In search of land to rent

We're heading out today, with our newly created leaflet, in the hope of finding someone ready and willing to rent us land, to place our container house on... wish us luck!

Here's the leaflet on Scribd:

our house

Inspiring woman, living in elegant poverty

Watch "California DIY, shipping container tiny home and a cargo trailer bedroom" on YouTube





As found on: Fair Companies

Container at Thor's Hammer

The container and all it's contents arrived safely at Thor's Hammer today. It's a strategic placement actually, because I hope to use Thor's amazing selections of recycled timbers to modify the container and build the house - saving a little on transport and time.

Packing up, moving on

I lost my job, ending 23 December (thanks UC). So, we bought a shipping container and filled it with our stuff. We'll store it and hit the road until we know where we are.

20 foot high cube empty

Amazing that it all fit!

Our container house

For a few years now, Sunshine and I have been researching shipping container houses as an alternative means to affordable housing. The key to a container based house is the portability. Our 60m2 free standing design retains that portability, with all external elements such as roofing, doors and walls, fitting inside a container ready for transport, quick setup and quick break down.

The reason we want a portable house is so we can move it temporarily onto rented land, save up for our own land, and relocate it to settle and extend. Our plan is a two stage approach to home and land ownership, attempting to keep our weekly payments as low as possible while we go.

If you have a small section of land you could rent us, we can offer you between $50-100 rent per week. We'd then secure a loan of $40 000 for the prefabrication, additions and delivery of our container house. The weekly repayments on such a loan would be $250 over 5 years. The land rent and house repayments together would total $350 per week. We think we could save between $100-200 per week, or $5-10,000 per year, $15-30,000 over 3. That's a deposit for our own land, and once we had our own land, we'd move off yours, leaving behind a little fruit orchard, a herb garden, and a small rammed earth pad, where we once stayed.

Here's a set of photos of inspirational projects and our design in a cardboard model.

Here's a video playlist explaining the design.

Costing breakdown - new, recycled and 2nd hand materials:

1. 2 modified 20foot high cube containers delivered: $10000
2. Roof and trusses: $7000
3. Insulation and linings: $3000
4. 4x (1.2x3m) sliding, timber framed, double glase walls: $5000
5. 1x (4.8x3m) back wall with window and door: $3000
6. 6x5m rammed earth floor: $3000
7. Kitchen: $2000
8. Waterless toilet: $2000
9. Shower: $1000
10. Plumbing, storage, pump, outlets: $3000
11. Power generator, storage, cable, points, lights: $5000
12. Rocket fire, thermal mass heater: $500
13. 2x doors: $1200

________

$45900 for stage one


If you think you can offer us a small section of land, let's talk.

Starting a rocket stove thermal mass heater

Its getting cold in Canberra. The fire place in our house is smokey and cold. The gas heating is too easy and expensive. Its time we learned how to build a rocket fire!

I discovered rocket fires last year when Permaculture Keith blogged about them. That lead to a couple of Youtube videos, which lead to meeting Erica and Ernie in Portland Oregon to see one in action.

Since that visit, Sunshine and I have been busy selling our house in NZ, moving to Australia, and having a baby. Now in a rental, its difficult to commit to a full build, but I've found a bit of time to study the method.

Basically, a rocket stove thermal mass heater is a super efficient wood fuel heater that can be built by just about anyone, using waste and/or easily collectible materials. To give you an idea, in Dunedin we used an efficient and certified wood burner that used about 4-6 cubic metres of wood per year. Erica and Ernie told us they use about 1-2 cubic metres in their rocket heater, and their house was less insulated than ours!

If you want to get a sense of what a full rocket stove thermal mass heater is, this is a great introductory video:



Here's the book that the video refers to.

And here's a really good illustration by Erica, of the critical design of the rocket stove. At that link are a series of photos documenting a full build, including the thermal mass heater.

Here's another photo documented installation with some adaptations to the standard design, by Michael Blaha.

And I started the Wikipedia article to see where it might go.

My attempts so far
So begins my attempts to study and learn this technique for heating. After the usual terrible time trying to source materials in Canberra, here's a series of videos of my first mock up.



Canberra is an incredibly difficult find out about anything online. The websites are crappy and the search results are worse. As a result, sourcing materials is frustrating. All we needed was some short lengths of steal pipe at varying diameters, a few steal drums of varying sizes, about 10 fire bricks, and 10 normal bricks. So I baled the family into the care and drove around looking for word of mouth. The main waste recycle facility was useless. We found private waste recycle yards that looked promising, but were all locked up with no one around. Everyone we spoke to directed us out to Fyshwick, the industrial hub of Canberra. There we found some materials, but all set at exorbitant prices :( It seems what useful materials is recycled, is pretty well stitched up by business. But we did manage to scrape together a few bricks and some guttering just to get this first mock up made.

The hunt for better materials continues...