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

[Music] hi there my name is kicker colossi and this is the can't house here in New Orleans Louisiana I'm an callosities no way this is our house we built out of seven shipping containers you can't ignore the origins of the house the way this house was done was using the original shipping container floors a shipping container is eight feet wide and usually 20 or 40 feet long so our dimensions of our house by combining the two side-by-side a 60 feet wide and then we go two containers back giving us 80 feet in the back the shipping container is basically a Lego brick there are very set set of dimensions and it's easy for me to put those I mentioned a graph paper and figure out the layout from there so the big joke was I'm a very much a child and I still play with Legos and now I'm getting to play with grown-up Legos you know this house is not a tiny home despite people thing you know shipping container houses that's cute it's gonna be Italian no it's not it's it's about 2,000 square feet but despite that I we really wanted to make use of each and every single bit of space we could underneath the staircase there not only a full pantry that goes all the way back in but we have the dog section and then we have a closet there for suitcases this is where we store to food and water and so we will go back there at night and sleep you don't want to accidentally step on a food bowl when you're running through a kitchen and I travel a lot but we decided since we got married to collect magnets from each destination we've gone so because this is a metal house we thought magnets are the perfect way to decorate our house I was raised here in New Orleans when Katrina happened I lost my home my parents were rescued after four days in the roof of the house our family business was destroyed and that really left some deep marks now I'm an adult and looking to put down roots and I was looking for a house here in New Orleans and I was struggling to find a home that felt right and right to me it was a few things one of them was the lay out the floor plan I wanted one that I could work from more importantly I needed a house that felt safe for most people who owns most houses are you know very you know simple wood sided houses Creole cottages or shotgun style houses and I lived in one of those when when I was renting a home and it just you could hear your neighbors it felt flimsy when the wind was picking up I was always terrified the thing was gonna crumble so I looked for a house that I could buy that was made out of brick or stone or concrete or something and it just didn't exist in the city and with any other requirements even with the other requirements that were both a cool layout but also affordable and I couldn't find it I couldn't find it so the next logical step was okay let's buy a lot of land and build a house taker texted me one day and we're just first starting dating and linked to some container homes and he was like have you heard of these well I'm from California of course I've heard of container homes you know I've seen the craziness and he texts me back and he goes I want to build one I thought he was out of his mind and then I came home one day and he had a piece of graph paper with everything all drawn out 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 it made sense new rules of port city we have shipping containers here and I started researching it they're metal so you don't have to worry about termites with a big problem there there's they're all using spray foam insulation so they stay cool very very easily as opposed to traditional law construction here in New Orleans and I got really excited things got real when the lot was purchased and it's like okay we're gonna build this thing now let's do it but who's gonna do this like what contractor in the city so we started getting serious and we started looking at the numbers and we had a budget set and we were looking at how much you know our big expenses were going to be the shipping containers the crane and moved the shipping containers so truckers the foundation these big things and then the percentage you have to pay a contract exactly so things start adding up and I was like okay we can be under budget with doing these things it'll be fine and then Cakery was like whoa the person who needs to build this is gonna take 30% of the building cost and that's 30% we didn't have so we made that decision then and there we had a very serious talk like if we're gonna do this we're gonna do without a contractor and we're gonna take this on and we are gonna 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 pennies together it was we wanted to do something exciting it's an amazing experience having to to control the process of setting up seven containers in one day it's a very expensive one morning in a couple of hours with a crane parked on our neighbor's lot that we had to get permission for and and having to have a welder and then having Ripper or arborist and the landscapers off-duty cops a structural engineer having to have all these people there that moment to set all seven containers was stressful because every hour it was gonna go over was gonna cost us not $8,000 thousands of dollars so we had to make sure it all happened on time and flawlessly and there was just that it did get stressful it was rough and we stumbled a lot and a six-month project spiraled into a year project neither one of us have any experience in the world of construction I mean we didn't own a hammer and yet we're here we are taking on the task of building a house from scratch but you know we realized we have a good internet connection and we can look up YouTube videos and we can learn and like and said we will accept the good challenge when I pitch this idea she could have easily just walked away there are very big decisions that we had to make early in our relationship required us to have a lot of trust in each other in order to find the right way that's when we realized that we weren't building a house we were building a relationship and the helis kind of just happened on the side we really tried to embrace the natural aesthetic of the shipping container we are not the first ones in the world of all this shipping container house not even close to being the first ones but what we're trying to do a little differently with our house instead of just sheetrocking over everything and covering up the floors with shiny new ones we really tried to highlight these elements so we used spray foam insulation on the entire house but on the internal walls we don't have to insulate it from the outside so allows us to really show off this corrugated metal vibe we wanted to keep the shipping container ceiling exposed for a few reasons one because it looks amazing having that ribbed structure kind of just looks so much cooler than a boring blank slate but more importantly it also gave us added height and we were limited to 90 feet total the dimensions of a shipping container so we did not want to put down a drop ceiling which means that we didn't have any ability to hide the light in the electrical electrical living that creates a whole nother element of complications because and design and design you now have to choose where your electrical is going to run and what it's going to look like yeah we're gonna see it I want to be able to walk from my bedroom 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 houses seem to be built right up at alongside one another so having my windows up high allows me to have that privacy yet let them stay open all day long this is the furthest back of the house and you can kind of see once you can connect two containers together to create that full space we have a you know a nice 16-foot wide better America 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's an hour north a year that we're gonna be tossed away a hundred-year-old doors these end tables as well were also reclaimed but we didn't want to have this house feel cluttered and claustrophobic so by building the end tables into the wall by putting our lights into the wall it frees up the floor space that we just don't have it much of our bathroom once again using the concrete countertops large a shower space the original shipping container ceiling there if you have a vision you need to keep you know completely follow that vision inspect what you expect otherwise it's not going to be done necessarily the way that you want we have these i-beams service house and the painters the the subs they all want to paint our Ivy's like 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 somebody else may have liked I beams are exactly disappeared into we would have despite what maybe some of the more experienced people might say you've got an aesthetic you want they embrace it this is my studio this is where I run my business I'm able to sit up here stare out at the you know beautiful windows look at the the cool memories from my childhood and stuff that inspires me on the Shelf what's also really cool about this space is you can really see that this is the shipping containers you can clearly see where the two containers were welded together where the seam has been you know who literally welded together you can see our custom fabricated banisters that my wife and I designed something that we've been asked before is it's like what's your favorite part of this house you know what makes this house special to you to you and for me it's definitely in that warmth and that commute like feeling that feeling of it's that Germanic concept of super warm and cozy I love that cozy feeling we have when you have the the light from the Edison light bulbs and the warmth reflecting from the wood and the big leather seat sofa here like that is my cozy happy place and this is my home and no matter how crazy the city is whether it's work-related craziness or just cuz its morals I'm getting hit with another big hurricane storm I feel totally safe you know there is a lot of warmth in here but it's something that we built together and that alone is just so comforting to come in here and know that we made this happen every little element every single weld every single awkward door that we installed like everything made that Julie some people can hang a painting up on the wall and hopefully it gives them that that feeling of home but for us it's not just the paintings that are the weird stuff we have on our walls it's the walls themselves [Music] you

Channel: Apartment Therapy

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Keywords: Apartment Therapy, Apartments, How To, Interior Design, Home Decor, The New Homesmiths, how to, tiny house, tiny house tour, alternative living, apartment therapy tour, apartment therapy house tour, house tour, tiny tour, how to build a house

Id: U5QEWVIVe9s

Length: 10min 27sec (627 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 16 2019