Trying to Catch Up
I am a much better artist and general helper than I am a blogger. When we lived on a boat in the Caribbean it was much easier, at the end of a week to sit down with a glass of wine or a beer and write about all the things we had experienced and done over the past week or month. Now that we are stateside and building a new house, taxing a kid around and working all my spare time is spent relaxing, sewing, or doing absolutely nothing! In the future I will try to do a better job at keeping up with our progress but I won’t promise. Maybe even next update I’ll type from inside out new house.
Lately we have been working on electric in our basement. We plan to call the inspector soon and hope to move along with insulation and drywall. Why the basement you ask? Well, we have decided in order to get moved in as soon as possible we will do it in the basement and then work our way to moving in upstairs.
Last blog post was in January and as we haven’t finished we have made quit a lot of progress. Several times we’ve had to stop work on our house and go to work to make money but hopefully in the end we will have a very small mortgage.
We’ve been taking bids for insulation, HVAC and now we just have to decide from our options. We’ve also decided to talk to a bank about financing to finish the project. In the beginning we were told no by every bank we tried. They all said they could not loan on a shipping container house as shipping containers are considered un-conventional building material. Since then, we are about 50% complete on our house and have funded it all out of pocket. Now they will still be lending on an “unconventional shipping container house” but we now have a few things in our favor we did not in the beginning. One, our house is turning out to look like a contemporary home with steel siding, and not just a pile of shipping containers. Two, we have quite a bit of equity in it now. 3. My husband is a very good builder and everyone who has seen it thus far is impressed how well it is built. So I hope I have caught everyone up that is interested in our progression and I’ll try to get a good timeline of pictures. That’s the most interesting part anyway…
- 2D rendering of our house plan. I created the plan and blueprint via Sketchup Program
- All first floor joist in place and ready for plywood. That area will be our kitchen/living room
- Jaxson and Rhonda nailing up joist hangers for our first floor. View from in the basement
- Our neighbor Jeff Burgin helping us lift our trusses onto our roof with his tractor. Our tractor wasn’t powerful enough to get the job done. It’s so nice to have great neighbors!!
- Robert, Rhonda’s Dad Job foreman
- Front View of house in March with trusses. Welding brackets to place them.
- Shawn grinding spaces to have our roof truss brackets welded.
- Shawn and Brian Myers of Shelby Welding, welding our brackets to hold our roof trusses.
- Roof trusses up on roof but not moved into place. Each one has to be picked up over the brackets and take to proper place and screwed into place. Our trusses were built at Ethington Lumber in Shelbyville, KY.
- Roof trusses all placed and attached into their brackets.
- West side of 2nd floor. View from West side container roof
- West side of 2nd floor framed. This will be our son Jaxson’s room
- Shawn and Rhonda on roof after trusses were put in place.
- Fisher Sips Panels being delivered in April
- front of house with delivered sip panels. They came from Fischer Sips in Louisville, ky
- Installing our roof SIP panels. There’s a bracket we screwed into panel to lift and then bracket is removed. The panel is slid into the spline of the previous panel. It is screwed with 8″ screws into the truss and nailed into the spline.
- Rhonda on roof after we put down underlayment on roof for snow and ice shield
- Front wall framed
- Shawn attaching siding to top of house in front
- Framing in basement wall
- basement rear wall framed ready for spray insulation.
- framed basement wall
- This is a view from our garage/shop. Our toilet room framed up and entrance to our home office in the can. So the can next to a can, ha ha.
- This is the way we transported all the framing lumber from the garage to the basement. Its nice living on rolling hills but not so convenient after it rains.
- Front view July 2018
- Front view of house with first part of porch roof started. Notice my mums and pumpkins, I couldn’t resist to start decorating!!
We are absolutely thrilled with the outcome so far! Can’t wait to see the final product! Your family has put so much work into this house, that it is definitely a labor of love. Thank you for giving us the opportunity to work on your home, it has been a pleasure! If you ever need anything else, please let us know!
Your home is coming along beautifully! I’m not surprised because you two are pretty amazing. You get an idea, no matter the challenge and make it work. Not only do you make it work, you have people thinking, “why didn’t we come up with that?!” Haha