Shipping Container Home Built For A Family! Inside Look

This is the double stack, it's two shipping containers stacked on top of each other, creating about 560 square feet of living space. We're here in Hawking Hills, Ohio at Hilltop Haven. I'm also here with the owners and host. I'm Greg Smith and we're in Hawking Hills. And this is the Hilltop Haven. What's the Hilltop Haven? The Hilltop Haven is a property we acquired back in 2014. And so for us, the top of this hill was just a premier site that we thought would always be amazing to share with other people and be a secluded Airbnb. And then what's this one here behind me? This one is called the double stack for obvious reasons. It's two containers, one on top of the other. Two containers on top of each other. Tell me a little bit about that. You bought this in Texas, correct? And then they shipped it up here. Tell me about that process a little bit. That's right. So originally when we were looking to get containers, they were selling a long container on top of a short container. And for us, we designed this one specifically with the company for myself, my wife, and four kids with the original intention of being kind of like a little cabin on our other property that we'd go to stay at, you know, and have some fun. And we shipped it up here, put together on that property, and then we changed our mind. So, okay. You changed your mind. Then how do you transport it from your first property to here? How does that work? So we had it all together. It was fully functioning. Everything was together on the other property. It wasn't more than a month later. We said, Hey, get the cranes back out. We had to cut the welds, unhook the electric, the HVAC, everything. And we had to get semi-trucks, cranes, bring it out and move it up the hill. Oh my gosh. And you, you did all of that yourself. We did. So it was a process. It was quite a process. So me, some friends, we had one guy come back from Texas, just kind of supervised. And it was quite the process to be able to get it up the driveway. We have about a half mile long driveway, a couple steep hills. And so it was quite a task. But it's here still standing today. It is. Yeah. I probably over-engineered the foundation for this. So I think it's going to stand for a very long time. So let's begin the tour of this property and of this container home. We've seen a couple double stacks before. I featured one about six years ago, if you remember on this channel, this one is a little bit different on the interior. It's manufactured by the same company. There'll be linked down the description below if you're interested, but this is the double stack. The exterior is wood cladding mixed with the container. So you can see on this front side, we have a little bit of the metal of the container, and then we have the wood cladding all on the exterior as well. It gives it more of that house look, cabin look, if you don't like the container, but I personally like the combination of the two here. Wrapping around the deck space, we have a ton of deck options around here. First, we do have these double doors that lead you to the living room. We'll get there in a minute. Over here, we really get a good angle of the container home. You can see there's a patio space up top. It's extremely tall, and they're actually not stacked right on top of each other. There's a little bit of manufacturing that goes along with stacking these containers. And so it might look like from the exterior that these two containers are just sitting right on top of each other, like they would be on a boat or something, but they're not. There's actually a gap and stilts inside, hidden, right? That's correct. Well, the stilts, you can kind of see where the welds are on the outside, but yes, so we have the one container, and then we have four stilts, one on each corner coming up, and then the other container sits on top of that, and then it's all welded together. So there's no stilts in the middle. It's just the four corners? Correct. Okay, cool. Yep. And that's the great thing about containers is you can do really cool designs because of the structuralness of how they're made to stack and what they're made out of. Continuing down the deck space, we do have some outdoor seating here, ample amount of just walk-in room, hangout room. There are two bedrooms here, which is really unique for a about 500 square foot home, and we have plenty of space for all of the guests. Continuing down along though, we do have an outdoor dining table here, and then the deck goes down. So I love the double platform deck here. We have an outdoor grill, another outdoor seating area, dining table, and of course the hot tub over here. We have to have the hot tub. Lastly, we do have an outdoor fire pit down there, and overall this just enables for a lot of outdoor fun space. But we want to check out the interior of this double stack container home. This is the front door. It's right in the middle. I know it's really bright right now. The sun is shining right on it, but we can walk on this lower level and check it out. So walking inside, this is the 40 foot container on the bottom level. So there's the most space, and this is where all the action is out. The unique feature about this model the host had custom manufactured is this interior spiral staircase. Yeah, so for us, we wanted to have stairs on the inside. So originally in Texas, they designed most of their units to have stairs on the outside to where you'd walk up, and obviously weather in Texas is much different than Ohio. So for us, we designed it to where we have a spiral staircase on the inside, which kind of created a little chute where we could do all of our plumbing and electrical connections on the inside, which is nice. However, our other plumbing, you know, on the first floor and second floor is in the exterior walls. So tell me a little bit about that. Plumbing and exterior walls in a container home. You know, normally you stud out the inside of a container, or you might first strip it, but ours are studs, so you lose three and a half inches. The plumbing is inside those walls. We thought that spray foam insulation wouldn't be enough to kind of insulate from the environment, but we have found out year after year that is not the case. Being on the top of a hill, the wind hits the containers. We found out the hard way. We found out the hard way multiple times. So yes. So it's not advisable to put plumbing on any exterior wall in a container home. That's in any home, but specifically container homes for sure. Yes. Yeah. Okay, so you had to learn the hard way with that, and then it just runs up to that second floor, correct? That's correct. So we did all the connections inside that kind of, that little area that shoot where the stairs are going up. Okay. So continuing with the bottom floor, we're in the kitchen space with a container. They're eight foot wide and about eight foot tall as well. Plenty of space around here, and this kitchen is very functional. I love the wood countertop. We have cabinetry below. It just takes up this section here, the microwave, the mini fridge, some floating shelves with your dishes, and of course we have the coffee bar down this way. We've got to have the coffee bar, and they even have a cooktop that we can pull out. So check this out. If you want to do some cooking, you can put this out and put it on the countertop. Very, very common with smaller kitchen designs. So we do have everything here, and we have a small dining table in front of this window. And speaking of windows, that's one thing I really like about this container home. There's a lot of windows here. I don't have any of the lights on, and the sun is just shining in here, and it's bright. Also what helps with that is the shiplap on the walls. I think that adds a lot of texture and detail, as well as these faux wood beams above. I love that. I love anywhere you can add windows and wood and brightness to the space, so they did really well with that. Continuing down here, we have the living room space. The couch here, it looks like you can pull out into a bed. We have cup holders as well, and the TV is literally perfect height right here. You can sit here and watch a great movie, and it feels like you're in a movie theater. I know on camera it might not look like that, but the TV is situated in a perfect way right there. And then these are the double doors that lead out to your deck space that I was talking about before. So we have multiple entryways in here, and then we have the other half. So the other half past the staircase, we have the hallway that leads us to our bathroom space. So through this sliding door right here, we have the bathroom. Walking in here, it is everything you would need. The sink here on my right side, different color palette in here, which I really like this pink color. We even have a tiled shower over here with the white subway tile, the gray grout. Overall for 320 square feet of living space, so you can fit a nice size bathroom, that's great on this main level. But there are two bathrooms and two bedrooms in here. Walking out of that though, we enter into the bedroom space, which is this last portion on this bottom part of this container home. Bed here in the middle. You can see there's not a ton of space on both sides, but remember this is only eight foot wide. We do have a nightstand on this side. Here's the cool feature. There is a closet space they built in right here with storage there. Hang up your clothes right there, and it's nice they include a closet in this space. We have a full length mirror, and if you need to shut the door, it is a sliding barn door. This is a full living space if you just use this container, but there's actually more up top. So walking up the spiral staircase, we enter into the top floor. I believe this is 30 feet, so it's a little bit smaller, but we have a functional space up here, and it's really cool. I think you guys will like it. We walk into the second living space in here. TV. This one's bigger than the one downstairs, so maybe you'll be watching movies here, but we have a seat here. You could put another couch right here if you wanted to enjoy the space. This could be the living room for the top guests, but we also have another double French door right here, and this leads us out to the upper deck. This is my favorite feature of this whole build. This deck space, it's covered. We do have the containers here. It was cut, as the host was telling me. So it might look like this is just like a 20-foot or a 30-foot on a 40-foot, but this is actually two 40-foot containers, right? That's correct. So the top one, we actually cut out the whole, you know, like 10 feet of the last one. So instead of having a 30-footer and then an open space, we did a 40, cut the last 10 feet out, created like a nice little deck where people can sit and overview the field and so forth. So that's cool. There's a couple chairs out here. We get to enjoy the privacy of the outdoors, and we'll head back and into the second half. Walking back, this is the same setup as the bottom floor. We can enter into the second bathroom. It's set up the exact same way, except this one's white, so it's a little bit brighter. The sink, toilets, and we have different tiling for this shower space. So both bedrooms have a full bathroom in just around 560 square feet of living space. That's pretty impressive. I think the guests will be happy staying here. We enter into the second bedroom now. Very similar setup. This bed's a little bit taller, I believe. Nightstand on that side, the AC unit right above your head. So there's AC units on both levels. And again, we have the closet space in front of us, the sliding door to close off the space with the mirror. Like I said, this is a smaller bedroom setup, but it's functional. And for a container home, that's a unique aspect. There's challenges with that. And around 560 square feet of living space, having two bedrooms, two bathrooms, full kitchen, full bathroom. This place really does have it all and multiple outdoor deck spaces. But let's head back outside. So whenever you were originally planning on having a property for people to come stay at, what inspired you to do a double stack container? So originally, we were one of the, I don't know the specific number, but I'll tell you the only thing I saw was one other container in the county at the time. And it was a single container. And so for me yesterday, let's go big or go home. Can we do two containers? Double the stack. So this is double the cool. That's what I thought, yeah. So now you need a triple stack. I don't know. Maybe my wife might kill me on that one. What's people's favorite part whenever they come stay here? What do you hear the most people say? I think the elusiveness of just being inside of a tiny home. You know, that was a big craze for a long time. I think people love to kind of be like, hey, what is that like? The inside, I think is finished out very, very nice. So that aesthetically is, you know, appeasing to most people. But for us here on this property, I think it's the seclusiveness of where we're at. It's very quiet. Even though we have three units, there's space far enough apart that you're really not going to know other people are, you know, down the road from you. It's not on the main road and it's a haven from everyday life. So that's the double stack container. Could you see yourself enjoying this? Do you want one for yourself? You can purchase one similar to this from the company that makes these down in Waco, Texas, I believe. They're linked down description below. They're not affiliated with this video at all. I've never talked to them. I just know they make shipping container homes. And this is one of them. This is my daughter, Eden. She comes along with me sometimes. She looks good in pink, doesn't she? If you want to stay here and come check it out yourself, visit a tiny house container home, the double stack. I'll let the host tell you how to do that. We'll have the Airbnb link in the description. Say bye, Eden. Bye bye. Tell him to subscribe. We're not there yet. So who am I here with today? I'm Greg Smith, and we're at... I'll re-ask that. All right. It's just more bloopers for the end. I know, it's great.