The Ultimate Cheap Vacation Cabin!

“It’s the end of the world, as we know it…”  REM

All around us, we’re reminded that the world seems to thrive on “doom and gloom…”

As the American economy takes a nose-dive, we are reminded that ALL countries, ALL governments, face their own perils.

Citizens are losing jobs, homes, and health.

FACT:

• Almost 10% of the nation’s working population is unemployed.
• 17% of construction workers are out of work. That’s a lot of “idle hammers.”
• Millions of American homes are in foreclosure. More will follow, soon.
• Thousands of Americans die in the street every single year, due to a lack of adequate health-care insurance.
• 45 million Americans have NO health Insurance at all;

45 million uninsured Americans is more than…

• 12 million more than the population of Canada (32.2 million)
• Nearly 5 million more than the population of Spain (40.2 million)
• 20 million more than the population of Iraq (24.7 million)
• Nearly five times more than the number of Americans living with cancer (9.2 million in 2001)
• 2.5 times higher than the number of Americans with diabetes (18.2 million in 2002)
• 7 million more people than those living with HIV throughout the world (38 million)

There are…

• Nearly 150 uninsured Americans for each physician in America
• Nearly 7,500 uninsured Americans for each hospital in America
• Over 84,000 uninsured Americans for each Member of Congress

45 million uninsured Americans is about the same number of Americans living in…

• West coast states (45.2 million in California, Oregon and Washington)
• Middle America (44.7 million in Alabama, Arkansas, Colorado, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee and Wyoming)
• Northeastern states (42.0 million in Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island and Vermont)

And, to make matters even worse…

• There are 6 unemployed people for every job opening in America.

Remember I’m not talking about Iraq, or Afghanistan… I’m talking about AMERICA.

Notably, too, we here in “the land of plenty” can’t blame our fall on a plague, or an invasion, or even a war on our own soil.  American civilization is collapsing because it’s rotten. Things get a little bit worse each day, people get a little more desperate, the first few breakdowns are fixed, and then it becomes harder and harder to fix everything.

And then it all starts to spiral down the drain.

History is full of such stories, but the assumption of a grand triggering event is a form of hubris: the belief that no matter how bad things feel, it would still take a massive right hook to knock us out. In reality, collapses can be staggered, local, and largely ignored by those not directly affected until so widespread that it’s too late to do much.

That’s the CANCER that is killing America.

I can recognize cancer when I see it. I know all about Cancer. My young wife is dying from it.

So, as more and more American families slowly succumb to the disease that is killing us, as they struggle daily… weekly, to stay afloat, we look to the skies, and hope for a miracle.

Take a deep breath…

And don’t wait for “Uncle” to show up on your front porch with a solution. It’s not going to happen.

Those fat-cats in Washington are far too busy taking care of themselves.

By the time they finally decide to try and stop the flood, it’ll be too late to build an Ark.

The hardest part is that those jackasses started the mess in the first place, up there in their “insulated cabins of comfort”, on Capital Hill.

The rest of us are left to fend for ourselves. Some of us aren’t content to just “sit and wait…”

We have loved ones, families, children. And we need to insure their survival, even if WE are the threat that will consume us all.

I’ve been corresponding with a guy lately. We’ll call him “J”.

A reader recently contacted me (we’ll call him “J”), and told me about a “Corten Cabin” he has… stashed way up in the woods. It’s what some of us would call a “Bug – Out Box”.

Now, “J” contacted me, because his steel box looks just like the box on my blog header (on another blog I write about “alternative construction”),  except for his container is twice as long.

“J” has a 40′ High Cube Shipping Container sitting on cinder blocks, out in the middle of nowhere… that he uses for weekend fishing trips.

There’s a logging road for access, unmaintained for years… that’s only passable when it’s not under mud, or frozen under snow drifts.

The story he told me of them towing that container into the woods was hilarious.

I bet his father-in-law wasn’t laughing. They blew up his truck moving that box… Oy.

It reminded me of a box we moved years ago, one that kept trying to drag us back down the hill, before we got to the top of it…

We “saw our lives flash before our eyes” about three times that day…

Anyway, while he goes up there on weekends in the summer, he’s thinking that “with the economy trying to kill itself”, his whole family may be forced to head there some day,  in order to ride out whatever “chaos and storm” the “hard times to come” might bring…

Let’s face it… like a lot of us… he’s nervous.

I suspect that this is in part due to TV shows like “The Colony” that advocate forward thinking all  rolled up to form a dysfunctional view of what survival in our times may end up being like, if you’re a complete idiot…

I’ve watched a few of these “disaster simulator/reality TV shows”. You know, “here’s a look at what happens, when it finally hits the fan”.

But  you know… we may not all get stranded with a rocket scientist, an electrical engineer, a mechanic, a nurse, a martial arts expert, and a doctor, yada… yada… yada…

We might get stranded by our “onesies.” So, we should understand what we’re doing, in case the cavalry doesn’t show up in time to make any repairs.

Or worse, we’ll inherit that drunk bastard up the street. You know the one…

… he’s always passed out on the lawn, none of his cars run, and he’s always getting his lights turned off. His wife is always at your house, “borrowing” groceries.

Yeah, they’re gonna be a lot of help… Oy.

Anyway, like  I was saying…

“J” thinks the if “the world goes to hell in a handbasket”, he and his family (he’s married with 4 children aged from 3-9) might be forced to head up there in the winter time, and he reminds me that it’s REMOTE.

There are no neighbors. There is no store. Walmart ain’t got there yet…

There’s just your wife yelling at you because you forgot the big Sam’s Club carton of toilet paper! Ya Dumb Ass! 

It’s not “heaven”, but there’s a neat little bass lake about 200 feet from his front porch.

He’ll have whatever he hauls in with his small SUV, and that’s it. He doesn’t want to rely on propane, or any other type of “store-bought” fuel, simply because it might not be available.

Now, here’s where it get’s interesting, because there are so many opportunities here…

“J” wants to  build a steel box to head to in case “things get really bad”. Right?

But this exact same box would make an ideal cabin, or even a cool small vacation home for “an all-American outdoors loving family”.

Hey, don’t laugh! In Iraq and Afghanistan, we lived in these things, and even built bunkers out of them. They’re “Tonka Tough!”

Okay, back to the case…

The box we’re talking about isn’t anything to write home about, it’s just a big shipping container. It’s the same as the hundreds of thousands of them littering shipping ports all across America. You can thank “idiot politicans” for creating a trade deficit that finds them dumped here.

You see, it’s actually cheaper to build new ones, than return the empties, for re-use.

In this case, except for some added insulation and siding on the outside, it’s a regular 40′ shipping container.

The box sits with the front face (40′) facing a few degrees of due south. It wasn’t “a solar plan”, it’s just the way the site worked.

“J” (and his brother – who is no longer available for “cabin help”) put a waterproof membrane on the exterior of the box. They used a rubberized roofing membrane that you spray on.

Why?  Well, because they found a barrel of it, laying around, that nobody wanted.

I know, I know… Don’t ask, don’t tell…

After they’d added more “water seal” to the box, they firred it out with 2×6’s.  This created cavities, and those cavities received about 4″ of PolyIso foam into the cavities.

When I asked him where he got the PolyIso foam boards, he told me that they’d found/commandeered/discovered the material from a vacant industrial real estate listing they had. It was just laying there collecting dust…

“Real Estate Plunder”. Okay, works for me…

Don’t worry “J”… we won’t hold “logistical left-turns” against you. We might, however, hold it against you that you’re a (gasp!) realtor!

He put some scrap siding over the insulation.

Anyway, as near as I can figure, he’s got about an r20-r30 wall system (depending on which PolyIso product it is, the insulation value ranges from about r5 to r8 per inch).

So, he can “almost” hold heat in, once he gets it there.

I say “almost”‘ because “J” ran out of insulation at the top of the box, so the roof is uninsulated.

But, he’d been thinking about some kind of clerestory roof anyway to bring in more summer sun. There’s a pair of vents on to roof, that look just like the one in my blog header illustration.

We’re going to pay some attention to this. We need a solution that will allow:

• more room
• more air, and…
• even some cool roof pitch.

“J’s” back is gonna hurt for a week or two, by the time we’re done.

That just leaves the floor.

“WARNING! WARNING! DANGER – WILL ROBINSON!”

Shipping container floors are treated with serious insecticides and fungicides to keep alien bugs out of foreign ports.   Wood preservatives containing a number of organochlorine insecticides, including aldrin, dieldrin, chlordane and lindane, are just the beginnings of the treatment that floors receive.

I ALWAYS, ALWAYS, ALWAYS, rip these floors out.

Why? Because you can’t EVER trust the shipper you got the container from.

The labels denoting the presence of that toxin are often worn off, or even just missing. Because the containers are moved so often and with so many variables…  you can’t tell which ones got the toxic sprays just by looking.

Some containers escape without being sprayed or treated, but the only way to know for sure, is to take a sample of the floor out, and get it tested at a lab.

There’s are products that you can put on the floor to encapsulate them. That’ll seal the toxins in there, but they’ll still BE there. And, those products are expensive. We’ll go a different route.

Rip it out, carefully, so that “you don’t get any on ya…” and replace it with a nice layer of concrete. Concrete is self leveling, and it also create thermal mass, and you’ll thank me later.

Don’t burn the floor. You want to breathe that crap? Bury it as deep as you can.

Okay, okay… I can hear you environmentalists screaming into your monitors.

“You Bastard! You’re polluting the earth!”

Look, the guy has a small SUV, not a dump truck. He can’t possibly haul that toxic wood out to the haz-met site. It’s not “nuclear waste.” And, he hasn’t got 100 barrels laying around to put it in. He needs to deal with it somehow…

Okay, all that accomplished, you’d have “shelter”.

Inside, it’s spartan. It’s so bad that his wife won’t even go up there! Once you get through those big steel doors, you’re greeted by a few wooden shelves, a tiny wood stove, hammocks, and a blow-up mattress for a bed.

Oh yeah, they have an outhouse. Did I forget to mention that? A “shanty with a hole in the butt seat” kind of outhouse.

He has a composting toilet, but it’s still in the box, in the garage.

Okay, he needs a bathroom, too.

And, he reminded me about 11 times that the box gets cold. So, we turn up the heat a bit.

He doesn’t want to try any “geothermal nonsense” (his words) because the container is already in place, and he couldn’t move it if he wanted to.

Actually, his exact words were; “Don’t be giving me none of your Geothermal nonsense, I don’t like shovels, my friend…”

He doesn’t want to rely on solar panels, because he’s not a guy with a lot of money to set up a complete “off-grid” situation. The closest he’s come to that is a Harbor Freight photovoltaic set-up with a pair of small panels.

So, he has enough power for a laptop computer, a TV, and maybe a radio. (I’m going to try and talk him into replacing that crap inverter, and adding a panel or two so that he can establish some kind of “real” electricity, for refrigeration and other necessities.)

With the world going digital, I wonder what TV signal he’d get? I’m thinking he uses a VCR or a DVD player… Remind me to check, okay?

He has a good water supply. It’s a hand-pumped well that draws water from about 175 feet. If he wants a shower, he pumps water up into a black painted 55 gallon barrel on the roof of his container, and then gravity-feeds it to a showerhead.

This is great for one guy on a weekend, but it’s not gonna work for a “family in residence”.

We need a solar powered pump, too.

BTW: The gray water from the shower, and doing the dishes goes out into the garden, that for now, only feeds the wild animals that live around his box.

That’s good, but we’ll do better.

They have a small Swedish fireplace/stove combination installed, but they only use it for heat at night. It’s sitting on a quartet of scrap patio pavers as a hearth. So, although he’s only heating about 300 square feet, it’s not exactly ideal. We’re gonna move the stove, and build it “into a better box”.

Again, it’s about managing resources. “J” says that he doesn’t want to use it during the day, if he doesn’t have to. Why? He hates chopping wood. HATES it!

The stove vents out the side of the box. Sort of… It’s a rather shaky connection.

So, we do some chimney repair, and then we use what I call “idiot solar” to help bump up the heat. But, we’ll use solar in a different way than “normal people” are used to.

Okay, I can see that there is a lot to do, but he needs to do it one weekend at a time.

And, he needs to do it in a way that maintains the security of the structure, so that he doesn’t end up with visitors he doesn’t want, or need, while he’s away…

So, over the next few posts in this series, we’re going to take that empty 40′ High Cube Shipping Container, and we’re going to turn it into a full blown cabin, complete with sleeping lofts, and enough interior to let it be used comfortably, for a long vacation in the woods.

We’re not just going to insulate that container top. we’re going to “weatherize” the box.

Weatherizing isn’t “turning off the heat and freezing in the dark.” It’s using ’stored’ energy (and less of it than you might think) combined with small resources to achieve the same level of comfort that you used to get from that McMansion of yours.

How do you accomplish this?

Well, first, you find all the “energy nasties” and you give them the boot. In this case, we’ll start with that leaky stove chimney, and work outward from there. Careful planning and attention to detail will have this family in a sustainable vacation home, in no time.

We’re also going to deal with indoor air quality.

Remember that the air quality is 2-5 times worse in your house, than the air outside it.   This is a small space, that may be inhabited by a family of six, under severe conditions, maybe for extended periods. Beyond air quality, we need to pay close attention to energy use, moisture (and it’s movement… unless you LIKE mold and mildew), combustion zones, and ventilation.

Remember, condensation is a killer.

Areas in walls and roof cavities that stay moist, start to grow funky things that attack your lungs. YUCK! He says they get some snow… so we need to address the Ice dams on roofs that form on the roof which can contribute to this problem, too. So naturally, we’re going to pay close attention to that roof, it’s construction, and it’s pitch.

We’ll talk about fixing that stove vent/chimney, before you huff and puff… and burn your house down…

We’ll talk about designing, building, and attaching a roof to catch the sun and even a couple of kids.

We’ll talk about photovoltiac panels on the cheap, and an “in-wall solar heating” solution.

We’ll talk about building loft spaces into it, to get the kids up and out of your hair.

We’ll talk about a “hidden” Master bedroom.

We’ll talk about the floor of that shipping container, and what to do about it.

We’ll talk about a kitchen (with a refrigerator and everything!) and a bathroom.

We’ll talk about catching water and setting up a graywater system.

And, we’ll talk about building storage into that shipping box, so that it can house all your crap, so that you don’t step on everything you own, in the middle of the night, when that damned bear is trying to beat down the door!

And we’re going to accomplish this, a goal at a time, a weekend at a time…

Why?

Because you “Show me a man who failed… and I’ll show you a man who didn’t have a good plan”.

Stay tuned.

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