Off the Grid: Dream of steel shipping container house becomes reality

A house made from shipping containers. Will it have windows? Is it a tiny house? How will it be insulated? These are just a few of the first questions people ask my husband, Vaillant, and me when I tell them about our Pacific Pines Ranch project in Oregon.

Several years ago Vaillant and I were discussing building our dream house and what that would entail. After watching a variety of alternative-building documentaries, we stumbled upon houses that were built using steel shipping containers. Some designed their container house to be simple and compact, and others designed theirs to be sleek and modern.

After looking into it further, we decided this would be our dream home. So a little more than two years ago, we began the journey that we are currently on today.

We started this project with minimal building experience. We knew we had a mountain to climb to master all the fabrication skills needed for this build. But we figured, why not? The skills we learned proved to be life-changing and continue to allow us to bring our dreams for the ranch to life.

Our goal is to be debt-free and as self-sufficient as possible. So being able to design, fabricate, build, and weld is important to us and our lifestyle. We have learned as we went along: how to cut steel, what size reinforcements to use for areas we cut out, and the best way to remove rust. The project became our greatest teacher and has shaped us into who we are today.

Strength, durability, and customization are some of the key reasons we decided to build our house out of metal boxes. These industrial steel shipping containers are designed to be stacked eight-high, completely loaded with thousands of pounds of cargo inside. This meant that we could design our house to be multiple levels easily as long as they were stacked together as they were intended to.

Containers are shipped all around the world and can endure the toughest conditions. They withstand saltwater, wind, snow, ice, rain, heat, and cold, and they have great longevity because they are manufactured out of Cor-Ten steel. Their ability to be customized as needed makes designing a structure essentially like playing with life-size LEGOs. Forty feet of windows? No problem. Cantilever balcony? No problem. The options are endless. They go as far as budget and imagination allow. In the end, our design will have seven shipping containers, six balconies, a rooftop deck, and one entire side of the house will be glass doors.

Currently we are working on container No. 6 and No. 7 of the structure. Our life on the ranch has been consumed with an endless cycle of metal fabrication processes: grind, weld, powder coat, repeat. We’ll keep this up until the structure is complete.

Two years ago Jessica and Vaillant began their journey of building their dream house out of steel shipping containers in Oregon. This new blog series will cover their journey creating Pacific Pines Ranch and the metal fabrication skills they learned along the way. Images provided by Pacific Pines Ranch

We are constantly trying to improve our fabrication skills and have learned so much along the way. It's a special challenge to build a metal house so close to the Pacific Ocean, and one that we have happily accepted.

Stay tuned as we share more about our container house project and the metal fabrication skills we’ve acquired along the way.

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