We Live In A Shipping Container | The New Homesmiths | Apartment Therapy

Hello, my name is Kicker Colossi and this is the house I can't here in New Orleans, Louisiana. I'm a callous. No way, this is our house that we built out of seven

shipping

container

s. You can't ignore the origins of the house. This house was made using the original

shipping

container

floors, a shipping container is eight feet wide and usually 20 or 40 feet long, so the dimensions of our house when combining the two side by side are 60 feet wide and then we have two containers. back, giving us 80 feet in the back, the shipping container is basically a Lego brick, there is a very set set of dimensions and it's easy for me to put the ones I mentioned on some graph paper and figure out the layout from there, like this The big joke was that I'm very young and I still play with Legos and now I'm starting to play with Legos as adults.

You know, this house is not a small house even though people know that there are container houses that are nice, it will be Italian, no, it is. No, it's about 2,000 square feet, but despite that, we really wanted to take advantage of all the space we could under the stairs, not only is there a full pantry that goes all the way in, but we also have the dog section and then we have a closet there for suitcases, this is where we keep food and water, so we will go back there at night and sleep. You don't want to accidentally step on a plate of food when you're running around the kitchen and me.

We travel a lot, but since we got married we decided to collect magnets from every destination we went to, so since this is a metal house, we thought magnets were the perfect way to decorate our house. I grew up here in New Orleans when Katrina hit. I missed. my house my parents were rescued after four days on the roof of the house our family business was destroyed and that really left some deep marks now I'm an adult and I'm looking to put down roots and I was looking for a house here in New Orleans and I was struggling finding a home that felt right and appropriate to me, it was a few things, one of them was the floor plan design.

I wanted one I could work from. More importantly, I needed a house that felt safe to most people. Who owns the most houses? You know, simple houses with wooden walls, Creole cabins or shotgun style houses and I

live

d in one of those when I was renting a house and you could only hear your neighbors, it felt flimsy when the wind blew. I was always terrified that the thing was going to fall apart, so I looked for a house that I could buy that was made of brick, stone, concrete or something and it just didn't exist in the city and with other requirements, even with the other requirements that were both an interesting design but also affordable and I couldn't find it, I couldn't find it, so the next logical step was to buy a plot of land and build a tenant who texted me one day and we're just started go out and I linked to some container houses and he said to me: Have you heard of these?

Well, I'm from California, of course, I've heard about container homes, you know, I've seen the madness and he answers me and tells me. I want to build one. I thought he was crazy and one day I came home and he had a piece of graph paper with everything meticulously drawn out, exactly what he wanted and he explained to me how he wanted the loft. for his office and this big open floor plan and I was sold, new port city rules made sense, we have shipping containers here and I started researching, they are metal so you don't have to worry about termites which are a big problem there.

They are all using spray foam insulation so they stay cool very easily compared to traditional legal construction here in New Orleans and I got really excited. Things became real when the lot was purchased and okay, let's build this. Now let's do it, but who is going to do this? Which city contractor? So we started to get serious and we started looking at the numbers and we had a budget set and we were looking at how much I knew our big expenses were going to be the shipping containers, the crane and I moved the shipping containers so the truckers were the foundation. , these big things and then the percentage that you have to pay a contract exactly for things to start adding up and I was like, "Okay, we can be under budget doing these things." Well, and then Cakery said, "Wow, the person who needs to build this is going to take 30% of the construction cost and that's 30% that we didn't have, so we made that decision at that time and we had a very serious conversation there." like we were".

We're going to do this, we're going to do it without a contractor and we're going to take this on and we're going to build this house, but let's be honest, we don't back down from a challenge. I mean, it wasn't just, you know, scraping. cents together we wanted to do something exciting it is an incredible experience having to control the process of installing seven containers in one day it is very expensive one morning in a couple of hours with a crane parked in our neighbor's lot that we had to obtain permission for and have having a welder and then having a ripper or an arborist and the off-duty police officers from the landscapers, a structural engineer, having to have all these people there, that time to place the seven containers was stressful because every hour was going to function.

All of this wasn't going to cost us $8,000, thousands of dollars, so we had to make sure everything happened on time and smoothly, and it just became stressful, and it was difficult, and we stumbled a lot and a six-month project turned into a year. . project, neither of us have experience in the world of construction, that is, we did not have a hammer and yet here we are, we are taking on the task of building a house from scratch, but you know what we realized that we have a good internet connection and we can search YouTube videos and we can learn and like and say we'll take the good challenge when I present this idea to her, she could easily be gone.

There are very important decisions that we had to make at the beginning of our relationship. having a lot of trust in each other to find the right path that's when we realized we weren't building a house, we were building a relationship and the helis just happened on the side where we really tried to embrace the natural. shipping container aesthetic, we are not the first in the world in this whole shipping container house, not even close to being the first, but we are trying to do a little different with our house instead of just putting sheetrock over everything and cover When decorating the floors with shiny new floors, we really try to highlight these elements, so we use spray foam insulation throughout the house, but on the internal walls we do not have to insulate them from the outside, which allows us really show off this corrugated metal.

Overall, we wanted to keep the roof of the shipping container exposed for several reasons: one because it looks amazing, having that ribbed structure looks much cooler than a boring blank slate, but most importantly it also gave us extra height and We were limited to the 90 foot dimensions of a shipping container, so we didn't want to put in a false ceiling, meaning we had no ability to hide the light in the electrical living room, which created another element of complications. because of the layout and design now you have to choose where your electricity is going to work and what it will look like yes we will see.

I want to be able to walk from my room to my kitchen in my boxers and not have my neighbor's evening. New Orleans is a really claustrophobic city, we have small watts and the houses seem to be built next to each other, so having the windows high allows me to have that privacy while still leaving them open all day. This is the rearmost part of the house. and you can see once you can connect two containers together to create that whole space, we have a nice United States better than 16 feet wide, like I said, we try to use a lot of reclaimed wood in this house, the doors here our barn doors from our farm , she is an hour north a year and we are going to throw away century-old doors, these side tables were also recovered, but we didn't want this house to feel crowded and claustrophobic, so by Build the side tables into the wall Placing our lights on the wall frees up floor space that we simply don't have in much of our bathroom once again using the concrete countertops, a large shower space, the roof of the original shipping container there if you have a vision that you need to maintain, you know completely, follow that vision, inspect what you expect, otherwise it won't necessarily be done the way you want, we have these i-beams service houses and the painters and the subs, they all want painting our Ivy said: "Let's hide them, let's make them disappear, it's not what we wanted, we wanted to once again embrace the industrial nature of this house and someone else would have liked it.

The beams are exactly missing what we would have done despite what maybe some of the more experienced people have done." I could say you have an aesthetic you want, they adopt it. This is my studio. This is where I direct my business. I can sit here and look at the beautiful windows. Look at the cool memories from my childhood. things that inspire me on the Shelf. What's also really cool about this space is that you can actually see that these are the shipping containers. clearly see where the two containers were welded together, where the seam has been You know who literally welded together our custom made railings that my wife and I designed something we've been asked before is what's your favorite part of this house.

You know what makes this house special for you and for me it's definitely that warmth and that journey. I like to feel that feeling, it's that Germanic concept of super warm and cozy. I love that cozy feeling that we get when you have the light of. the Edison bulbs and the warmth that reflects off the wood and the big leather couch here, this is my cozy, happy place and this is my home and it doesn't matter how crazy the city is, whether it's work-related madness or just because of their morale, I'm getting hit by another big hurricane storm, I feel totally safe, you know, there's a lot of warmth in here, but it's something that we built together and that alone is so comforting to come here and know that we made this happen , every little element, every weld, every awkward door we installed, as if it all made Julie, some people could hang a picture. on the wall and hopefully it will give them that feeling of home, but for us it's not just the paintings that are the strange things we have on our walls, it's the walls themselves.