hey there welcome to my channel where i feature alternative and unique home tours
this week's video is part of my alternative home playlist where i feature homes of all sizes doing
unique and creative things to make a spectacular home and i guarantee you that this week's tour
is going to make you rethink everything you thought you knew about shipping container homes
just take a look at this multi-level family home complete with cantilevered rooms decorated with
recycled materials and featuring several tranquil spaces the owner recently listed this house on the
market and it's been going viral online the price tag makes it one of the fanciest homes
i've ever stepped foot in but also one of the coolest concepts that i've ever featured on
this channel we're going to take a tour with the owner who came up with the original design
and he's gonna discuss how he's lived in this space for the last four years
with his family we'll also learn why he's selling and what he plans to do
next
hi i'm edward merced and this is my shipping container house
i decided to build a shipping container house because it was something different something new
it started out as a joke with some friends at one o'clock in the morning my friends you know
they're making fun of me at first they go oh it's going to be a mobile home park or
something like that and use that joke as a drive for me to do something like this even though i say
shipping container house it's more livable than you know your typical one i would say
how i got the idea of shipping containers is i've been in the import export business for 20 years
now and i've always you know seen stories on it at first i was going to do only a 2000 square foot
the city wasn't open to certain things so the more that they try to keep me from doing things you
know the more it gave me energy to go against what they want to do my family you know there's four of
us my wife and two girls i designed this house for them with what they want in the design a lot of
people think i'm an architect or an engineer you know but actually i have no background whatsoever
it took me almost a full two years to build it and then i've lived here for four years now
the question that people ask me most is does it cost more to build a ship contained home
versus a regular conventional home to build a normal shipping container home yes it can be
cheaper but the way i did it no is not i didn't go to save money i meant it as a fun project
welcome to my shipping container home let's go inside
i just came in the front entrance and as you can see this is like the center of the house
in terms of where we are at we're sitting in a 20-foot container and you notice they're all high
cubes so they're nine and a half feet tall off those but you know it's pretty tall so we walk
up the stairs and there's 11 shipping containers you know 840s and 320s but this wall and this
wall are only one of four walls in the house that are not made of shipping containers
so originally the house ended there but i decided to add more more square footage to
the house so that's what's good about shipping container home is that if you decide to add more
you can keep adding you know i can add another three or four on the property still and still
be okay so this is kind of my office area and this is where
you know one of the cantilevers so right here we're technically in the air hanging over
so this is one 40-foot container it goes from here all the way back there the difficult part is
how you connect it to the wood so what i did is i just put a standard roof on top of it
so it overhangs the container so it doesn't leak
you'll see this atrium i've always wanted uh to grow plants inside the house but i didn't
want it in pots like everybody else we rotate plants in and out sometimes
my wife's from japan so this is my take on a japanese tatami room
it's as true to how it looks like if you were to go to japan as much as i made it the only
difference is it's in a 25 shipping container the mats are real tatami mats like they have in japan
and they're set a certain way too they're just not just thrown in here stuff like this you know
came from japan this came from kobe we didn't want to go to a store and buy stuff that didn't
go with the room you know like this thing is like 80 years old it's paper mache from japan
now we're entering the master bedroom and it's just a hallway going down and again i use a lot of
wood that is meant for outdoors i just you know i just kept it indoors for a month and a half before
i put it on so it doesn't you know swell or you know doesn't take moisture and stuff like that
a lot of nuances of frank lloyd wright he uses a lot of wood in his house and again this is
outdoor wood that i bought and i left it in here for a month and a half until it dried up and and
again this i just went with the flow you know we we started out with just one c and then i wanted
to give it the tree house effect if you look out my window it looks like we're in a tree house
this is also recycled this came off of some commercial in downtown portland i try to mix
a lot of materials so if you can see this is something very delicate my wife's mom made it
you know by hand but this is just a piece of wood and then i had a welder this is a motorcycle chain
but it's just a simple shelf that i made gives you a little more like a steampunk
and then you know you get this little delicate flower paper flower on top the story of this is i
have a friend who wraps cars for a living and i'm kind of his guinea pigs he decides he wants to do
wallpaper so this is a photo from a famous garden in japan in my wife's hometown and we decided to
print it out put on the wall so we have wallpaper around the house you know so it gives it you know
just not just drywall but you know gives you a feel of nature too walking into the magic bath
these came from overseas and then this actually came from indonesia it was somebody's door it's
dated back to the 1500s basically when i built this house i literally didn't have a plan the door
the front door there there came to the point where my guy he couldn't cut the container yet because
i didn't know which door was so i went down to the recycle center and a door a guy just donated
it was still in the cart i bought it right off of the cart and loaded my truck brought down
to my container guy and he went and cut it out that's how it was so up until 10 minutes prior
i didn't know which door i was going to use you know it was kind of like that all the time
we're back to the front door and this is why saying you know the recycle door that i go
in the fly you know and bought but and i kept it like that i didn't want to refinish it and
anything i buy recycle for the most part i don't go and finish it because if i'm gonna go and paint
this stainless it's gonna you know hurt nature and that's not the point of you know trying to recycle
right i actually uh looked it up this door was mahogany door it's a ten thousand dollar door
when i walked into that rebuild center they had just unloaded off a truck some
i guess some rich guy didn't it didn't fit his house or something so i bought for 900 bucks
so they're gonna sell for twelve hundred dollars but i go hey can i do it for 800 and then we sell
at 900 but it's a it's a solid um 10 000 door you know so that's the good thing about that
and so now so if you get the um frank lloyd wright you know image is like when you walk into his home
you know the entrance is kind of smaller i didn't want to keep it that small you know it's just an
impression of it so and then when you walk in here now all of a sudden you walk into a bigger space
this area is the main living area that's a 40-foot container going that way and then you
got a 40-foot container going this way and that's a 40-foot container and it's divided you know
the bar the dining the the cooking area so this first part is a fully stocked bar
that's a container ceiling there and that's drywall it takes a lot of time
but somebody had to cut each piece you know out of drywall
so you can see you know there's a little steampunk look in there
this is our dining room table it's just a solid piece of eight and a half foot tree trunk that
i imported from indonesia a lot of stuff came from indonesia japan china and then a lot of
stuff locally one day i came across this door i go you know what that's gonna be my chandelier
we like to cook ours is actual a restaurant kitchen not legal in normal home but in here
it's okay because we have metal we use this type of tile which doesn't melt sometimes when we
have guests over we just close this that's the pantry the refrigerator everything's hidden in
there this table was made by myself and another guy at one o'clock in the morning we bought home
depot 60 pound creep bags 32 of them and we just put in a wheelbarrow and we dumped it in here and
smooth it out and sand it quite a few times we block epoxy and we mix in glow in the dark
when you have the light on during the daytime it charges so i'll give you an example so
i just turn on the flashlight to charge it and then at night this is what it looks like
this wall here is another 40 foot again this is a part of the shipping container
these are one trippers and when i say one trip is that sometimes like intel or nike
or apple or something they want a brand new container they don't know what chemicals or
whatever has been inside the used containers so these are called one trippers and they use it for
you know high-tech stuff so that it keeps it clean and stuff i know that these are pretty safe
this is a teak root you know a thousand-year-old teak root but it's illegal to export teak from
indonesia now so they go back in and they dig up these roots to sell
and then this actually came from the local rockery so it's just a piece of flagstone and
a friend of mine he carved it out for me i just hooked it onto our plumbing and call it a day
the vibe you you get when you come in my house is you get a 1950s
mid-century with a modern industrial with a little bit of steampunk 1950s if you think about it you
know you got a conversation pit so that's what this is my pond it becomes my fish tank in here
coys i have 15 or 17. and then the goldfish about 70.
so originally actually this was going to be a swimming pool for the kids we had to save
these fish for my old house i took these and bought them here so we turned it into a pond
we're going to the kids room
the kids room is made of three 40-foot shipping containers because of coven you know they had a
study from online from home so this is where they sat to study so it's a nice circle window this
also cantilevers out from this circle window all the way down to the artwork down there my
kids drew that's a 40-foot container and if you notice here a lot of containers exposed
these three windows here they came off of a historical building here in downtown portland
when you cut big holes like this in a container it does ruin the structure of the actual corrugated
so how we uh alleviate that is we put these tubings you know it's all engineered
uh our engineer calls it out and we we we follow what he says but these are two inch
tubings this is the end of a 40 and now you're gonna go see two 40s you know next to each other
this is the kids tv room this is where the two containers meet and then we we just bolted it on
and then we weld them on the outside of this so this is their bathroom
we have a little throne here there's uh pipes and water running underneath and we didn't want
to expose this these are the i guess the little differences in a normal home because normal
they would you know this wouldn't be like this but since it's a shipping
container home you have to do what you got you know you have to work with what you have
here's one the girls room and then here's another girls sleeping area
if you want to look up close this is where the two containers meet so this is one container
and then just see the container
my best accomplishment or you know a feel good that
people tell me is like when they open the door the first thing everybody says whoa
the reason why i'm selling this house is because one is trying to try to downsize make a smaller
footprint two is i want to do something a little crazy might build a home out of more
ship containers or something totally different you know concrete or something i don't know mud i
don't know whatever somebody dares you to do right thanks for watching this week's video make sure to
like share and subscribe and i will see you next week with another tiny house or unique home tour
you