Browse Forums Building A New House 1 Feb 05, 2019 2:30 pm Hi, I'm new to this forum and thought I'd add some pics and info about my shipping container home that I'm currently building with my wife, father and help from the rest of the family in the northern suburbs of Sydney. We're self building and doing 90% of the work ourselves. I hope this will help people get a few ideas as I found it hard to find info on shipping container homes in Australia. If anyone is interested and would like me to post more about the process just let me know. Like ⋅ Add a comment ⋅ Pin to Ideaboard ⋅ Like ⋅ Add a comment ⋅ Pin to Ideaboard ⋅ Like ⋅ Add a comment ⋅ Pin to Ideaboard ⋅ Like ⋅ Add a comment ⋅ Pin to Ideaboard ⋅ Like ⋅ Add a comment ⋅ Pin to Ideaboard ⋅ Like ⋅ Add a comment ⋅ Pin to Ideaboard ⋅ Like ⋅ Add a comment ⋅ Pin to Ideaboard ⋅ Like ⋅ Add a comment ⋅ Pin to Ideaboard ⋅ Like ⋅ Add a comment ⋅ Pin to Ideaboard ⋅ Re: Shipping container home 3Feb 06, 2019 11:12 pm It would be great to follow your build. I considered a shipping container home, but found there was very little information out there, and it seemed very daunting to try as a first time builder. Keep us up to date for sure, i'll bet there are plenty of others who are curious about it Re: Shipping container home 4Feb 07, 2019 2:46 pm It’s great to know that people are interested. I'll try to keep you up to date as best I can. For starters here is the floor plan Like ⋅ Add a comment ⋅ Pin to Ideaboard ⋅ Like ⋅ Add a comment ⋅ Pin to Ideaboard ⋅ The whole house consists of 4 x 40 foot high cube containers, 8 x 20 foot high cube containers and 1 x 20 foot general purpose container that will have the top half removed to make the pool. The inside of the containers will be sheeted with gyprock and the outside will be kept as bare so when standing in the living room you will be able to see the outside of the containers. Each of the 4 bedrooms are made of 2 joined 20 foot containers which make them quite large at roughly 4.5m x 6m however this makes it possible to add and ensuite to each room as the kids get older. Re: Shipping container home 5Feb 08, 2019 1:59 pm Melos Wow I’d love to see more of your plans. How long will the whole process take I'm hoping we'll be in within about 18 months. It will take a while as we're only really getting a couple of hours each afternoon and usually half a day in Saturday to build. Re: Shipping container home 6Feb 11, 2019 12:13 pm wow this is cool as! How many square meters will the house end up being? Re: Shipping container home 7Feb 11, 2019 2:22 pm dulie wow this is cool as! How many square meters will the house end up being? Thanks. Without doing the sums again it works out to be roughly 320 m2 of internal floor area and about 50 m2 of outdoor deck area Re: Shipping container home 8Feb 11, 2019 6:19 pm Before I go into more detail about the container home I'll share some info on how we started. We were lucky enough to find a 1000m2 flat block with a large brick shed on it. Like ⋅ Add a comment ⋅ Pin to Ideaboard ⋅ Like ⋅ Add a comment ⋅ Pin to Ideaboard ⋅ Like ⋅ Add a comment ⋅ Pin to Ideaboard ⋅ We decided to build the granny flat first tucked into the corner near the driveway because this could be built quickly and get us living on site while we build the main house. Like ⋅ Add a comment ⋅ Pin to Ideaboard ⋅ Like ⋅ Add a comment ⋅ Pin to Ideaboard ⋅ Like ⋅ Add a comment ⋅ Pin to Ideaboard ⋅ Like ⋅ Add a comment ⋅ Pin to Ideaboard ⋅ Like ⋅ Add a comment ⋅ Pin to Ideaboard ⋅ Like ⋅ Add a comment ⋅ Pin to Ideaboard ⋅ The steel beams are largely ornamental they do hold up the polished concrete slab but do nothing to support the walls and roof. The walls are made of 100mm cool room panels and the roof of 150mm cool room panels. These are light weight, easy to install and highly insulated. They also have the benefit of being a finished product if you don’t mind the steel look. This worked for us as the kids could put magnets and play games on any wall they like. I would recommend these panels as they're fast and affordable. We'll be using them for our roof on the container home as they can span 7m between the containers unsupported. Re: Shipping container home 9Feb 15, 2019 5:21 am After building the granny flat and moving on site we used the brick shed to prefabricate the steel post that the house will sit on. We are trying to use a lot of reclaimed materials and we managed to buy some old 200x200 shs steel. Like ⋅ Add a comment ⋅ Pin to Ideaboard ⋅ These are well and truly above and beyond the engineer's requirements but they were cheap and I like the look of large steel post and beams. We had to cut them to the right size, clean them up, weld them and finally get them galvanised. We tried a few different ways to cut the steel like a plasma cutter an oxy cutter and a 5 inch grinder. The oxy and plasma cutters were fast but not very accurate and ended up being quite expensive once you burn through all the consumable parts and gas. Like ⋅ Add a comment ⋅ Pin to Ideaboard ⋅ Like ⋅ Add a comment ⋅ Pin to Ideaboard ⋅ Like ⋅ Add a comment ⋅ Pin to Ideaboard ⋅ Like ⋅ Add a comment ⋅ Pin to Ideaboard ⋅ In the end we used the grinder as it was the most accurate. After welding new plates on the ends of the shs we had to drill 4 holes top and bottom to allow the zinc to flow in and drain out properly during the galvanising. Like ⋅ Add a comment ⋅ Pin to Ideaboard ⋅ Like ⋅ Add a comment ⋅ Pin to Ideaboard ⋅ This is important because galvanising is charged by weight so the more zinc that is trapped inside the more it will cost. Like ⋅ Add a comment ⋅ Pin to Ideaboard ⋅ Re: Shipping container home 10Apr 11, 2019 11:42 am Next came the demolition of the brick shed. As we are trying to keep costs down we decided to knock the shed down by hand. This was a lot of work but cost us nothing. Like ⋅ Add a comment ⋅ Pin to Ideaboard ⋅ Like ⋅ Add a comment ⋅ Pin to Ideaboard ⋅ Like ⋅ Add a comment ⋅ Pin to Ideaboard ⋅ Like ⋅ Add a comment ⋅ Pin to Ideaboard ⋅ We are also trying to reduce waste and the cost of removing it so we hired a mobile concrete crusher for about $1100 and over 2 days crushed 9000 odd bricks and roof tiles into useable gravel that we spread over our driveway. This will eventually be concreted after all trucks and cranes have finished on site. Like ⋅ Add a comment ⋅ Pin to Ideaboard ⋅ Like ⋅ Add a comment ⋅ Pin to Ideaboard ⋅ Like ⋅ Add a comment ⋅ Pin to Ideaboard ⋅ Like ⋅ Add a comment ⋅ Pin to Ideaboard ⋅ Re: Shipping container home 11Jul 05, 2019 2:44 pm Thanks for sharing, this is fascinating and inspiring! Keep up the good work. Re: Shipping container home 13Mar 06, 2021 10:27 am JonathanHodges There are some awesome ideas on this thread! You never realize how big these shipping containers are until you see one in person. In my opinion, houses like these would not be hard and expensive to build. The more I look into this the more I want to buy a few of these and start building a small house for myself. It would really make sense having something like this beside the house you already live in. I was looking online a bit and there are companies that can make you custom containers. The one that looked the most promising was https://www.tigercontainers.com/contact-us/shipping-containers-sydney/. It looked like they have a lot of experience, and they could be trusted. Hmmmmm... this sounds like a bit of masquerading self promotion. Particularly given the website dedicates all of one sentence to talking about modifying shipping containers to suit your needs. And no pictures etc to demonstrate they've ever done it. 1 10465 We already paid for somfy motors for the blinds. The quote above was purely for “pre-wiring” so the blinds company can install the motors and blinds. That’s why we… 5 16082 From what I know about water tanks (I've been working with a client on them for a few years now) is this - The concrete can last a lifetime if they don't crack for some… 2 10523 |