40ft DIY Shipping Container Home (Total Cost Breakdown)

yo welcome to containing luxury so a lot of people have had questions about what is the absolute cheapest you can build a 40-foot container oh and today we're gonna cover the breakdown of exactly what the cheapest you can do it for is let's get started [Music] I'm a licensed general contractor so I write construction estimates every day all the time for all different types of projects and one thing I wanted to be able to share with everybody is what is the absolute cheapest that we could get this project done for and if you take out all of my time any labor any fuel of running to get materials and we look at just hard numbers on what we're gonna be writing checks for to get this project done that's virtually what we're covering in this in in this video but make sure to watch it all the way through because there might be certain things in certain sections you're like oh I don't have the tools for that one it's gonna cost more or oh that doesn't really apply to me I'm using this and that's where you're gonna want to kind of pay attention to all of it but let's get into the numbers okay so first the very first section we're covering here is that we use a used shipping container so that number right there is your ground number you're working off of and we were able to acquire this container for around $2,500 in our case that covered shipping because we knew a guy that could get it over here in your case if you use a new container check out other videos because that price can vary different as well so we have another video that breaks down what type of container to use and the cost of those but in our case let's watch what stop dinging in our case we use a used container it costs us around $2,500 section number 2 is windows because that's virtually the very first thing you're gonna be doing is cutting out all your windows to get some circulation of air flow through here because you will die of heatstroke if you live in this other states or even in the northern in the summer so with the window cutouts we just gave you a ballpark number on what you're looking at with doing the cutout and installing the window including the window now in ours we used impact windows if you're not in southern area where you have the risk of tornadoes or hurricanes then you might not be using impact windows so you might have a cheaper cost on windows if you are building in these areas I highly suggest you just go ahead and build with impact windows because they're going to be with withstanding the damage that you might sustain so for that number we were looking at about $3,200 all in that included the cutoff wheels for cutting this thing out any miscellaneous steel we needed to weld in place the windows themselves so nothing extra like that's our hard cost on that windows and door or sorry windows all exterior penetrations let me get that straight it's going to be our windows and our doors in our case we have a sliding door on the end and we have one impact rated just front entry door and then we have one two three four five windows on our build so that's one of those sections where it's important to pay attention here because you might only have three windows you know or you might not have anything on the end so your your cost difference but essentially you can use that figure and figure out approximately where you might be we're thirty two hundred section three that is going to be our insulation so one thing to also know before we get too far into this I'm trying to go in order of which you're going to be doing this so you can kind of use that as a guide as well so first thing bought our container second thing windows and door penetrations on the exterior third thing we're now into our insulation so this is another section can drastically differ in our case we used one inch closed cell insulation panels which come four foot by eight foot eight foot those our cost broke down to about a thousand dollars installed so if you were going to be using spray foam and you framed all your studs in here and then you hired a company to come in and spray do the spray foam you're going to be every bit of twenty five hundred dollars I know this because we hire these guys to do that all the time and I obtained a quote on this container for doing it I looked into buying a frost packs myself which you can see on eBay or Amazon to do it there was no kits I found that had enough board feet which is 1 foot by 1 foot to be able to get the insulation that we needed so I had to buy 2 kits and that broke down to almost every time 16 to 18 hundred dollars not including tape and plastic and having to prep stuff off so you could easily spend twenty five hundred dollars as your bottom line figure if you're going to be using spray foam if you're gonna go like us and do rigid 1-inch insulation board on your exterior walls and roof we actually put it on the floor as well then our cost was roughly a thousand dollars okay so number four is gonna be our framing our interior framing materials only so we picked all of our stuff up from a supply house some of the stuff you can get at Home Depot depends completely on your build if you were gonna be using twenty gauge steel frame studs like we did then our material cost of just the metal itself was about $700 that added up all of our material runs to our local supply house for that kind of stuff if you bought from Home Depot and you built out of wood I would assume you'd probably be somewhere around there so I think regardless of what method you're gonna be used to frame interior and also your partition walls it inside the container I think you're probably going to be somewhere around seven seven eight hundred bucks I don't think you'll be much different in any direction you choose because the material costs are very similar that's pretty simple section so number five again is a major variation section if you added up all the materials that we cost we spent in just electrical if you're going to be hiring electrician to do this this section could cost you an easy extra couple thousand dollars but if we look at only the material cost of what I personally spent from supply houses picking up what we needed for this we were about fifteen hundred dollars that included are 50 amp RV plug that we needed big 50 amp RV extension cord that plugs in our breaker box all of our breakers inside the panel and all of our GFI circuits wiring outlet boxes clips you know all these different things people think you know like oh it's not that much and it's like add everything up when you get to it and it's it's a lot more than you expect and that's also a very important section you know you want to make sure you're building this thing safe and and to code yeah whichever municipality you're dealing with so that was our electrical was about fifteen hundred but again to be completely different for you number six is going to be our plumbing section again materials only doing it yourself this is assuming you're skilled plumber so materials were about eighteen hundred dollars again that that figure sounds pretty big but then when you think about we have stainless steel drop in sink we have a nice faucet we have a bathroom vanity which has sink faucet drain basket we have a little water heater that we've hidden underneath here you have your shower your shower valve your toilet your toilet water lines shut offs so all those things you start tiling that up we ended about eighteen hundred dollars again no labor so take that into consideration if you're hiring a plumber jack that number up considerably labor is gonna be your most expensive thing in this so number seven is gonna be drywall we use drywall you could be using ship live if you were using ship lath your costs are gonna be way higher than our drywall costs unless you're using some reclaimed lumber and you took all your time and got that stuff we don't know but if you're buying it ship level is not cheap so it's a it's a major cost a lot of people I look at some of these tiny homes and they spent seventy thousand dollars on their tiny oh you know so this is the absolute cheapest you could get this project done for and we're again we're only covering the cheapest you could build one so we're using all the materials that are going to work for building the lowest cost so for us the lowest cost because we don't have access to free materials was drywall so drywall for us if we broke it down just a cost per board with you know fiber tape and compound and sanding sponges we're about seven hundred and twenty dollars so that's wall board insulation now again can drastically change depending on your situation might go up might go down but factor that in for your cost flooring we used a vinyl floor it's a really cost effective quick install product so I'm not quite sure that anyone's gonna find anything cheaper or less expensive than what we put in so in our case with the vinyl floor with the underlayment that that's required for it we came in at $750 and again that doesn't cover material transport going to pick out all this stuff there's a lot of time and fuel put into that but hard money cost seven hundred fifty bucks if we go into next is going to be HVAC which is all of our heating and cooling now we chose a mini-split system which was a high-end really energy-efficient system and we only put one down in the end with a creative design that allowed the airflow to get down into this area you might find that because of the way you built your walls that you need two mini split systems so you'd have to double this but for us for just the cost of the unit now this is again assuming you're an HVAC installer and you can install this thing yourself and mini splits are not that complicated but we use professionals for all of ours so the material cost alone on earth heating and cooling system was about nine hundred dollars again can obviously go up from there if you did pay a professional I'll tell you right out I paid twenty three hundred dollars for that that AC unit and that included all of our copper running you know everything that was required for it but I use the licensed professional that that we've used on many of our jobs and he got me a really high quality unit because we wanted to make this really really energy efficient but hard costs $900 okay number 10 is going to be our Nitori we have kitchen and bathroom cabinets so all of our cabinets we have a really cost-effective company for these so I don't think you're going to find cabinets it's just not going to happen unless you have a friend that took them out of a house or some creative way but we have to look at if you had to drive to a store and buy cabinets your lowest and material costs on something like this could easily be right around $2,200 that's for a kitchen of this size so you might have something that you're just doing something really small so again important to pay attention to what we're pricing versus what you're doing but $2,200 got us these cabinets I'm also a building contractor so I have you know wholesale pricing on stuff that if you went to Home Depot and bought off the shelf cabinets you would be getting similar pricing on those and these are a much better quality so the next thing obviously countertops on top of our cabinets so in our case we went ahead and did butcher block it was the most cost effective use of countertops that we could fabricate and install on site total do-it-yourselfer type of countertop because you can cut it with a circular saw no special tools you didn't need to polish and and get into all that stuff so you can watch our video on I believe it was our cabinets so you can kind of see how we sanded it clear coated it so the material cost on these we required two slabs again might be different if you have a smaller kitchen you might be able to use the cut off piece of this and use it on your vanity for us we use the whole piece here and then we had another counter top we have a bot so we had two countertops at 350 dollars each that broke down to about 700 dollars that again does not include any of the sandpaper for sanding up and down the clear coat any of this stuff so that's assuming you're kind of a woodworker guy you might have some extra stuff in your shop that price can go up from them but our art costs we wrote a check for $700 or 7 $700 okay the next section number 12 is going to be no work when we say no work we're talking about interior doors baseboards door casing any type of trim woodwork that we have inside the container here so for us that broke down to roughly about $600 that included you know some raw finished doors that we picked up or door really one and we sanded it and clear coated and did all that and we don't have any costs in for that so just our hard material costs on millwork broke down to about six hundred dollars number thirteen is miscellaneous mistake materials this is actually a really important section you are going to spend way more money than you ever assumed adding up little sections and thinking what they're gonna cost my rule of thumb as a general contractor is literally think of what it's gonna cost me and double it and that's what it really ends up costing me so I have a section in here of $500 for miscellaneous stuff from glue to shims to screws to nail saw blades tape plastic roller covers and honestly I think that $500 is not even close to what you really need this is assuming you own all of these tools you have you know a lot of stuff on hand so if you're doing this as a do-it-yourself for this section might cost you a lot more so the 14th section that we're gonna have in here is our paint which is only going to be covering the material cost of the primer and paint it required required to do the whole inside of the container so again that's not roller covers roller frames roller poles brushes you know you could go to Home Depot and buy everything new you need to get this job done or don't need but would want to get this job done and spend easily another $300 on miscellaneous stuff so you know assuming you're only looking at I already have a roller already have a brush already I've actually naps tape plastic all that kind of stuff you're gonna spend about $250 in to primer and paint you have to you know you're gonna use probably like an eggshell or satin on your your trim your baseboards door casing all that kind of stuff and a flat on the walls because it's gonna be hiding a lot of imperfections if you weren't really skilled on it on drywall finishing or even chip latha installation so keep in mind that's about $250 just in the end of the paint if we look at what we did not include that are things that if you want to do these we're gonna go drastically up in price from here we did not include anything on the exterior this container so we used it on our estimate here with very minimalist numbers we used a used container so it's gonna be beat-up it's gonna have imperfections it is not getting painted on this estimate so anything you do above and beyond on the exterior this container is then gonna be added cost so we have no siding we have no roofing we have no paint on the exterior we have no landscaping we have no sight prep so I'm gonna be building this container I need to put it somewhere I need to do some type of site work because I have to have if I'm not using a content eyelet which is also very expensive I would Jack up your your plumbing section if you use a composting toilet but if you're if you're not using a composting toilet you need to have some type of septic system that you can tie into that's gonna require some work hopefully you can do that yourself but you got to add up depending on the distance how much that's going to cost you water supply and electrical to be able to plug in to your 50 amp RV plug or you might find that you're gonna have a different connection for your site but these are all things that are not included in this we're only looking on bare minimum cost to complete a container yourself can assuming you have every tool required to do this job all right so the moment we have all been waiting for the grand total of the cheapest you can build a 40-foot container home for not touching the outside is seventeen thousand three hundred and twenty dollars that's my cost if I did not pay myself a dime and I could do absolutely every single part of this myself not including driving to get any materials nothing that is my hard cost and also assuming you have every single tool you own so for anyone out there that is thinking that they're going to hire somebody to build them a quality shipping container home for under $20,000 I would not hire that person there is absolutely no way as a contractor that I would ever build this thing it the odd the amount of time that goes into it and we're gonna release another video as well going over how much time actually goes into this if you were looking to build it yourself and we're gonna go over all that but it's just it's not realistic that you know even at seven seventeen thousand three hundred twenty dollars I really think you need to give yourself like a twenty five hundred dollar buffer for miscellaneous stuff that you're gonna find that you need to get this project done and that's gonna push you up to that twenty thousand dollar mark and that's doing everything yourself and not touching the outside so when we get in deciding we can look at some of those other at a costs but these are real realistic numbers of what the bare minimum you can get a livable healthy and safe interior of a shipping container built for for you obviously there was a lot of those sections that we could have you know altered and one section might be more and one section might be less but I think that you'll find if you balance it out you're gonna be somewhere around twenty thousand that you know at the end of the day so if there's anything that we missed if there's anything that you know you guys think we should add to this let us know we'll try but I tried to write this just bottom line what I think it would cost me which is not what we have here you know what we have here cost us a lot more than this and if you want a generic number on what you think it's cost to hire somebody to do this looking at these material costs double it and that is the usual cost for anything in construction that you're doing add up all of your materials for that job and if you double it that's going to be the lowest estimate that you will receive that is of anyone qualified because of all of the labor that's going to go into doing all of that stuff with material running and anything below that is quite frankly gonna be somebody that wouldn't necessarily trust that they know what they're doing and that they aren't going to be coming back to you for more money with a crying story of like oh I didn't account for this or oh I didn't do this or I I can't you know finish it because I need more money so and I deal with that all day long with clients and they're in the construction field so I always like to be upfront this is what it's gonna cost and anyone that tells you otherwise I really wouldn't believe them unless they can show us some quiet somehow show me how they can do it I look they're not stealing the materials so okay so if there's anything that we missed you know make sure to hit the comments also keep in mind if you have specific questions about what or any particular section we're going to try and release a video of cost breakdown in detail of each individual section so make sure you can hit the like button and subscribe to our Channel and what's the check button the valve okay make sure to hit the like button and subscribe to our channel for all of the updated information that you're gonna find because we really want to try and build this as a community where you guys can ask questions and we'll try and realistically answer them to the best of our ability because there's a lot of things that you're gonna come across in these builds and there's a lot of added and hidden costs that you might not think of and we have some of the experience to cover and bring up to you before you hit a brick wall and you're like oh I went way over budget on this so again thank you guys and we'll see you on the next episode don't look presentable I feel like I'm watching my slobbering too much for the record this is Kim bucho I'm not drinking okay so so I spiked it with Lacroix [Music]

Channel: Containing Luxury

Views: 2,212,402

Keywords: shipping container, cost, buy a shipping container, shipping container home, DIY, build a house, tiny house, budget

Id: XtfzvStTXTI

Length: 23min 11sec (1391 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 23 2019