Planning

The first step is simply to plan what it is I want to accomplish and how I can afford going about it. There is no water running through the property, so I plan to drill a well. In the short term, I want a cabin that is relatively cheap and easy to build myself. In the long run I may want a bigger house for a bigger family and a shop to run my business. Planning is important now because it is hard to change things later.

My first dilemma is a decision between building a traditional stick built cabin myself, or to use some type of shipping container cabin that I can have delivered to my property. Shipping container homes are becoming more well known and popular. A 40ft X 8 ft container is a pretty standard size, and yields around 310 sq ft of living area. A typical shipping container has to be insulated, and there are really only two options for this. Spray foam insulation or fiberglass insulation within a framed interior or exterior. Spray foam is fantastic. It creates a vapor and moisture barrier, sticks directly to the container, and adds tons of structural strength to the already strong shipping container. However it is very expensive to traditional fiberglass batts. Fiberglass isn't anything special, but requires a place for it to be put. So you'll be framing up around the container with 2x4s or 2x6's  adn enclosing it with a vapor barrier and a siding material. Basically, you are framing up a house around the container, so what is the container for then exactly?

There is another option in the world of container homes and that is choosing an insulated refrigerated container. These already have insulation in them, and they have flat sides as well because the insulation is sandwiched between two additional layers of steel. There is no thermal bridging(or very little) because the inside layer is isolated from the outside layers, and all this is done in less than 2 inches of thickness resulting in a  container of the exact same dimensions but even more appealing than the corrugated containers. Holes can be cut for the framing of doors and windows.

The nice thing about reefer containers is that they are only a few thousand more than an everyday container, and all the work is already done. I don't think you can spray foam a container for the price of just buying a reefer container that already has foam insulation in it,and fiberglass batts involve a serious amount of labor to attach them to a container. Further, a reefer container retains its dimensions and can be transported by a truck later down the road if need be.

However, transportation is often not considered in the cost. Remember that it can cost hundreds if  not thousands to pay a trucker to transport one of these things several hundred miles. If your desired location is far from a port city, it may be expensive to have your container transported to your site.

I am still wrestling with the decision between a nice compact and somewhat mobile container cabin to begin my project, or just building a stick cabin directly on my site. If I do it myself, a stick cabin twice the size of a  container cabin might only cost me 6,000-10,000 for a very basic design, while a shipping container cabin might cost as much as 6,000 just for the container and delivery to my location.  I still have several months to decide since it is winter time now and no progress will be made on the property itself until spring. But by spring I hope to have the money and the plan to move forward with building my cabin.