Home Being Built With Shipping Containers

CALGARY, Alberta, Nov. 8 (UPI) — A former carpenter says he intends to live “off the grid completely” in a house he’s constructing out of shipping containers on land in Canada.

“It’s just going to look like a regular home,” Bill Glennon said of the house he’s building near Rimbey, Alberta.

Glennon said the inspiration behind his intended 5,000-square-foot, four-story, four-bedroom, five-bathroom home — complete with garage, workshop and media room — came from his wife Roseanne, who spotted a newspaper article about someone else’s shipping container home years ago, the Calgary Herald reported Monday.

Glennon and his wife, in their 50s, were looking for a retirement home and, making the rounds of home and design shows, didn’t see anything they liked for under $1 million.

So Glennon put his construction skills to the test and began drawing plans for his dream home being built out of 30 shipping containers, each costing about $3,000 and weighing more than 11,000 pounds.

They began excavating in 2009 with help from their 19-year-old daughter, Kala Glennon’s brother Bruce and sister Colleen who’ve helped with welding, the roof, painting, tile and lighting, the newspaper said.

Glennon says he wants to live “off the grid completely” and has put in a wind generator, a solar-panel system and energy-efficient windows with a solar hot water heater to come later. The whole project should be finished next spring with a total cost ending up at about $125 per square foot.

“Right now, we’re trying to insulate the outside, and we’re still waiting for the concrete to be poured on the roof, back-fill the garage, and get some plumbing in,” Glennon said last week. “We’ve got a long ways to go.”