How did I come to the conclusion to build with containers…
Container buildings has become fashionable in the last years. While I don’t consider them very sustainable, they offer some advantages, which came in handy for my situation.
Around 2014 I used to stay around 6-8 months per year in Paraguay. I had shipped part of my belongings with a 20 ft Container in 2013 and started to take some of the furnitures, appliances and personal belongings out of the container into a house. Unfortunately this wasn’t the best move. Not being present all year round in a traditional building puts your stuff at risk of being
- water damaged
- eaten by termites
- eaten by rats
- covered by rat shit
- etc
I made all of the experiences above while anything left in the container remained as clean and undamaged as the day I had put them into the container. Shipping containers are basically hermetically sealed with the exception of 2 small air openings (which you can cover if you want to) .
In 2014/2015 while making these observations I was faced with some structural damages in one of my houses in the village. A closer look at the building didn’t convinced me that it was worth to repair them. I originally had started to construct some columns to extend this house but now it didn’t seem to make sense.
One day I realised that this was also an opportunity to build something from scratch as I wanted instead of fixing thins and making to many compromises with the existing structure.
So I decided to take the existing structure down (recycling all the materials) and build something new using shipping containers.
I spent some time playing around with some container models and sketchup to come up with a basic layout concept.
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