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Updated: Nov 6, 2022

09 / 16 / 2022

As you can imagine, we get a lot of questions about our house and what we went through to make it happen. To summarize, here is a list of some of the most frequent questions we get.

Is it warm? Is it cold? How did we insulate?

No and no. And we insulated outside. You need more than that, huh? People always assume that living inside containers would be cold in the winter and hot in summer, which would be true if you didn't insulate. However, our insulation strategy was to mimic a Yeti cooler. We put all the insulation outside the containers, preventing the heat/cold effect on the steel walls and ceilings inside our home. Because the insulation is outside, we were able to leave a lot of the container walls and ceilings exposed inside the house, which is pretty badass when you want to hang pictures...magnetic walls! People expect the steel walls to feel cold or warm to the touch, but they aren't!


To insulate, we used a multi-layer system. The base layer is a product from InSoFast manufactured to match the corrugations of the steel container. On top of that is an additional two inches of rigid foam insulation. Because our insulation is continuous, we have no thermal bridging providing us with an effective R-21 wall. A standard wood 2x6 exterior wall with R-21 batt insulation between the studs has an effective R-value of only R-17. If you used metal studs, that same wall assembly would have only an R-value of 7.


Is it loud inside?

Do we have cellphone & wifi reception inside?

Permitting must have been a pain in the ass.

Did we do it to save money?

Are the containers new or used, and where did they come from?

How much work did we do ourselves?

What would we do differently?



09 / 07 / 2022

How did a year fly by so fast?! We apologize for the lack of updates, but gees, we've been busy...and though it's gone too quickly, we've enjoyed a fantastic first year in our new house.


Let's do a quick recap since our last post!


December. Santa was a day late with the white Christmas, but we rang in our holiday vacation with lots of cheer and snow! We were pretty much snowed into our house for a week, making it out only once to stock up at Costco. But when we didn't want to risk driving back up our hill, we parked in a nearby neighborhood, loaded the groceries on a sled, and hiked back to our house!


February. We updated the laundry room to incorporate wall hooks and shelves with a wood-slat idea that Gretchen found inspiration for on Pinterest, much to Jason's dismay, since he had to build it.


March. Landscaping! And thankfully, we had a company do it all for us! They began with a retaining wall beside our garage and laid all sprinkler lines. We picked out pavers, stones, and lots of plants with the help of a landscape designer. By the end of the month, all of the landscaping was done (except for the walkway pavers), and Jason began constructing our privacy fence and gated yard.


April. Jason finished constructing our fence, and the pavers and grass sod were placed. It turned out 100% better than we ever expected - all because we had excellent landscapers and family to help! We are excited to see our beautiful trees and shrubs mature over the years.


May. We met our neighbors, "Hootie" and "Blowfish," the resident barred owls. They are kind of rude and stare at us all the time, but we don't mind the view.


June. We finished the floating shelves in the den and pulled out our books that had been in boxes since David was born...and then we went on vacation!


July. We figured it was time to start parking our cars in the garage. But to do that, we completely emptied it, cleaned it, and then laid carpet around the perimeter – all in one very long and tiring day. We still plan to fill the parking area with epoxy flooring, hopefully before the rainy season this fall.


And then August was spent going on another vacation (because we deserve it after spending a lot of 2020 and 2021 building this house!), enjoying the fleeting summer days, and relaxing.


After living here for a year, people still have a lot of questions, so our next post will be a list of frequently asked questions and answers. Stay tuned for that coming in the next couple of weeks!



12 / 22 / 2021

Happy Holidays!

We have been happy to open our home this holiday season to friends and family, and it almost feels like life is back to normal (pre-pandemic). But then one of us gets a stuffy nose, and we go back into lockdown. Ugh.


We don't have much for updates to share, but we did want to shoot a quick Happy Holidays and Thank You to our followers and everyone that came out to our Open House earlier this month! We had a whole house of guests touring our home and hopefully gaining all sorts of inspiration for their own house projects.


The day after Thanksgiving, we went and cut down a whopping 17-foot Noble Fir from a local tree farm and managed to squeeze it into our atrium. Jason used the beam trolley to stand the tree up and put the star on top. We figured for our first Christmas in the new house that we might as well go BIG. Though, note to all, do not expect us to go this big every year! Decorating a 17-foot tree was no easy feat, plus we ran out of string lights and had to buy more!


Then, we made it above the fold! Our local fan-favorite reporter Josh Farley came for a house tour and wrote a little story for the Kitsap Sun. It was pretty crazy to see our house on the newspaper cover! We've been happy to answer questions along the way, and keep them coming if you have more! We are here to help inspire others to 'think outside the box - while living in the box'!


If you missed our open house but still want to come and see inside, or have questions, shoot us a message using the form at the bottom of this page. We will most likely host another Open House sometime in the spring or early summer after we get some more trim painted and kick off our landscaping plan this winter.


Stay warm dear friends - and have a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!


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