Building a Shipping Container Home | EP03 Doors, Windows, and Insulation

hi I'm Ben and this is the house I built out of shipping containers now I've been interested in shipping container architecture for quite some time but I had a really hard time finding good information about how to get building permits or how much would it cost well we did the research we documented everything that we did and now we're so excited to share with you what we learned so check it out this is episode 3 where we'll install the doors windows and insulation one of my favorite design features is this pair of jeld-wen by folding doors that we installed parallel to each other overall we tried to keep the amount of glass at a minimum since that adds cost and wherever we add glass we have to cut away some of the container but we did splurge on this one dramatic moment that allows the inside and outside of the home to merge together so when we left off in episode 2 we had just been installing these steel frames for the openings for these big doors I want to create a little more visual separation between these doors and the corrugated metal so I welded some one-eighth of an inch thick plate steel to the tube steel frame I did this on the south side and even though the motivation was primarily aesthetic to create some visual relief this will provide a little bit of passive solar shading as well we lifted the top piece into place so that we could get a precise mark for the length and then cut it and welded it into place we cut the side pieces at a slight angle so that when we welded in the top piece it would be sloped to shed water now typically in the environment like this I would install much longer overhangs but I'll explain my thinking for these shorter ones in the design notes at the end of this episode these jeld-wen by folding doors came unassembled which made them easier to ship prior to assembling the frames we had already installed some strips of one-inch thick wood that we will set the door frames on we've moved the frame into position check to make sure it was level and then screwed through the frame and into the woods surrounding it we added shims where needed and were careful not to over drive the screws and bend or tweak the frame I hope host the full specs for these doors on the modern home project website once the frame was secure we could stall the door panels one at a time now I like by folding doors because they create such visual drama because you can open them all the way up they can be however a little bit more finicky and difficult to operate thence a sliding glass doors as with most things in life there's a trade-off but with this project we decided to go with the visual drama really capitalize on the view since this was going to be primarily used as a vacation house now there was some gaps between the steel frame that we welded in and the frame for the doors we use fire resistant spray foam insulation to fill in these gaps we're gonna cover these foam filled gaps with angle steel and flat bar we sprayed two pieces first with rusty metal primer and then welded them in place we use this piece of angle steel to hide the wood underneath the door frame and then welded these really thin half-inch pieces of angle section to the tube steel frame and that just covered up those gaps around the sides we used a piece of flat bar the the gap along the top the sparks and splatter from the welding can damage the window so make sure you protect them we were priming the backside of these pieces of metal trim with rusty metal primer we had a few people suggest that we should be using a weld through primer but then we also heard that these aren't that great so let us know your opinion in the comment section below the rest of the doors are all swing doors that have glass panels in them these are also from gelled hwon once again is just about getting them nice and level using shims to stabilize it and then screwing through the door frames and into the wood around it every door in this house is technically a patio door and has glass in it I just figured if I was going to take the time to cut an opening I might as well be letting some light in we used a few different types of great stuff spray foam insulation for this house the reason we used a fire blocking foam on the outside gaps is so that it wouldn't catch on fire when we welded on the steel trim to cover it wallows waiting for the foam to expand I trimmed the shims using a multi-tool Tony had used a 2x8 underneath this door which was whiter than we needed so I drill the hole and then trimmed it with my jigsaw I'm gonna slide a piece of angle steel over the wood but under the door sill and I used a chisel just to shave the wood down a little bit so it would fit I clean of the metal and then welded it in place the foam had expanded but there was still a few gaps so I just went in one more time to fill those in I find that it's easier to do it in multiple passes than to try to overspray and then have to clean up all that mess once the foam had fully cured I took a knife and trimmed it flush to the doorframe now I can weld in a piece of angle section that will cover that gap end a piece of flat bar at the top there's still another window to do and we did this the same as before just applying some caulk on the inside of the steel frame and then securing the window through the nailing flange with self-tapping screws if I was to do this again I think I would have installed the windows from the outside and then created a second trim piece to cover the nailing flanges with the window secured we then added an additional two by fours around it and then screwed through the window and into that wood now for the inside gaps around the windows and doors we used a window and door great stuff this version is formulated so that won't over expand and Bend the window and door frames we also took regular great stuff and started foaming around all the framing we really focused on the ill regular nooks and crannies there would be difficult to fill with rigid insulation this spray foam is helping to seal up all the little gaps in the construction which will greatly reduce our air infiltration and improve the energy performance we also started the electrical Ruffins which involved installing all the electrical boxes and running the wires this is the last chance to walk through the entire house and really make sure you have all the switches and outlets exactly where you want them designed like this I would specify spray foam insulation but since we want to do it ourselves we chose to use rigid insulation which is easy to cut with a box cutter we're going to use a combination of 2-inch thick one inch thick and 1/2 inch thick rigid insulation to fill in the gaps in between the two by fours for the ceilings we started with pieces of 2-inch thick insulation which we put on top of the double sill plate and they kind of fit nicely up there later we taped in between the seems to seal each layer now no one on this team had ever built a shipping container house before so we were definitely learning as we went and one of the things we like to do was to build a head on one small area of the house this way we could kind of test out our construction systems see how everything would sort of go together and then make better informed decisions as we applied it over the majority of the construction so we insulated this one end wall and then sheath it with half inch thick OSB later on we would switch to plywood because it has a little bit less formal dehyde than the OSB now some of the biggest gaps are between the corners of the steel containers and the wood framing and here's where I made it real big mess with spray foam insulation I was going around just sealing up all the nooks and crannies and I kept trying to spray more foam into that big corner gap I would spray some in move around to other areas and then come back and spray a little bit more in and then it started spreading and getting kind of out of control Jesse came in to start measuring and cutting the insulation panels and if you keep your eye on the pile you'll just see it keep growing and growing and growing now a number of things went wrong first we just sprayed in too much too fast also the air out here in the desert is quite dry and spray foam cure is a little bit better if there's a little bit of moisture so so we learned it applying a little bit of water with a spray bottle helps the spray foam expand and fill out these bigger gaps to fix this we also took a bunch of scraps of rigid insulation and stuff them into the gaps first this way there is a little bit of structure for the foam to go around and hang on to there you go all filled up we would slide in the first piece of insulation apply a little bit of spray foam around the edges and then add in the additional pieces we filled in all the gaps and then sprayed around all the electrical boxes as well now we have already have some insulation in between the steel floor joists but we want a layer of continuous insulation on top of it so we're gonna apply these subfloor insulated panels these are a really cool product that are often used for remodeling basements and it's just a layer of OSB laminated to foam they cut easily with a circular saw and then you can just glue them down to the floor using liquid nails subfloor adhesive for the pieces around the door we trimmed just the OSB part of the panel so that the phone was slide right underneath the doors threshold I really like the system the two foot by four foot panels were really easy to handle and the whole installation went really quick now we ran out of these panels for the third container so we decided to come up with a different way to do it so after we screwed the plywood floor panels back down we nailed in two by fours on the flat side every 16 inches on center we then filled in these gaps with pieces of one and a half inch thick foam and then nail down plywood on top of that now in general my strategy for this project was is to use my hired labor to do the more conventional parts like the 2x4 framing applying the plywood and insulating well I focused on the steel work and I think the strategy sort of makes sense because in most areas it's easier to find affordable framing labor than it is to find affordable steel workers that have welding experience I want to make a thin plate steel frame to go around one of the bedroom windows so I cut and welded pieces of plate steel together but I was careful to make sure that there was a bit of a taper on the top and bottom panels this way water that lands on it will drain right off the edge I prepped the tube steel frame and then welded on a piece of angle steel that will serve as a ledge to support this big trim piece I used magnets to hold the piece of angle steel level and then welded it to the tube steel frame all the welding that I did on this project was done with my Forney three-in-one welder I can't recommend this machine highly enough it's affordably priced powerful and incredibly versatile we lifted the trim piece into place and then welded it to the tube steel we still didn't have power to the site at this point so all this welding had to be done with a generator we use this Rio B generator power all the heavy-duty tools and the welding and then we used our goal zero system to keep all of the batteries charged for all of our handheld power tools it was an effective combination because it allowed us to keep the noise down when all we needed to do was charge batteries but then still have the power when we needed it shipping containers have holes so that they can be picked up with forklifts so I cut some pieces of eighth inch plate steel Prime the back of them and then welded them into place the plumbers cut some notches into this bottom beam in order to fit in some of the elbow pieces for their drain pipes so I just took some of the extra corrugated steel and cut patches for those there are some really big openings at the ends of the 40-foot container so again I cut long strips of eighth inch plate steel and I welded on two small pieces of angle steel so it have something to clip my welding ground on to the structural engineer required half-inch eating on all the interior walls so while I was patching up the steel the rest of the guys started cutting and nailing in all the plywood now this does seem like overkill to me but I'm not an engineer and I couldn't find an engineer that would sign off on it without specifying this type of sheathing the good news is is that it'll be really easy to hang pictures in this house since there will be plywood right underneath the drywall typically this type of sheathing is applied on the outside edge of all the two by fours but because we started with a complete container that would have been a little bit difficult in our location all new houses have to have sprinkler systems in them for fire suppression so we had to wait for a specialty installer to come and install all these pipes before adding additional insulation around them we installed another layer of insulation over those pipes with just the sprinkler heads sticking through now there are a lot of tasks you can do yourself to save money but I highly recommend hiring experts to apply gypsum board an experienced crew is so fast at it and they're gonna do a much better job at muddying taping and sanding than I could not only would I be struggling physically with the dexterity for each one of these steps I'd be overthinking each process as well this crew was able to do the whole house in just two days they screwed on the panel's mudded and taped the seams put trim on all the corners and then did a full skim coat over the top the skim coat is definitely something I wouldn't have attempted as a DIY project because if you aren't able to apply it perfectly flat you're gonna spend a whole lot of time sanding hello in this edition of design those we're gonna go over what I learned about reinforcing openings in shipping containers we're gonna check out the insulation details and we're gonna talk a little bit about passive solar overhangs let's start with why I think angle steel is a better option for reinforcing openings than tube steel the width of the corrugation on a shipping container is pretty substantial and that makes it a little bit challenging to get perfect cutouts even when I went nice and slow I occasionally had gaps ranging between an eighth of an inch and a quarter of an inch it's also very difficult to hold them in the right position while you're getting ready to weld them because there's nothing for the tube steel frame to rest against the corners of tube steel have a radius to them so even if you cut the openings perfect that radius will slope away from the corrugated metal that you're trying to weld it to another issue that's totally fine for this climate but isn't ideal over all there isn't any overlap and that means we're relying a lot just on the sealant with the angle steel we have three inches of overlap so even if the seal and failed it would be hard for wind-driven rain to get up past that flange that flange also makes the installation process a lot easier because it gives you a positive stop where you can push the frame all the way up against the corrugation and even if you cut the hole a little bit too big you're still gonna have a lot of these positive stop points to weld to steel together the gaps between the corrugation and the flange on the frame can be filled with closed cell spray foam I also think the angle steel just creates a better looking frame from the exterior all right let's move on to insulation for the walls we were able to get between three and three and a half inches of insulation which gets us to about our 19 to 21 for the floors we hit our 46 but remember the majority of that has steel going through it so it's not going to be as effective as the continuous insulation for the roof we hit a total of our 48 and 26 of that is continuous the floors of the container came with this really thick plywood there our steel beams underneath it and in there we just filled in with a lot of rigid insulation mice and other critters sometimes like to burrow rigid insulation so we made sure to seal along the bottom side steel rail with some quikrete precision grout above the plywood is where we get our nice continuous insulation using the OSB insulated panels the sill plate ends up beneath this panels so we added some short pieces of 2x4 in between the studs just to give us a little bit more material to nail and screw the plywood and gypsum board to for the roof insulation it's all about working around the structural connections the first continuous layer of two-inch insulation sits on top of the double 2x4 top plate and gets pushed right up against a two-inch tube steel we use two by fours on joist hangers for the ceiling and was able to get another continuous layer of two-inch insulation right above them we shoved an additional insulation in between the 2 by 4 ceiling joists but some of this had to be cut out to make room for fire sprinklers and the ceiling lights passive solar design is all about understanding how Sun angles work and designing a building so that you let more Sun in when it's too cold and keep the Sun out when it's too warm this is typically done with overhangs above any windows or doors on the south side of a building the Sun will be at a steeper angle during the summer and then it'll drop to a little bit lower in the winter so you can size overhangs to keep the Sun out during the hot summer months but still let it in to warm up the house in the winter typically I would select the length for these overhangs from a chart of best practices or if we wanted to get really precise like I did with my architecture firm we would actually build a full energy model to really simulate how the building is going to work but in both cases you're taking in a lot of assumptions and with this project since I'm actually going to be able to live in it and measure it I decided to go a little bit more conservative onto overhangs at first and then really and measure and see how well they are working and only add a little bit more as needed it's a really cool opportunity to design in real time and constantly improve the building and I'm super excited about measuring these things and tweaking and adjusting them now obviously the Sun angles are going to be different in different parts of the world this is a handy chart that I created with one of my previous designed companies they kind of separates it into a few basic groups and then gives you really good rules of thumb for sizing your own passive solar overhangs I'll post this chart on the modern home project website thanks for watching episode 3 we're still working on episode 4 we should have it for you soon I know you've been you've all been waiting and we appreciate that in episode 4 we're going to cover the HVAC systems and some of the other technical aspects of the home so stay tuned and make sure you hit that subscribe button if you haven't already thanks bye

Channel: The Modern Home Project

Views: 1,885,277

Rating: 4.8993206 out of 5

Keywords: how to build a house, building a house, shipping container houses, how to build a shipping container home, shipping containers, shipping container homes, shipping container architecture, tiny houses, diy tiny houses, building a tiny house, how to build, ben uyeda, building a modern house, the modern home project, homemade modern, container house, container architecture, container building, container windows, container doors, cutting containers

Id: XlHXMrXt_0U

Length: 20min 5sec (1205 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 22 2019