stability and more space sounded really nice.
We don't need the container to provide all the services a normal house does, at least not at first. We have Serenity to sleep and cook in, and there is a flush outhouse and outdoor shower on the property. With that in mind, phase 1 of the build is to turn the container in to a nice studio - an office for her, and office for me, a wood stove, and maybe a little kitchenette type thing for coffee and tea. If we want to build more amenities in the future (a bed, a shower, a more legit kitchen, et cetera) we can. For now, the idea of moving from 68sf to 285sf + 68sf sounds luxurious.
The Design
A box within a box. Build a stud wall on the end, and then glue 2" of polyiso insulation to the interior of all six sides. Create a post and beam style interior framing box inside the insulation layer, to hang interior siding, a ceiling, shelves, and the like off of.
That's the basic idea. We're aiming for the absolute simplest fastest route to be able to move in to the container, and we can build it out at our leisure from there. This urgency is driven by how uncomfortable our current circumstance is: two people living and working in a space smaller than many people's closets in winter surrounded by a sea of clay mud.
