The man that built a castle from shipping containers

then one day i sm um i was filming something and i smashed the camera i did actually at least break it doing something cool it was when i was building my tower putting the top on it i had up on the top of the tower on a tripod filming myself and i think a big gust of wind got it and it fell all the way from the top to the ground and i was like oh man that's like 400 bucks right there let me i turned on that's when the day i turned on the monetization thing to buy to replace that camera this is andrew camera out of here i have a youtube channel with my name andrew cameron i do a lot of construction work welding work built a very unique building which is all covered on there talking here of sid phillips today you got a bunch of questions for me here yeah may welcome to the proper job podcast because what brought me into your video was when you were building the the container home to give a little bit of context to the people listening you actually built this house yourself with very little help from others you utilize the vast amount of machinery you have including your own crane i mean building your own place is already pretty impressive but it's not exactly a normal looking house either it utilizes a bunch of cargo shipping containers some on the horizontal some rotated 90 degrees so they're vertical it's four floors high and it's made to look like a castle uh yeah yeah pretty much i take it it was obviously a goal for you to build your own place yeah that that was the goal that because like i mean you know who wants to live you know like before that i live with my parents like who wants to do that i skipped the whole you know apartment phase thing i just seemed like that was always just a complete waste of money so i went straight from you know and i knew i wanted to build my building the way i wanted to build it so i wasn't only i was only looking at vacant pieces of property and that's all i could afford too so it's a lovely bit of london yeah yeah it's up on a hill you know i think that's why it was a decent price at the time when i got it because it was all a hillside so but yeah that's what i wanted on the edge of town because i didn't want neighbors i wanted a big lot um because you know i always do things that annoy neighbors so it's best just that you know you need a lot of land for for doing stuff like what i'm doing so so where did the idea come from to build a container castle that came from well the idea appealed to me because the containers are relatively cheap and they're really strong so i figured i could put up a fireproof building that could go up very fast and i wanted it to be indestructible as far as not getting damaged from you know fire or time or stone like one time hurricane irene i had a ton of trees fall down knocked down buildings damaged buildings i saw plenty other people's with their buildings damaged you know when i was at the fire department it was like we'd go to these house fires and i was like why would anyone build and you'd see these houses burned down and like why would anyone make something out of wood that's just crazy so that's what appealed to me i made the entire building out of steel and concrete and since i i'm you know a welder so it just was a lot easier to build it out of steel anyway and plus like when you start doing the math too it's almost cheaper to build the way i built like it's kind of expensive but it's kind of not so did you have like the design idea in your head yes kind well it took me a while i knew i wanted to do something like that it just took a while to figure out how to do it because i wanted a concrete roof at first okay and i didn't know how to do that and then someone suggested spam crete to me which is like a precast concrete slab that can be a roof and then once i started learning about all these different materials it just kind of came together i know from watching your videos you're upgrading uh the house too you're building on top of the roof and i've seen you utilizing sketchup and it seems you're pretty proficient at it was that something you learned in school i did not learn that from school the way i learned sketchup was when i first designed my building i got an engineer involved to help me with the plan so first when i built design my building i actually made a little model of it just out of like balsa wood and wood and cardboard just stuff like that and that's something my dad had did too once when we put a big addition on our house in the early 90s my dad actually did a really good job making the addition out of cardboard but i mean a thing looks like a photo of the house everything's colored right and perfect and he essentially showed it to the carpenter and said build this this is the addition um so i just kind of went the same route i built my building out of i made a model and then when i was talking to the engineer with the plans he ended up drawing the whole building in sketchup and that's how we were able to communicate through you know emails just emailing the the building and revisions back and forth and then you know sketchup was pretty easy to use you know you can teach yourself how to use it with the tutorials that are available so but that's how i kind of force myself to learn how to use it tell me a little bit about the heating solutions you have for the place where you live it's only one little room i heat right so it's really easy to keep it heated because to try to heat that whole building would be hard because it's enormous although i did just install a pellet stove on the second floor um and it definitely warms it up but hasn't gotten real cold yet but it's a huge building and it's not insulated so heating the whole thing will be a little tricky but i usually don't care i mean i don't mind just letting it be the same temperature as it is outside yeah just put more layers on it what kind of i mean the trick is to kind of freeze yourself early on like when you start wanting to put on a coat like in november or december the trick is not to just be just get used to it and then once it actually gets cold it's i'm generally used to it by then so how did you get on the school system though did you did you kind of fit in with the whole like sort of lesson planning and structure or did you find it a little bit tough for someone like you who seems to like to do things his own way i did all right i didn't do as well with some classes in high school like english and spanish class for some reason i didn't learn a drop of spanish that was a waste of time um but i did i did well with math and science those are the ones i did good at in the second edition of uh the build of of your house uh you you do talk a lot about fire safety and i take it that's come from this this volunteer experience yeah i just got a lot of training out of that and i kind of learned how not to build a building spent most of the year just working on my own building and i'm glad i was in a position where i was able to do that because i wasn't stuck having to take all these different jobs to to make money i was able to just to to do something like that where you know it's where it caught you know whole cost money the whole way the whole project but and you're gonna glaze that are you you you're planning on enclosing that whole um metal roof structure yeah um pretty much since june i've been working pretty much full time on closing that whole thing in and i am extremely close to being done um the all the walls got made out of steel diamond plate with like metal studs everything's made out of steel like thick steel you know either eighth inch or three sixteenths thick and i put in a bunch of windows and it's it's it sealed the whole building up there's been a lot of work in that eh yeah it's probably four or five months of work right okay do you enjoy the sense of community on on youtube but yeah i've met a lot of cool people from youtube too you know that one video i put up where i um did all i was welding and then this guy text me hey you know i live a few hours from you or watch your video where you were got all that welding that needs to be done that's a crazy amount of work can i come up and help you weld and i was like does it i said yeah as i come over and the guy was super cool ended up going jet skiing a few times this year um and you know he stayed after he was up there like two three days just welding full time with me and we really got caught up on the welding because at that stage in the project i was working with uh two other guys putting all the steel in place and we put like we'd be setting all these big beams and stuff and then you know i'd weld them enough so they're not moving anywhere but as a full product i wanted everything fully welded to everything which really isn't necessary but i just kind of built it that way anyway and that was nice that i came and helped so when did you see kind of you you sort of i suppose success in your view from youtube you know one day i just noticed i was putting videos up and i was posting them on i think facebook just to share with uh you know people i know locally but then all of a sudden i was noticing i was getting like subscribed i didn't even realize the subscriber thing i was awesome like oh look at all these people subscribing to to my stuff and i just kept on doing it and i i never even started you know i know people a lot of people want to get on youtube because they hear you can make money and yes that's true but i didn't even know that when i first started doing it i was just doing it for fun i think that's the the kind of the key takeaway message and that don't get into things for the money it's it's got to be about the passion yeah 100 and usually the money appears even when you're not pushing for it um if you're doing if you're doing something you're passionate about you know whether it's an art or or anything it it turns them it will make sense if if you're good at it it's cool to be able to you know video it's cool that people are interested in the stuff i'm doing and i'm able to share it with people you know so easily with this great camera equipment that's of you know that's come out in the past 10 years or so yeah i should have started sooner so what are the kind of plans for the future did did youtube surprise you because i i expect you you're making um a nice living for him from youtube it's happened slow it i mean i guess the best way is it's exciting because it opens up you know i'm not stuck doing things i don't want to do so i mean like i was saying before i was able to you know i'm not by any means being lazy at all i spent the whole year working on my building and i'm glad i was in a position where i was able to do that as far as future i mean yeah i know the future coming i wanted i can't wait for my this building phase that i'm in right now to be done because i'm going to start taking a lot more jobs for customers again because that's been pretty light for the year because of the building um so because and people have been asking like does this guy take jobs anymore i'm like yes i do i'm just finishing this building that took the whole year which you know i didn't want to spend a whole year building it but that's just how long it took so so yeah there'll be a lot more jobs again i'm my goal is to take interesting stuff um ideally things that take one to three days four days but just stuff that's really interesting that i haven't done before i mean i could put some some crazy projects out there too like that i kind of want to do that may not get done like i wanted to get this i'm trying to buy this other piece of property and i'd love to build a small version of my building i think that'd be fun okay i know people would love that so and and when i built my first building you know the castle i didn't film it from you know day one so in this case i could start you know like i may do things a little bit differently and film it from day one so that's that's a project i'd like to do so kind of the things you've learned from building nut and the lessons that maybe you do things a bit differently um a little bit i don't feel i made any mistakes on that building if i was to build that building again exactly if someone if someone else wanted that same building which i think makes sense i think that is a very practical building to build use to build it wouldn't be much different um the only thing i'd maybe do a little bit different because i knew it was going to be you know that hot the the you know right now to things like four stories i knew it was gonna be four stories but it was two stories for years before it was four stories i got maybe build the the framework a little differently if if you're gonna do the four stories in in one shot but that's i mean it's not really making it different it's just what's the reason for wanting a smaller building is that that's why i was asking about doing things different was it the practicality of heating it no no no no i just i thought it'd be fun to build like a little mini castle it's just like almost a scaled-down version but i was gonna do more concrete more poured walls that's something i kind of want to get into this concrete form stuff so tell me a day in the life andrew like for the people who because you said you said something earlier about coming across lazy and i certainly don't think you come across as a in any of your videos what what kind of uh time are you waking up uh i'm not an early person usually nine or so okay maybe ten i mean sometimes earlier depending but you i'm not an early bird at all yeah i mean as far as day in the life i don't know i start to have breakfast and then just go to go outside and start doing whatever whatever the job is right so is there a plan in your head yeah oh actually that's one thing i do pretty often is i'll make notes of what i need to be doing i just make lists of stuff to do just listen and just cross them out as they get done and how long are you working for because you say about like doing your your your editing in the evening um well now the days are shorter but it really depends on the day in the job that's getting done but um yeah i mean today i knew i had this so i came and got ready for it but i mean usually since it's i'm usually there's plenty of editing to do so like once it gets dark out i just start editing so you work with like the seasons by the sounds of it yeah right okay okay so what what is it then you do to relax is it is it editing or is it about because i know you you do your jet skiing and you go off on your atvs and things like that is there anything else that people don't perhaps see um your passions are i probably have i mean i've watched tv sometimes i've maybe watched 20 minutes of tv before bed yeah stuff on youtube mostly mostly educational stuff but not always yeah you don't really come across as much as a as a tv watcher to be honest andrew it's been lovely chatting you're welcome have a great rest of the day utah cheers

Channel: Sid Phillips

Views: 780,884

Rating: 4.9179487 out of 5

Keywords: Shipping containers, container home, shipping container conversion

Id: LdBneRYrSd4

Length: 14min 28sec (868 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 20 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/doyu]

His channel is awesome! None of the usual YouTube bullshit, just videos of him building and fixing cool shit.

[u/overkill]

Nice video. I remember watching him do his driveway, I had no idea he'd done this!

[u/Terminal-Psychosis]

Such an awesome build, and it just keeps getting better.

[u/FraGough]

Andrew Camarata

[u/Hurtmethenkissme]

I'm such a fan of Andrew. His place looks great with all the windows put in.

[u/ZomBNiki]

Enjoyed the video, thank you.