Framers Rock!
I want to be a framer when I grow up. He keeps the big picture in his head while keeping track of every detail that might affect where to cut or where to nail. He chops a giant timber using a circular saw while holding the wood on the toe of his boot, then pow pow pow — a building appears! It’s gotta be extremely rewarding work.
Holes finally finished. Teenager helping some, but he’s really just not that into it.
Holes
I have a framer and his assistant working with me today. We spend the morning making a list of materials needed to finish framing out the entire building ($2,000 worth) and they finish the last bit of the beams and joists that are under the roof. They also discover that, while the back ends of all the containers line up nicely, the fronts do not. The difference is about 3 inches. I think my building can visually absorb this, but I’m irritated with myself for not noticing and fixing it. I’d be really mad if I needed a nice smooth front. I’m wondering if, even though they’re all built to ISO specs, all containers might not be exactly the same length.
The deck framing is next, but that can’t proceed until there are posts set in concrete out in the grass beyond the slab. I’d like to apologize now to anyone who is doing the work themselves, and who needs to dig holes for footings or posts. I’ve been bitching and moaning about having to move blocks around on our slab — that’s nothing compared to post hole digging with a shovel. (I check into renting something to make it easier. The hand-held post hole diggers don’t have the power for the diameter we need. A Bobcat does, but costs about $600 for the day. That’s just shy of $70 per hole, so I balk — even though I think it would be fun to drive a Bobcat.) We need 9 holes, 18″ in diameter and 32″ deep. The ground is loam for the first inch or two, then sand, then clay. The holes that have lots of clay take an hour to dig out. The holes that are all sand take half an hour. Most are somewhere in between.
I’m going to be feeling this tomorrow.
Modifying Shipping Containers
Now that the containers are up on their blocks in the right places, it’s time to cut one side off of each of them. Plasma cutters are probably the easiest way, but the cheapest machine I can find is $1,000 and I’ve heard that welding of any sort can damage your eyes so that you lose color perception. This is much too high of a price for a graphic designer to pay.
I look around the shop to see what else might do it. I settle on using a SawzAll that came with a loft we rented in NYC a few years ago.
Stop laughing.
The SawzAll needs a hole to start in, so I drill a bunch of holes in a corner of the corrugated wall of the container. I know I’m in trouble when it take more than a minute per hole. I start sawing. This creates a very hostile work environment. Aside from the hot sun and humidity, the saw motor itself gets very hot. The saw blade gets so hot that it softens. The little bits of shipping container that are being thrown off by the blade seem to be molten and pepper my face and hands as I cut. The saw is heavy and is pushing in and out so I have to keep the saw pushed against the container while at the same time pushing it in the direction I want it to cut.
About every three feet, the blade softens sufficiently that it gets pinched and seizes up. Now, instead of the saw moving the blade back and forth with great force, it’s moving me back and forth with great force. You can’t let go of the button fast enough (because your hand is cramped up so badly it won’t release) so the saw keeps punching you in the chest, over and over. Your arms are numb from the vibration and pounding.
The corrugated metal itself changes as you cut on it. It’s very heavy and I’m working away at removing what is holding it up. As I do, it sags and settles — almost like a liquid filling the gap my saw blade has left. I learn to cut little openings that allow me to re-insert the blade every few feet because the cut seems to heal up as I go along.
Oh, and damn the person who installed steel tie-down rings to the base of the walls inside of shipping containers.
I finally get the sides and the bottom cut off, but now face a difficult problem. How to cut along the top? The problem is that the wall probably weighs about 600 pounds and now has sharp edges. The corrugation gives it stiffness in one direction, but flexibility (and worse — elasticity) in the other direction. I can’t just climb up on a ladder and cut it off without it falling onto me and either crushing me or cutting me in half.
I attach an eye-bolt to the top-middle of the wall I’m cutting on. I get the PullzAll out and hook it to the eye-bolt on one end, throw it over the top of the container, and attach the other end with a chain to the base of the container on the opposite side. Now, once the wall is free, it will hang from the winch with which I can safely lower it to the ground.
This plan works perfectly — for the first container. The cut is finished, the wall starts to fall out, the winch holds it up. I use a long pole (through the doors of the container) to knock the bottom of the wall out and slowly lowered it to the ground. I attach the PullzAll to a tree, drill another hole in the side of the now free container wall, and pull it out of the way. It actually functioned as an effective plow, cutting a deep gash into the yard before finally flopping down on its side violently once it was clear of the container.
The second container is harder. After the final cut, the wall falls into the container, instead of out of it, and manages to wedge itself in there nice and snug. I push and pull and bang and curse, but it’s not moving.
“SawzAll!” my wife says. (This has now become a verb at our house, used whenever there is no other option but the brute-force-cut-the-motherfucker-out method of problem solving.)
So I cut off some of the wall that was causing the inconvenience. The moments toward the end of that cut are by far the most dangerous of our entire project so far. I have no way of knowing what the wall will do once it is loose. I don’t know if the eye bolt and winch will hold or not, and I can’t finish the cut without getting close to it. I end up essentially standing around the corner from the thing I’m cutting, so that at least it won’t remove my torso when it pops out. Just before I get to the end, the little bit of metal fails and bang! the wall slides out and hangs on the winch like I was hoping it would. As I lower it to the ground, I notice that the eye bolt looks a lot more like a “C” than the “O” it once was. Very close.
Maintaining Flexibility
I’m finding a common thread that runs through our project. The more flexibility you can maintain, the better off you are. The blocks are a good example. Another example is that as long as I’m doing all the work myself, everything is fine. As soon as somebody else gets involved I have a deadline to be prepared for them to do the task I need them to do.
Deadlines = money because they are not flexible. If I’m working on a deadline, I might need to buy materials from the more expensive vendor because they can deliver on time. If I’m working on a deadline, I have to work faster than I’m sometimes comfortable with and end up making costly mistakes.
Maintain flexibility in every aspect of your project, for as long as you can.
Footings
The property we purchased has an existing concrete foundation in the back. While it seems to be thick enough to build on, it isn’t raised above grade level at all so water accumulates. It also has some cracks that obviously go all the way through it, so we’ve determined that we’re better off not relying on it too much.
I want to have a sizable crawl space under the building for infrastructure access in the future. In addition to getting above any sub-Noah floodwaters, the height might even help keep out some of the critters. The engineer’s plan is to use simple concrete blocks to get the altitude needed.
You’d be surprised how much work those simple blocks turn out to be.
First, we have to get them home from Home Depot. Their rent-a-truck has a weight limit (with a really loud, irritating alarm), so it takes three runs back and forth to get them all home. Loading at the store, unloading at home, block by block on a hot, humid, Houston day.
I’m all excited when we first get them — happy to be doing something other than dragging a container across our yard — and we lay them all out where they need to go. After they’re all nicely stacked in their places we realize that — duh — the containers need to be placed into position first. The nice neat piles of blocks are in the way.
We (actually by this point, it’s “I”) move them out of the way. The next day I use the Egyptian method to move the containers into place. The next work day I jack up one end, place blocks, drop the jack. Jack the other end, place blocks, drop the jack. Back to the first end, put the jack on blocks, raise the container again, add another layer of blocks, drop the jack. Back and forth until the container is resting on blocks two feet up.
The next week, our engineer comes to do a site visit and notices that the “C” channel beams that go around the base of the container are broken up by the holes for forklifts. The piles of blocks that aren’t in the corners need to be divided up so that both ends of every segment of that C-channel is supported.
A few days later, we realize that the 2″ x 12″ wood members that make up the beams and joists need to sit lower than the containers:
So we unstack all of the piles and restack them, breaking some of the blocks in half. This creates a “step” for the wood to rest on, while still providing the height necessary for the container to sit on.
Fortunately the engineer had specified dry-stacking the blocks, so moving them many times iss just painful and time-consuming. If we had done cast concrete footings in place, life would now be hell.
A month later, when we we’re positioning the third and fourth containers, we have a big forklift. While this makes it much faster and easier to get the containers into the vicinity of where they need to be, it doesn’t help at all with getting the containers to sit perfectly parallel to, and the right distance from, its neighbors.
Doing it right or not
This project is the first I’ve ever worked on where I set out to do everything the “right” way, instead of the easy or fastest or cheapest way. We’ve hired an engineer to make sure everything is built to code. We’re working with the city to get necessary permits, etc. Initially, there was a temptation not to do all of this extra work, after all, how likely were we to get caught?
There are a number of reasons not to take shortcuts, in our case at least.
This building will someday be spaces for rent to other people. We want to make sure that it is built safely so that nobody gets hurt by it. We also want to be able to have liability insurance and insurance on the building itself that values it properly.
I’ve never built something from the ground up, so involving professionals ensures that it’s built properly and doesn’t fall down.
But the main reason we did it the right way was so that we wouldn’t have to worry in the future. I didn’t want to be paranoid about city inspectors finding the project, or the utility companies discovering that we’d done something we shouldn’t. Taking a shortcut now might save a little time, a few thousand dollars, but the legacy of that shortcut would last for the lifetime of the building. We decided that it just wasn’t worth it.
Shipping Containers
In the middle of February, 2008 we bought our first two containers from Advance Container for $1,100 each, plus delivery. They were delivered to the front of our driveway, which is about 250 feet from where they needed to be. This being a very low-budget operation, I used the Egyptian method of moving big, heavy things across terrain. I had six 4″x5″x10′ timbers which I placed like rails under the sides of the container. On top of the timbers, long heavy water pipes rolled like wheels. The container itself rolled on top of the pipes. Initially I thought I could use a come-along to move it, but these things are really, really heavy. The come-along had the force to do the job, but it was going to be extremely physically demanding and I’m just a mortal graphic designer. So I bought a Warn PullzAll electric winch. It can pull 1,000 lbs, which wouldn’t do much holding up a 5,000 pound container, but with the timbers and waterpipes, was up to the task. I’d use auto tow straps and a section of heavy chain to pull against trees, fence posts, etc.
The pulling is the easy part. The constant jacking is what really gets to you. I had two Sears low-profile floor jacks (the low profile was critical so that the jack could fit into the forklift holes on the underside of the container if it ever dropped to the ground.) I’d jack up one side of the container, position the timbers and pipes, then lower the first side. Next, I’d jack up the other end of the container and position those timbers and pipes. I found that it wasn’t a good idea to do both ends at the same time — it was too precarious and the container would fall off the jacks. This raises an important point. NEVER, EVER, even for a moment, put any part of your body under anything that is jacked up. If you have to get under there, block it up with something that won’t collapse.
It ended up taking three full working days to get each container from driveway to the slab in the back where they needed to go. The trouble is that I never had three consecutive days to do this, so the whole process took almost two months. During this time, we had some heavy rains, so sometimes I was trying to jack the thing up in a pond of water. (You can use a wide piece of steel like a flywheel, or even the blade of a shovel under the jack to help support it, but it’s somewhat less than ideal conditions for jacking up a 5,000 lb object.)
We didn’t have a camera during this whole process, but we think photos were taken and we’ll try to post them for your amusement when we can.
Background
I’m a graphic designer and my wife is an artist. We’ve lived in the San Francisco Bay area, Oxford, England, Austin, Texas, New York City, and Houston, Texas. Of all the great places we’ve lived, Houston is where we’ve decided to finally settle down. It’s unmatched for the warmth of the people, the vibrant art community, work opportunities and low cost of living.
Our idea is to be a sort of “halfway house” for artists right out of school. They’re passionate, excited, in need of structure and poor as dirt. That last little detail is how we ended up with shipping containers — they were (and mostly still are) a cheap way to build. It took a while to find a property that was the right combination of central location, size, price and neighborhood suitability. Houston has no zoning, but it does have deed restrictions established by neighborhood civic associations, which are enforcable as law. Most of the city is covered by some sort of deed restrictions, but there are pockets that have none.
The property we found had a house big enough and weird enough for our needs, sitting on a half-acre lot in an unrestricted area that already had a community of artists nearby. After buying the house and making a few essential fixes, we began working on how to build a studio building on the existing 1,000 s.f. slab in the back of the lot.
Financing
The first step, of course, was to figure out where the money would come from. We found that almost any kind of financing was out of the question because the mortgage used to purchase the house and land “encumbered” the entire property. Nobody was going to give us a loan for something that they couldn’t take back if we stopped making payments, and how could they take away a building in our back yard?
So we’re building the whole thing ourselves, with cash. As we have a few hundred dollars on a free weekend, we work on it. Using shipping containers fits well with this approach. If we don’t have any money (or time) for a month, they’re not going to be damaged by the elements waiting for completion. They could also be purchased individually, so that we didn’t need a giant pile of money to get started.
About shipping container prices
There’s an active worldwide market for shipping containers that is affected by macro trends. For instance, in 2007 the U.S. had a larger import/export imbalance which meant that more containers were arriving in Houston with fewer leaving. That pushed prices down. In 2008, exports picked up and prices rose. China is a big factor in shipping container pricing because they’re needed for shipping or as a source of steel for recycling.
We didn’t find much difference in prices between suppliers — everyone keeps tabs on the market prices. Therefore, what you pay is mostly determined by the condition of the unit and the cost of transporting it to you. Those that are “cargo-ready” are in the best condition. They’re waterproof and structurally sound with good floors and no holes. We look for units a step down from that, ones that don’t have holes, but aren’t cargo-ready and are a little cheaper. The cheapest ones are rusted out junkers, which, ironically, are also hard to find because repair yards scavenge the usable metal from them to repair others, or they’re recycled for the metal.