Temperature: 19°C high; 13°C low Season: spring Travel time from UK: 2 hours 35 minutes Time difference: GMT +1 Nothing brings a spring to the step quite like the sight of Italy's glorious Amalfi coast. Particularly in March, when its vertiginous twists are bathed in a daily average eight hours of sun. Cliffs plunge into the Tyrrhenian Sea, topped with grand palazzos and smart hotels. Narrow, Roman lanes are stuffed with limoncello stalls flogging the boozy spoils of Sorrento's famous fruit. Its snoozy air and pastel-coloured houses are pure Italian cinema: you might even swear you've seen a young Sophia Loren looking impossibly saucy by the quay. Do as the Italians do and spend the lazy, romantic days enjoying a long aperitivo . Don't miss fresh fritto misto at Marina Grande, the town's old fishing harbour, or Michelin-starred Il Buco in the cellars of an old monastery, where chef Peppe Aversa serves seasonal ingredients under a stone-hewn, vaulted ceiling. Th...
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Off the Grid: Dream of steel shipping container house becomes reality - The Fabricator
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A house made from shipping containers. Will it have windows? Is it a tiny house? How will it be insulated? These are just a few of the first questions people ask my husband, Vaillant, and me when I tell them about our Pacific Pines Ranch project in Oregon.
Several years ago Vaillant and I were discussing building our dream house and what that would entail. After watching a variety of alternative-building documentaries, we stumbled upon houses that were built using steel shipping containers. Some designed their container house to be simple and compact, and others designed theirs to be sleek and modern.
After looking into it further, we decided this would be our dream home. So a little more than two years ago, we began the journey that we are currently on today.
We started this project with minimal building experience. We knew we had a mountain to climb to master all the fabrication skills needed for this build. But we figured, why not? The skills we learned proved to be life-changing and continue to allow us to bring our dreams for the ranch to life.
Our goal is to be debt-free and as self-sufficient as possible. So being able to design, fabricate, build, and weld is important to us and our lifestyle. We have learned as we went along: how to cut steel, what size reinforcements to use for areas we cut out, and the best way to remove rust. The project became our greatest teacher and has shaped us into who we are today.
Strength, durability, and customization are some of the key reasons we decided to build our house out of metal boxes. These industrial steel shipping containers are designed to be stacked eight-high, completely loaded with thousands of pounds of cargo inside. This meant that we could design our house to be multiple levels easily as long as they were stacked together as they were intended to.
Containers are shipped all around the world and can endure the toughest conditions. They withstand saltwater, wind, snow, ice, rain, heat, and cold, and they have great longevity because they are manufactured out of Cor-Ten steel. Their ability to be customized as needed makes designing a structure essentially like playing with life-size LEGOs. Forty feet of windows? No problem. Cantilever balcony? No problem. The options are endless. They go as far as budget and imagination allow. In the end, our design will have seven shipping containers, six balconies, a rooftop deck, and one entire side of the house will be glass doors.
Currently we are working on container No. 6 and No. 7 of the structure. Our life on the ranch has been consumed with an endless cycle of metal fabrication processes: grind, weld, powder coat, repeat. We'll keep this up until the structure is complete.
Two years ago Jessica and Vaillant Passecker began their journey of building their dream house out of steel shipping containers in Oregon. This new blog series will cover their journey creating Pacific Pines Ranch and the metal fabrication skills they learned along the way. Images provided by Pacific Pines Ranch
We are constantly trying to improve our fabrication skills and have learned so much along the way. It's a special challenge to build a metal house so close to the Pacific Ocean, and one that we have happily accepted.
Stay tuned as we share more about our container house project and the metal fabrication skills we've acquired along the way.
You can follow more of the Pacific Pines Ranch project on Instagram, YouTube, and Facebook.
Everything you need to know to have the best woodsy getaway in 2021. This camping cottage, as it's classified, can be found at French Creek State Park, just an hour outside Philadelphia. It's one example of cabins in Pennsylvania state parks. (Photo courtesy of Pennsylvania State Parks, Commonwealth of Pennsylvania) With the warm weather upon us, you've probably been looking at your calendar, hoping to plan a getaway. I have a suggestion: Stay in one of many cabins in Pennsylvania. As my family has discovered over the past decade, the Pennsylvania state park system offers affordable cabin and yurt options that are comfortable, nostalgic and wonderfully woodsy. (Yes, you can bring your dog to some.) Plenty are within an easy drive of the Philadelphia area. And with high elevations, swimming lakes and waterfall hikes, there are plenty of options for cooling off. Here, a guide to how to do it best. PLANNING YOUR TRIP Where are these state parks? Pennsylvan...
Susan Law Cain/Shutterstock With their gable roofs and symmetrical windows, colonial houses can make quite a statement. Classic, elegant, and charming, they've become embedded in the white picket fence, American dream imagery. According to Wentworth Studio, the colonial revival began in the 1880s and lasted until around 1945. The simplicity of these homes makes them the perfect candidate for additions, alterations, and renovation. American colonial homes tend to have a symmetrical floor plan, with the front door right in the middle of the front exterior and usually flanked by large columns and tall windows. They are impressive buildings, and flippers and renovators enjoy bringing these houses up to a modern standard. Sometimes it's a s...
American firms NAC Architecture and Bernards have used shipping containers to form private apartments in a Los Angeles facility for people experiencing homelessness. The Hilda L Solis Care First Village – formerly known as the Vignes Street Interim Housing Project – is located on a 4.2-acre (1.7-hectare) site in Downtown Los Angeles. The complex is named after Hilda L Solis, who chairs the LA County Board of Supervisors. The Hilda L Solis Care First Village is located close to Downtown Los Angeles The facility was created by NAC Architecture, which has several offices in the US, and California-based Bernards, a builder and construction management company. The firms worked in collaboration with LA County's Department of Public Works. Owned by the county, the site formerly held a parking lot and was slated to become a staging area for the construction of a new jail. The complex comprises three-storey buildings created by stacking shipping containers In 2019, plans shi...
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