The Harsh Reality Of Living in a Container Home (1 Year Review)

The Harsh Reality Of Living in a Container Home (1 Year Review)

Thank you so much to everyone who supported this channel this year! I know its been a while since the last upload, but we’re hoping to upload a lot more in 2024! Happy New Year everyone!

[Music] a [Music] yeah this is our shipping container home and my wife and I have been living here for over a year and while we were excited about it at first there are some things about it we really don’t like if you’re thinking about getting a shipping container home or a tiny home here’s five things we wish we had known our tiny home is a 40ft high Cube which is a little taller than a normal shipping container it’s one bedroom one bath with a kitchen and a living room so we have all the Necessities within 320 ft our first problem is there’s no room for guests we have kids that live out of town and a lot of grandkids that my wife loves to come over and spend the night but it’s really hard to find room to fit everybody in it’s especially hard around holidays cuz we all like to get together uh And when everybody comes into town there’s no room for them to stay with us also when we have friends come over uh it’s okay we can hang out outside when the weather’s nice but if the weather’s bad we can’t have friends over because there’s nowhere inside for everybody to be if for some reason they needed to spend the night I don’t know what we’d do so our second problem is structural because the house was pre-built offsite and moved to this location we had some damage that occurred during the move like cracking tiles and things like that that had to be fixed now that the house is set we’ve still had some settling issues that we didn’t think we would have with uh some tile cracking again and the flooring of all things splitting down the middle so this is our tile shower and we talked about how the house settled during movement and we got cracks we used to have a crack that followed this line all the way up but they came out and pulled all that tile out and fixed it but since then the house is settled some more and we have a crack in this corner that runs quite a distance it’s not all the way up and down but it’s quite a bit uh also one of the problems that we’ve run into is as it settles it’s shifted and this pocket door rubs on the wood and you can see where we get a rub Mark that we’re going to have to fix also one of the other structural issues that we have is when we try to hang cabinets or things like that we have to be very careful with the pipes that run through the walls because it’s so small of a space to run the water pipes and the El electric lines you have to be really careful where you hang stuff or you might hit a line also with having the pocket hole doors we can’t hang anything on those walls because the door goes inside the wall so to try to come up with some more storage space we hung these cabinets and shelves ourself uh but because we were worried about the water and electric lines we had to buy a special studfinder so we could follow the lines and I had to follow and outline the water and electric lines before we hung these brackets right here uh to make sure that we didn’t hit them this is one of the pocket doors that I was talking about and when you open it we’re unable to hang stuff really on this wall right here anything heavy you can see that we’ve got some command strips right there so we can hang light stuff but nothing that will drill through the wall with a holder the pictures on this wall we probably could have hung with a screw but I think we just used a command hook on that one with the TV I had to do a stud finder so that way I could Mount the bracket to the wall because it rotates at and pulls in and out so we can move it in and out of our way but you can see with the pictures most of the pictures on the walls we’ve just hung with uh command strp but these two real light ones I’ve used tiny little picture hangers that don’t go very far through the sheetrock our third problem is the most common one you hear about these things and that’s storage and downsizing uh we came from a 14400 ft home and we knew it would be an adjustment but it’s been a whole lot lot harder than even we thought it was going to be uh I could see it being easy for those coming from a small apartment or this being your first house and not having stuff uh but moving from a large home or a larger home uh into this square footage has been a very hard adjustment over the past year we’ve been trying to go through our stuff and weed out things that we don’t need and keep things that we do need uh for example we got rid of a microwave and got a toaster oven because we thought we wouldn’t really use a microwave that much uh we figured out that we did so we actually found a microwave that’s a microwave and convection oven combined and now we have them both in one spot and there’s several things like that that we’ve been having to change out just trying to figure out really what works for us our fourth problem is the fact that we live inside of a metal box things that we didn’t think about before we moved in here was receiving cell phone and Wi-Fi signals in inside the building uh before we figured it all out as soon as you walk in the house and close the door we lost all outside Services it wouldn’t come through the walls so what we’ve done is placed a hot spot right here in the window where it will actually receive signals that’s the only place we’ll receive a signal is in the window and everything in the house is connected to that one little box and we have to put our cell phones on Wi-Fi calling and connect to that hotspot or we get no service in inside our house at all and whereas being off the grid is not out of the question for us we would love to move towards that right now we are not like we’ve said before uh and so that has created an issue for us that’s the only internet that we have and cell phone service one of the other problems is the layout of our house even though we love the layout uh we ran into some problems with heating and cooling because the the air conditioner was in the bedroom and it was a straight straight shot through the house to the living room it worked pretty good uh as long as all the doors were open but if we had to close any of the pocket doors to you know take a shower or somebody go to bed and close the door uh the opposite ends of the house were Polar Opposites temperature- wise so we did have to add a second uh mini split in the living room but since we’ve done that it’s been wonderful another problem that goes along with that is the outside of the shipping container uh we didn’t put it very far off the ground trying to keep a low profile but by doing so we’ve created a small space that stays shaded and cool which is perfect for some of the creepy crawlies that you don’t want making houses right under your house uh also the insets of the shipping container doors are shaded and cooled and out of the weather so we have a problem with things making their homes right outside our door which is not where you want them this is the end of the shipping container with the doors on it that I was talking about and here you can see where all the pine needles have fallen we haven’t cleaned it in a few days because we’ve been busy but you can see all the little webs that have built up under the awning or the overhang because it’s a safe dry little area one of the things that we just noticed that we’re starting having problems with that also hurts our foundation pylons is we have a gopher apparently he likes to live in the cool dark of the house and dig out from it as you can see his little path runs right under my smoker that I just moved to this location a few days ago and I think he’s hanging out right there under the house where you can see that tiny little Gap and our fifth problem and another one that we knew we would have to make an adjustment for but didn’t realize how difficult it was going to be is personal space I love my wife I know she loves me we’ve been married for a while but when you move from 14 to 1500 square ft down to 320 you really really spend a lot of up close and personal time and sometimes you just need your own little space and that’s been something that we’ve had a hard time figuring out how to do uh you know with our house basically being a straight line uh and a a hallway through the whole thing uh it’s hard when we’re both getting ready for work at the same time in such a small space figuring out how to work around each other without stepping on each other’s toes uh sometimes it causes a little frustration but we’re figuring it out so when we talked about personal space if I’m in my bedroom and my wife is in the living room watching TV she will be all the way down there past the dog watching TV on the couch so if I have made her mad that day I can close these two doors and she can have a little time to be unmad but that’s as much personal spaces we’ve got in here but if you’re considering moving into a tiny home or a shipping container home with someone else that is definitely something that you’re going to have to consider before moving in now having said all this all we’re trying to do is put out there that there are some things that are drawbacks or that you have to consider we still love living in our sh container home there are way more positives than these negatives it’s just things that we wish we had known prior to moving in none of them would have kept us from buying this house and living here just some things that we could have thought about to make adjustments beforehand we have talked about maybe someday expanding a little bit or even trying a different type of tiny home but for now we love the house that we live in and we plan on staying here it’s been a pretty eventful year and we would just like to thank everyone who has supported our Channel we hope you’ve enjoyed these videos we love making them uh we plan on making more so we’ll see you around but for now That’s all folks