The idea in the beginning was – and still is – to build a wooden tiny house on wheels out of only or mostly natural materials myself. This takes a lot of time and money – especially because I don’t have any idea of what I’m doing… After a lot of dreaming and thinking and planning, but not really getting anywhere, opportunity stared me in the face and I stared back a second and then jumped on it. Opportunity came in the form of an office container. It’s like these standard shipping containers (6 x 2,5 m) that is minimalistically insulated and mostly used as office on construction sites. That’s how it looked when I first laid eyes on my new home.
At first it seemed really far from what I was dreaming of, but now I see it as a perfect first step. I want to live small, but since I have no idea if I’ll still want it a year from now, I need to try it out. So I see this container as a perfect opportunity for me to test it out on a small budget and in an assessable timeframe. With this container I have a sound structure where I will still have to build in a water supply, a wooden stove, a “bathroom”, a kitchen and everything else I need in order to live in it. So it’s still a lot to build myself and learn by doing it, but I won’t need so much money and time to test out if I actually like living that small :-). Also it feels really good, to finally DO something after thinking and planning for more than a year.
The first question was, what kind of foundation I would use. Since I didn’t want to use concrete, the options I found were either to use thick wooden planks, old tires filled with gravel, a thing called foundation screw or – what I opted for – washed-out concrete boards. still concrete, but not integrated in the ground and easily removable. So I dug some holes, put gravel in and on top the washed-out concrete boards. That looked something like that:
Now that I tried it, I wouldn’t recommend using washed-out concrete boards for that endeavor, because they can break and if they do, they’re useless soon. I would guess that the best solution would probably have been the wooden planks. What’s your opinion? Anyone have experience with different forms of non-permanent foundations?
