Designing your own shipping container home can be easy if you know the basic building blocks to use. As an architect, designing homes involves knowing what the end user needs to complement their lifestyles. This is how you put your ideas together and onto a drawing.
To design a shipping container home, use a combination of set dimensions of the 40 ft and 20 ft long shipping containers. The number of bedrooms, bathrooms, and amount of cooking/dining/entertaining your lifestyle needs will determine the size and shape of your new home.
Follow this system, and your dream home will come to life quicker and easier than you could imagine.
The Design Process Follows a Path That is Much Like a Metal Spring
Imagine a metal spring that is bigger in one end than the other. The wire in the spring begins at the larger end and travels around and around towards the smaller end.
Likewise, our design process starts in broad terms and it continues to travel through many turns while becoming defined more and more towards the final design.
Since you will be designing the home for your own use, you already know the lifestyle that you want to live in your new home. Reviewing your lifestyle is part of the first step of designing your home. This step is called “programming.”
Programing is When You Examine What Needs to be in Your New Home
Before you start drawing your new home, try writing down words that will describe the perfect home that will meet your personal lifestyle needs.
Answer these questions to determine the size and adjacencies of rooms your house will need:
- How many people will be living in the house? This will help you decide how many bedrooms and bathrooms will be designed in the house.
- Do you need a bathtub or just a shower?
- Do you need one or two lavatories in your bathroom?
- Do you often prepare your meals at home and need a large kitchen?
- Do you entertain guests often? Will you entertain by watching TV, playing board games, serving meals, performing with musical instruments….? This will help you decide if your living room or dining room needs to have certain seating for whatever type of entertaining you expect to experience.
- Do you need a lot of natural light? If so, you will want to consider having more windows and skylights to provide the direct or indirect sunlight to enter your home.
Get inspired by Looking at Other Shipping Container Homes
In order to know what you like and don’t like, check out how other people designed their shipping containers.
Check out the “Design Ideas” tab of this blog for some great design suggestions.
Look for inspiration on Pintrest such as at https://www.pinterest.com/liveinacontainer/_created/
Dwell magazine has a lot of inspiring shipping container home designs at Dwell Ezine
The Architect magazine has some interesting articles about shipping container homes at Architect Ezine
There are some books on Amazon about shipping container homes you might want to read.
Quite frankly, most of them are full of fluff with a lot less information than what you will find on the internet including at Design Ideas.
Here a few books I have in my library. They have some design nuggets that might inspire you when designing your home:
Shipping Container Homes: Building a Home Using Containers – A Simple How to Guide for Beginners
Get Inspired From Tiny House Designs
Although your house might end up being a large house, most shipping containers are similar to the tiny house market. So, I have found that searching for tiny house designs on the internet helps me see how small spaces can be designed to not look cramped while feeling like an inviting place to live.
Schematic Design is When Your Home Design Transforms from Words to Drawings
Once you decide the number of bedrooms and bathrooms you need, then start sketching out how it might be arranged in your new home.
I usually start my schematic design by sketching “free-hand” onto paper. No drafting board, straight edges, or computer.
When I was in architectural school, my professors did not like it when we designed “rooms.” They would consider a room to be too much of a restrictive description of what needs to be included in a designed building. Instead, we used the term “spaces.”
The term “spaces” does not have the connotation of only having 4 walls to define it. Try this mindset out when you are planning our design of your new home.
While we are talking about what architects do to design homes, let’s peel off all of the restraints, such as building code and zoning law restrictions. That will come later when you hire professionals to take care of those issues.
It’s time to let it all hang out and put your own thoughts into physical form.
Draw Bubble Diagrams to Determine Location of Spaces
The first few sketches will not be to any correct scale. It is mainly used to get an initial idea of how the various spaces (or rooms) will be arranged.
This first set of free-hand sketches might only be a bunch of circles and lines between them. Bubble diagrams, like this, will help you get a quick feel of what spaces need to be near or further away from other spaces.
Have separate bubbles for each bedroom, bathroom, and closet. Other bubbles can be for the kitchen, dining room, living room, and laundry room.
Sketchup is a Perfect Program for Home Design
Sketchup is a 3D computer software that I found to be a perfect tool to use when designing shipping container homes.
A free version is available at Free Sketchup Program.
I use the professional version. There is a free 30 day version available at Professional Sketchup Program. More versions are available too.
In the Sketchup program, there is a large library of design elements called Sketchup Warehouse. This is a large preset library that includes shipping containers, furniture, and cabinets for every room in the house.
Another computer aided design tool I use is AutoCad. To learn more about how AutoCad compare with Sketchup, go to AutoCad vs Sketchup
Free Preset “Kit-o-Parts” Library to Use When Designing Your Home
If you don’t want to learn a new software program, there is another way to gather all of the things that you will need to design your home
Download your preset library of home elements to use when designing your home at the Kit-o-Parts link.
Download “Kit-o-Parts”
After you download this helpful tool, print it out several times.
Then, cut and paste them into newly designed floor plans.
This download can also be pasted onto the Google Drawings website. After it is downloaded, the pieces can be copied and placed anywhere you want them . The only computer commands you need to use are copy, paste, move, clip, save, and download.
Watch This Video: How to Design with the Live In A Container “Kit-o-Parts”
Here is a video that shows how to use this preset library, “Kit-o-Parts” by cutting and pasting on paper or virtually on the Google Drawings website.
Go to this YouTube video to see exactly how to use the “Kit-o-Parts” to design your shipping container home.
Examining the “Kit-o-Parts” Components
Using shipping containers, you will find that there are set modular dimensions to work within. Usually, you will want to use the two standard sizes of shipping containers.
The two most common shipping containers used for home design are the 40 foot long and the 20 foot long high cube shipping containers.
The high cube shipping containers are 1 foot taller than the 8’-6” high standard cube. You will want to use the high cube in order to have maximum head room in your new home.
For the 40 foot long high cube shipping container, the interior dimensions after adding a 4 inch wall all around the inside face of the container’s perimeter has a remaining 7’-1” wide x 38’-10” long.
For the 20 foot long high cube shipping container, the interior dimensions after adding a 4 inch wall all around the inside face of the container’s pepriminet has a remaining 7’-1” wide x 18’-8” long.
Design Rules of Thumb to Follow
Number of Shipping Containers Needed
You will find that you can fit up to 2 bedrooms with 1 full bathroom in two 40 ft shipping containers placed next to each other.
Use the Kitchen Work Triangle While Designing the Kitchen
Kitchens should be designed with the “work triangle” in mind. Draw a line between the front middle face of the sink to the refrigerator and then to the range. Each side of the triangle should be 4 to 7 feet. The sum of the three faces of this triangle should be between 13 to 26 feet.
Here are the work triangles for the kitchens found in the Kit-o-Parts.
Hallways: Minimum Width
Keep at least 36 inches clear in width for your hallways.
Doors Sizes for Various Rooms
The front door should be 36 inches wide. The door or doors should swing into the house.
Bedroom and bathroom doors can be 2’-8” wide. But, if you have anyone physically disabled and will be living or visiting your home, you will want a minimum of 36 inch wide doors throughout your house. The bedroom and bathroom doors should swing into the room.
Closets can be 24 to 36 inches wide. They can swing in or out of the closet.
Share Your Design with an Architect and Structural Engineer
After you have designed your new home. Share your floor plan with an architect that is familiar with the building codes and zoning ordinances in the area you want to build your home.
The architect will make any adjustment that the municipalities will require before you can obtain a permit to build your newly designed home.
Be sure to consult a structural engineer too. They will design the foundation and all the structural supporting members needed to build a safe place to live.
