Houses and Home Ownership

Check local regulations. A lot of places are making off-grid living illegal.

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Fire codes can be pretty weird/restrictive around the use of shipping containers, too, if humans are going to be inside them.

I have an absolute hardon for the idea of a tinyhome.

The problem is that they’re not actually as cost-effective as they should be. The idea has become popular enough that the market has responded as the market is wont to do.

So while I liked the idea, the reality of a normal house is much more doable.

Shipping containers specifically aren’t great for homes. They are designed to do a very specific thing. You CAN live in them with some mods of for emergency shelter, but you don’t want to bury them or stack anything on top of them that isn’t another shipping container stacked in the specific way they are designed to be stacked.

You’d probably be better off looking at pre-fab modular homes. They are built to meet current codes, so you don’t have to do a bunch of stupid shit to make get them up to code. You’re still going to need land to put it on, but if you go small then the plot can also be small.

Before you commit to something tiny, go see some actual houses in various square footages so you have a realistic idea of the space. Watch Tiny House Hunters if you want to see some people get slapped in the face by how small 500 sq ft actually is! Houses have a lot of unseen infrastructure you don’t think about: plumbing, wiring, insulation pockets, etc. All that stuff takes up space if you have it, and if you forgo it you’re going to have to do some work and/or make some compromises (like having a composting toilet that you have to manually empty).

@thewhaleshark The other problem is that you’re claustrophobic and large. :stuck_out_tongue: You would hate living in a tiny space.

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The thing is, pretty much everything feels small to me, with a few exceptions. The master bedroom in your stepmom’s old place felt comfortable to me. Everything else, not so much. Sometimes, the open flow in our house feels small to me.

Cramped would be another story, though. A shipping container with a totally open layout might be comfortable, but the “many small rooms” thing drives me crazy.

This is one of the nicer conversion I’ve seen done, in turning a shipping container into a home.

https://youtu.be/slsJmN2AdXY

Best advise for home buying is remember that homes are like one of the few areas in American life where you can haggle over the price. Do your research into the person who owns and the situation they might be in. (I.E. if someone has a 30 year mortgage on a place and it’s only been 2 years chances are they don’t have a lot of wiggle room on price, while someone who owns the house outright won’t be constrained as much).

Shipping containers meant for international overseas shipping usually have a wooden floor which is often fumigated and can be impregnated with fumigation residue.

For instance, the coatings used to make the containers durable for ocean transport also happen to contain a number of harmful chemicals, such as chromate, phosphorous, and lead-based paints. Moreover, wood floors that line the majority of shipping container buildings are infused with hazardous chemical pesticides like arsenic and chromium to keep pests away.

Buying a new unused shipping container would alleviate these issues as it wouldn’t have the paint on it yet. Do your research and be wary of super cheap deals on containers.

They also don’t make good bunkers, the corrugated metal sides don’t have sidewall strength and can/will collapse under too much weight.

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[quote=“AaronC, post:30, topic:166”]
They also don’t make good bunkers
[/quote]Tell that to every farking “prepper” in Arizona preparing for Obama to come take their guns for Operation Jade Helm…

[quote]

They also don’t make good bunkers, the corrugated metal sides don’t have sidewall strength and can/will collapse under too much weight.[/quote] Then how do they stack them so high?

They stack on specific reinforced load-bearing points in standard configurations.

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I may have said it badly. They tend to collapse from the sides, as the sides can’t take the weight pushing in on them.

They are really strong vertically, the corrugation is there to give it strength in the vertical sense, although it reduces aerodynamics enough that it’s estimated at a 10 percent loss in fuel efficiency for ships and trucks moving these.

If you dig these out and make a half bunker so that only half is under ground and the rest is either bare or just covered in the fill from the hole it’s fine, but when you bury them without reinforcing the sides you are asking for trouble. They also suck for condensation if not prepared and ventilated properly.

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[quote=“AaronC, post:34, topic:166”]
They also suck for condensation if not prepared and ventilated properly.
[/quote]Nevermind heat dispersal! The biggest danger in bunker shelters is heat buildup. It was such a concern that the US government’s guides on “surviving” nuclear strikes put a lot of thought into shelter ventilation.

Hence, the Kearny Air Pump

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Weight pushing against the sides makes total sense. I was thinking strictly of stacking causing them to collapse.

And I didn’t describe it very well the first time, since in my head I knew exactly what I was trying to say.

Definitely all good points on the shipping containers. I’ve come across that stuff before, so it’s really one of those things where you have to design around the limitations and be smart. Tearing out the old stuff, stripping it down, and figuring out what’s fresh. It’s not a thing to take lightly but it isn’t a show stopper, and there are countless examples of it being done successfully and well and sometimes both.

And also, I use those as a common example but there’s other options too. I don’t see why I couldn’t design a ground-up module system using say, a large CNC machine to cut plywood into walls with all the cables and plumbing routed right into it. The benefits of that are building outside the confines of a rectagular cube, the downsides being you need a way to knock it all down to flat-panels like a massive IKEA set if you wish to move it and not need a wideload truck. There’s tons of ways to tackle it.

In Josh’s video link, that is an awesome setup and the colors and layout and the custom furniture, I love it. It all makes a lot of sense. The lady has certainly turned it into a living for herself to make those types of homes and design the accessories, and I love that part too; that’s totally the right way to approach it by integrating furniture right into the layout to maximize utility.

And her point that you can’t normally DIY it for very cheap despite the initial cost outlay seeming pretty low (due to the expensive thin insulation and such adding huge costs) that is a valid point, but even so that house was right around 100k USD which is definitely not bad. One has to also consider that’s for a brand new setup and she’s quoting numbers that include paying her/her people to do the engineering work and install it. I know a tiny bit about what goes into designing and building homes traditionally from my family: lots of design work for a home and lots of labor to build it, regardless of how and what and who does it. It’s when you aren’t doing that yourself, the material costs are only a small portion of the home cost, not even including the property. Being ‘modular’ I hope those container homes benefit mostly from being able to use standard designs and labor is minimized due to fixturing and building in a shop vs on site, but it’s still going to be more than doing it yourself if you have the skills to do so.

For me it would be more a matter of time. If I’m making enough money can I hire people to do this for cheaper than the time I’d take obsessing over it. So far, I’ve done a lot of DIY versions of things and the answer is usually that it breaks about even but there’s often only so many billable hours and I’ll spend my personal time doing this kind of stuff anyway so the opportunity costs are really hard to quantify.

Still, seeing that home in the video above and I’m just like “yes, that, that’s legit. How could I not try for something like that?”

He’s moving fast to undermine the nation.

If I am reading the article correctly he stopped an executive action that had not even gone into effect yet? I pretty much expect him to stop EVERY executive action President Obama took in the last few months regardless of what that action was.

This isn’t increasing the current rate. It’s preventing a decrease. That’s not making them pay more than they already were.

I mean yeah, it sucks… but FHA loans are already pretty wicked cheap. I know; we have one. I’m not terribly worried about this particular thing. The healthcare and women’s rights issues are a much more imminent danger IMO.

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YES, it is more over the lifetime of the loan. But compare that to throwing rent money into the void for the duration of the time it takes you to save up a down payment to avoid PMI. You might find that the rent money you will lose with no equity in exchange comes close to balancing out the PMI cost. It did for us (we were paying roughly $12000 a year in rent, and it would have taken us at least 3 years to save a 20% payment).

If you are not paying any rent where you live, then yeah… you don’t have that consideration and the PMI is just more money. But that’s the cost of taking out a gigantic loan when you have little-to-nothing to secure it with.

Obviously I’m not saying that the loan is cheap in absolute terms. But as mortgages go, including the consideration of the interest rate, a FHA loan is cheaper than any private alternative. I am, of course, assuming you don’t have a 20% down payment saved up because then you wouldn’t need a FHA loan.

Affordable housing is a huge issue, and I agree that more options need to be available. I’m just not sure I agree that being able to get large loans without some sort of significant security or insurance is an option I’d support. Seems like giving people loans they couldn’t afford was a driving force of the housing market collapse. I’m leery of resuming that.

I get that this is a personal issue for you. I’m not saying I don’t want you to have a house. But the insurance requirement is there for a reason, and I don’t think it is safe to just call it a “tax.”