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?
