Top 10 MISTAKES I Made While Building My Container Home!

so when I built my shipping container home over two years ago I had zero prior construction experience needless to say I made a few mistakes along the way and in this video I'm going to show you what they were and the things I wished I knew before building a container home join me on my journey from construction to completion of my mortgage-free home on a homestead so with this first mistake that I made we're here on top of the roof it really had me puzzled trying to find out the cause but it basically comes down to these two roof vents right here basically the problem was anytime I turn on an exhaust fan like this microwave [Music] bathroom vent after a minute or so I'd start to smell a faint sewer smell in the house after much speculation and trial and error I finally found out the problem it basically comes down to these roof Vents and the roof boots that slide over it and seal everything in the best way for me to explain to you what went wrong is to go into the three model I made of my home so this was the installation procedure I came up with first cut a square hole out of the shipping container roof second run the vent pipe through that hole third insert a roof boot over the vent pipe here's an example of a roof boot that basically fits over and around the vent pipe and has a flange at the base that sits on top of your finished roof so basically insert the roof Boot and press and mold the flange over the corrugated roof of the container also very important Bend in the top of the boot over and into the vent pipe so rain water can't leak in between the vent pipe and the roof boot fourth slather the entire base of the boot with Henry tropical 887 this is the same white stuff I used to seal the entire roof it's this white gooey substance that cures to waterproof the roof and that's basically it but there was one big mistake I overlooked let me show you so you see that white stuff kind of caked inside here it's kind of white colored stuff there that is caulking but that wasn't always there in fact once I put this caulking here around the inner Rim the problem was instantly resolved what happened was before I put the caulking here there was a tiny gap between the roof Boot and the pipe as you can see there's the vent pipe inside the boot now I bring the vent pipe up to its final location with the boot bent over and into the vent pipe you can see that there's this small air gap into the home while rain water would never leak through sewer gas from the vent pipe could right between this Gap and down through the square hole I cut through the container roof which is exactly what would happen every time I turn on an exhaust fan inside the house and sold by Sim simply putting a bit of caulking around the inner Rim here the Gap was sealed and the problem was instantly solved now in a traditional home this roof boot system might not have been an issue but since container homes have extremely tight air envelopes which is good for energy efficiency container homes have tight air envelopes because nearly every seam is welded shut the point is there aren't as many places for air to escape from and so every time I turn the exhaust fan on it has to take the air from somewhere and so it went to what was possibly the most vulnerable spot which was a little Gap up there on the roof vents now real quick before I show you the second mistake a few months ago I announced on my channel that I'm offering Services where I turn your shipping container home idea into a custom 3D model since then I've been hired by over 40 viewers of this channel to bring their container homes to life in fully explorable 3D my services include the final 3D model various image drawings of the house with Dimension measurements and I can even create highly realistic images and video tours of the home if you really want to show off so if you have a container home idea that you'd like to see brought to life in a fully explorable custom 3D model feel free to email me using my email which I have listed down in the description of this video to learn more so the second mistake I made was a real close call basically you see that window right there and that window over there let me get up close and show you something so with this first window here you can see that there's that steel frame that kind of pops out of the corrugation and Frames the entire window well if I get up close and I measure you should be able to see that there's about a half inch of a lip sticking out there about a half an inch of that steel frame popping out now let me go to the other side and show you the other window so if we get up close onto this window you can see that the steel frame that surrounds the window is barely even sticking out like an eighth of an inch it is barely popping out past the corrugated walls basically it was a mistake on my part and it was complete luck and a close call that the window ended up even fitting to begin with to explain what went wrong let me first show you my procedure for installing the windows first I cut the big square hole out of the container that the window would fit in next I took two inch by two inch angle irons cut them into pieces and assembled them into a square that could be inserted right into the opening I cut as you can see from this exterior shot there's that nice half inch lip extending outside the home and so here's where I made the mistake that window over there was installed on the long 40-foot side of the container but this window here was installed on the short eight foot side of the container and what I completely failed to take into account is that the depth of the corrugated walls are different on the 40-foot side versus the eight foot side so if I bring you up close to the 40-foot side of the corrugated wall you can see that the depth of the corrugation is about one and a quarter inch then if I pull back and I go on to the short eight foot side you can see that the depth of the corrugation is a solid one and three quarters of an inch maybe a little bit more you can just clearly see that the shape and depth is different on the long 40 foot side it's kind of a more shallow wavy corrugation but then on this side they're more like deep trenches so if we look in the model you can see that when I slide the 2x2 angle iron frame into place we've got that nice half inch lip sticking out but when we go to the short side of the container the angle iron only sticks out barely an eighth of an inch this is just something I completely overlooked it didn't even occur to me until the day I was inserting the angle iron frames into place as you can see from this footage I had to use a bunch of clamps to really press the angle iron frame against the corrugation so I had just enough of a lip to weld onto thankfully it was just enough that everything turned out fine but boy was it a close call so this right here is the leftover pile of container walls that I cut out while building the home if you didn't know this is common practice with container homes unlike traditional homes you don't have to build up your walls from scratch you just gotta cut them out so I actually went back into the 3D model and calculated it I cut out around 230 linear feet of container walls and I did it all with this an angle grinder although I will say that an angle grinder does do a decent job cutting through these relatively thin container walls the fact of the matter is when you're cutting 230 linear feet I should have gotten a better tool for the job I think a plasma cutter would have made things much easier in total it took me about seven days straight of non-stop cutting dawn to dusk to cut out all the walls so this mistake was something so simple yet it would have saved me a ton of time and labor so basically let me show you so if I wanted to cut out an entire wall of the shipping container which is something I had to do inside the house cut walls out to open up floor space you would cut all the way at the top of the container wall and you would cut all the way at the bottom but let me show you something if you get up close you can kind of see right there that at the very top of the container is a really thick weld right there in fact if you look at the bottom of the container wall you have the exact same thing you've got these thick welds that run all along the bottom just really thick and hard to cut through especially with an angle grinder so you might be wondering why I didn't just avoid cutting the welds well there's two reasons first when cutting the bottom of the wall off if I left that 3 16 inch tall weld down there the floor would no longer be flat for the eventual floor tiles that I laid secondly when cutting the top of the wall off if I left that 3 16 inch tall weld it would get in the way of the roof Rafters basically during the design process with my structural engineer we'd established that the roof Rafters would be set perfectly flush with the undersides of these top rails that meant having to cut through these thick welds but during the design phase I was unaware that these welds even existed on a container so it didn't occur to me now here's the thing if I'd send simply drop the rafters down about a quarter inch at least it would have spared me doing the top part I ended up having to get one of these grinder attachments and brutally laboriously shave down these welds um and this was definitely one of those things where the 3D model came in extremely handy just having all those measurements down the dimensions of the rooms where I would make those cuts this 3D model is available to download right now just click the link in the description below suddenly realize that they don't fit well this happened to me but not in the way you might expect I'm going to use the spare 20-foot shipping container to demonstrate what happened so this is basically the design that my engineer came up with you take a joist hanger obviously in their actual house there would have been wooden framing here you nail your joist hanger into place then you take a two by eight rafter double two by Eights on a single double joist like so so basically we just take your first two by eight rafter you bring it over the top and you slide it into place no problem everything works here's where the problem happened when it was time to take the second two by eight rafter and insert it well what happened was you try to come over the top and you'd have to fit into that joist hanger but what's happening is if you look at the top up here it's hitting the metal roof of the container so if I again if I try to come and put it in it doesn't fit well so you might be wondering how did I actually go about installing it what we did was we started off with the joist hanger but we only nailed the left side of the hanger and left the right side not nailed in came in put the first one in again the left side nailed now with the right side not nailed loose and at an angle it gave us just enough room to come in it fits and then while it's here like this push the joist hanger back on and then nail it into place here's some footage from the roof rafter installing you can kind of see that we're doing that whole procedure here so these sliding doors were a really big feature on the home and I really didn't want to screw them up unfortunately once I had the sliders installed while the house was still under construction I did get some leaks uh whenever it rained thankfully it was only one of the total four sliders that actually was leaking so the best way for me to explain to you what went wrong is to go into the 3D model so let me show you the system I came up with for installing the sliders first I cut the hole out of the container second I used angle irons to create a frame third the frame was inserted into the hole and welded into place fourth the sliding door was installed fifth these small pieces of angle iron trim one inch by one inch were welded onto the outside to cover up the small shim gaps between the sliding door and the metal frame and six I use quad caulking to seal and waterproof all around now although this might seem like it should be leak free in theory the issue occurred down here as you can see my sliding doors have these tiny weep holes on the bottom corners from the outside edge of the bottom of the door to the weep hole is about a sixteenth of an inch of vinyl plastic and then the wee pole starts so basically the sliding door itself sits on this beam of the shipping container and this joint right here had to be sealed with caulk but when I try to apply the caulk I only had a sixteenth of an inch to bridge the gap between the steel beam and the bottom of the sliding door if I applied a bunch of caulk above that 1 16 inch of the door I'd be plugged up the weep hole you can't do that the weep hole is an integral part of the drainage system so in summary the entire waterproofness of this system depended on a small bit of caulk hanging off the edge of a cliff of a sixteenth inch bottom of the door and eventually probably from opening and closing the sliding door repeatedly the caulk cracked and water began leaking in looking back I think I should have installed a sill pan that would be completely welded into place inside and out so that it was waterproof so the next mistake that I made involve drywall let me show you now there's a few places throughout the house that I made this mistake but let me show you in the bathroom so for example if we come in here and we take a look at this wall here with normal everyday lighting you can't really tell what the problem is now if I take a flashlight and provide some really harsh lighting here you'll probably see what the issue is so you can probably see there that kind of change in sort of texture almost like a bulge popping out of the drywalls like a big bulge so basically what caused these bulges was the drywall joint compound that I used and how thick or thin I mixed it somewhere along the way when I was doing my research on YouTube on how to do drywall I stumbled upon a video that said that for the first coat first taping and first coat you should mix this to about the consistency of peanut butter okay so that's what I did let me go ahead and show you again I'm not a professional drywaller so you go ahead and you just take it and uh yeah you just fill this joint with a little bit of mud probably a little bit too much but you know just uh it could be squeezed out later or so I thought so now you just go ahead and you take a little bit of drywall tape with this peanut butter textured drywall compound and I tried to squeeze it out this is what happened I basically came and I passed the knife and all I get is a tiny little bit of mud that's a lot of mud back there I don't know let me try again and I come and I put more pressure you know maybe I'd start in the middle or something I put more pressure and I have to really put a bunch of pressure now I'm scraping the tape it's not getting like fuzzy and scrapey the tape was moving and it was it almost just like what the how am I going to get this out it's it's not coming out and so that was essentially the mistake that I made there was too much mud packed up and built up behind this tape and I couldn't get it out because it was like a peanut butter texture so let's go ahead take this off and now I'm going to go ahead and remix this but with more than enough water so that it is finally like what I would say should be more something more like yogurt all right we're back I've added in a lot more water and now we have something that I would say resembles much more like maybe um yogurt I mean you can just see you can just see it it kind of just oozes off effortlessly now I'm going to come in put a little bit of pressure over here and now when I squeeze it out it's going to come out a lot more easily a lot of mud came out there let's go again comes right off and what's happening is what's happening is a lot of the mass of that bulk of mud that I had under the tape has been squeezed out so this is now flattened out so I don't have that bulge which you saw in the bathroom a moment ago under the flashlight one of the things I heard about once you do this you go ahead and you kind of apply just a quick layer of mud on top and then you basically just come and wipe pretty much all that off there it is one more time that's it and this was definitely one of those things where the 3D model came in extremely handy just having all those measurements down the dimensions of the rooms where I would make those cuts this 3D model is available to download right now just click the link in the description below so as you can see a critical part of the waterproofing of my roof is this white stuff you see everywhere this stuff is called Henry tropical 887. the product is amazing and nearly three years after applying it it looks in great condition and I haven't had a single drop leaked through but you see that paint roller I'm using to apply the product to the roof that right there is the mistake I made basically when you're applying it onto like flat surfaces really it wasn't a problem but the thing is once the paint roller had to get into these Corners here between the corrugations you can see the roof of the container is corrugated these little corner spots here trying to get the paint roller to apply it into this sharp corner of the corrugation um was really difficult it required applying a ton of pressure with a paint roller and it really prolonged and extended the application time with this thing one workaround to this issue would have been to buy an airless sprayer I I would have made it much easier to apply and eventually I would end up buying one of these anyways to paint the exterior of the house well you see this large panel of glass here this is actually a panel of glass from one of my sliding doors there's technically two panels of glass but now there's only one left because the other side the other panel shattered to Pieces basically what happened was one day I was doing some welding some Final Trim welding here basically if you look over here in the angle iron you've got these pieces of one inch by one inch angle iron that runs the whole way all around and I was welding that into place the sliding doors were already installed and I was up over there putting some spot welds on the angle iron and somehow slag from the weld even though I did have some pieces of cardboard up to Shield the glass from this molten slag somehow a few drops landed on the glass and the glass literally blew up in fact if I show you the other slider here I had to do welding on this side as well and if you can actually see this little Trail here this was a piece of molten metal that hit the glass and then slowly fell burning its way in but this glass never actually exploded um because the I don't think the piece of molten metal penetrated deep enough so the final mistake on this list was quite an emergency and it involved the windows so recall the window installation from earlier cut the opening in the container reinforce with angle iron and then insert the window well it wasn't until I'd inserted the windows into the openings then I realized my very serious error basically my plan was to secure the window into place by drilling the screws through the jamb of the window and into the angle iron frame I mentioned a moment ago but for whatever reason during the planning process I completely forgot to account for the depth of the windows jam and while I originally thought that the screw would pass through the window and land through the angle iron on the outside of the house it turned out the jam and the screw landed inside the house and completely missed the angle iron in other words it was impossible to secure the window into place what followed was me going back to the drawing board back to the 3D model to concoct some kind of retrofit where I could somehow get the window to be secured into place and so this is what I came up with basically if we take the window out again you can see we have this angle iron frame so what I did was I took some scrap angle iron I had lying around cut off a bunch of pieces about an inch and a half wide okay so I got this window with the small pieces of angle iron that's an example of what it looks like right up into that Nook and I'll have no problem welding right here and where is it right there of course I have it all the way around I got that help and then welded these L-shaped pieces onto the existing angle iron frame around that cutout for the window what I was left with were these little brackets that extended just a bit deeper into the house creating a landing spot for the screws I insert through the window Jam to land on and secure onto and ultimately this system ended up working the windows were Rock to solved foreign I'll be taking the lessons that I learned into the second phase of this film probably going to be adding a second floor I think I'm going to be doing it in about a year adding a second floor to the house an extension and I'm hoping that the mistakes I made in building the first floor I'll learn from those when I move on to the second floor so that's it for today's video if you liked it hit the like button subscribe and hit the notification Bell for updates on that second floor that I might start building which of course I'm going to document in Exquisite detail and post here on the channel so definitely subscribe and hit the bell for that and that's it for today

Channel: Think Outside The Container

Views: 317,350

Keywords: shipping container homes, shipping container homes DIY, container home, how to build shipping container home, shipping container home cost, shipping container home tutorial, container home build, shipping container home build, container home construction, container home foundation, tiny house, shipping container fail, container home mistake, container home scam, container home top 10, shipping container home warning, container home regret, reasons container homes are a scam

Id: _LiqY7V7qYw

Length: 26min 41sec (1601 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 25 2023