Everything You Wanted To Know About Building A Shipping Container Home

As makers, we have a tendency to escalate our vision. Each project idea seems to get a little more complex, a little more grandiose in scale. Ben Uyeda of Homemade modern is no different. We’ve followed along for years as he and his friends have constructed various cleverly designed pieces of furniture and home based projects on homemade modern, but recently he’s published a massive project that dwarfs all the others in scale. This project is so massive, it got its very own channel to house it, the modern home project. Ben has set out to build and thoroughly document building a home from shipping containers in the desert of Joshua Tree.

Shipping container homes have been around for quite some time. What Ben is doing in terms of construction isn’t necessarily new. However, his thorough documentation seems to be where the value lies. Ben pointed out that he had considered a shipping container home for a long time but had never seemed to find a useful compendium of all he needed to know (remember, Ben has a background in doing architectural projects, before getting into making videos on youtube!). He set out to remedy this reference issue by creating his own version.

As you follow along you’ll learn everything you would need to know to build a container home in the same geographical area as him. It would, of course, be impossible to say that you would learn everything you’d need to know to build anywhere because regional building codes can be not only different, but even contradictory, but with that in mind, this is a very good start.

There are currently only 3 videos published on this project, but there are more on the way. Even though I never intend to build a shipping container home, I have found this to be thoroughly entertaining and educational. I’m looking forward to more on this series and have actually found a few bits of information that I think could assist me in upgrades I’d like to make to my workshop.

Ben will be speaking about this project at the upcoming Maker Faire Bay Area, so make sure to get tickets and come listen and ask questions!