In the March 24 issue of the Fort Worth Weekly, we ran a story called Housing the Homeless, which dealt with retired home builder Mike Wallace’s failed attempt to build inexpensive homes out of shipping containers on the Fort’s East Side.
The failure wasn’t Wallace’s; it was just that the neighborhood associations didn’t like the idea of those long narrow metal boxes–despite considerable interior and exterior changes–being called homes and then sold at cost, with some sweat equity built in, to homeless people.
Well, Wallace, as noted in that story, took his prototype container home and bought an acre of land in bucolic Joshua, in Johnson County, and plunked it down there.
Since then, he and his volunteer crew, which includes the formerly homeless Troy Sanderson, who lives in the container, have built a cement-filled cinderblock foundation. And on Saturday, May 22, they brought in a crane from Dallas to lift the container onto it. The event was wonderful country. There was fantastic poundcake aplenty for the dozen or so spectators, beef hotdogs and plenty of sweet tea.
What was not there were any television crews to catch the event. The finished container was put in place first, then welded to steel plates in the foundation. That was followed by the lifting and setting of two additional containers on the foundation. The three containers were all then welded together.
The tiny houses that the East Side neighborhood people objected to having in their area is now going to be larger than 1000 square feet, with both a side porch and front porch.
The next step in the project is to cut some of the metal between the containers to make the rooms as Wallace wants, lay the flooring and interior walls and ceiling. When that’s done, the exterior will be bricked and a standard peaked-roof will be put into place. It’s probably going to be the prettiest house in the neighborhood. Plus it will be tornado and flood proof.
It was definitely a boy’s day, what with hooking up the containers to the crane, the fellows using guidelines to get those containers into place and all those welding sparks.
The house ought to be completed in two more months. We’ll keep you posted.
What a blast! Thanks for the experience, Mike. We are so glad to have been able to help A Place To Sleep with the positioning of the containers, and we look forward to volunteering in the future! This will surely become a fantastic AND practical solution for anyone seeking a low-cost, high quality housing solution.
Thanks also to Peter Gorman with Fort Worth Weekly for covering the event and successfully wrangling the 48 foot container, cowboy style…