Sourcing Timbers and Brackets for our Post and Beam Great Room

This past winter was the coldest Ontario has seen in 20 years. Spring is officially here however the nicer weather hasn’t exactly arrived yet. After checking in with our builder, it appears we’ll need a little more patience before the roads dry up allowing us to get back into the construction scene.

During our planned sea container construction downtime, we have been busy preparing for our next steps.

1. Source big timbers

We believe in local sourcing to support the community and to reduce shipping costs. These savings will ultimately reflect in our final construction costs so we searched for a nearby sawmill with the capacity and capability to mill up dimensional timbers as large as 10″ x 10″, and some as long as 26 ft.  Sure enough, just one concession road over from the project site, our friendly local sawmill was up for the task.  Timbers of this size require a long lead time. Our order was placed months ago in order to align with our spring construction period.

2. Source heavy steel brackets

Another long lead time item are the custom heavy steel brackets for connecting the post and beam timber works.  For ease of on site assembly, and for the beefy rustic look, we decided to go with heavy steel brackets instead of custom fit hand carved joints.  Once the final dimensions of the rough sawn timbers were confirmed, design and engineering of the brackets were finalized, and off they went into the fabrication shop for manufacturing, and over to the finishing shop for a hot dipped galvanized treatment.

Now we wait for the ground to dry up.

Once we mobilize the crane, the containers will be placed on their foundations. Then we start building the great room.

The following preparation and progress has occurred while the site lay in winter hibernation:

  1. Post and beam timbers sourced and cut, ready for delivery
  2. Manufacturing of enormous engineered brackets and hot dip galvanizing, ready for delivery
  3. Researching off-grid power and determining requirements of the cabin, keeping us busy –  interesting findings on the latest energy storage technologies post to follow
  4. Documenting interior design requirements so that a furniture, electrical and lighting plan could be created to optimize the living space. We have an exciting interior designer engaged – deserving of her own dedicated post.
  5. Did we mention we’re hoping to have the sea container cabin project filmed for a TV series?  Film producers are excited about the rich content of this project, so we’ll see if they can keep up with the speed of the build this summer.

white pine timbers for sea container cabin

First load of timbers for the great room are waiting to be delivered.

If you would like greater detail on any of these topics or just want to hear more about our experiences, contact us or leave us a comment below. Your interests do influence our future community blog topics. You can also follow us on our journey by signing up for our emails.

Spotted in Shizuoka Japan

Once you are in the business of building with shipping containers, you can’t help but notice these types of projects when traveling the world. We were recently in Shizuoka Japan, and drove by a retail storefront that caught our eye. A series of containers were painted black, placed along both sides of this building and have been integrated in a way to provide furniture and goods storage. I was particularly impressed with the beefy foundations and fastening detail they employed. What a neat find. If you come across anything neat, please let us know so we can share with our community of shipping container architecture enthusiasts.

 

Japan shipping container

Japan shipping container

Scale Model of Our Shipping Container Cabin

 

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One of our excited project followers has taken the initiative of printing a scale model of our Shipping Container Cabin on his home built 3D plastic printer. For those of you who are unfamiliar with 3D plastic printing, there is a niche following of techies that design and build 3D printers that literally print out 3 dimensional objects using melted plastic droplets. Think of it as a miniature hot glue gun with brains, motorized controls, and a computer interface. This 3D model was printed using our original concept design for our shipping container cabin in Google SketchUp. As you can see, the end result looks just like our Project OCTOPOD!

We love it when people take the initiative to build creative projects with creative tools.  Imagine the day when we can print out full scale housing?

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