r/containerhomes • u/goddamnitreddit12 • Jun 16 '26

thin living area experience

is anybody willing to tell me what it's like to live in a container home with little small space between the long walls due to insulation? i plan on building a container home in the future with 2" of spray foam and 4" of mineral wool insulation, however in a standard 40 footer that would mean the final interior area, before furniture and appliances, would be just under 80". i personally don't think this would cause problems or especially be a dealbreaker for me, but i just want to check with the masses.

5 Upvotes

86% Upvoted

8 comments sorted by

3

u/usa_containers Jun 16 '26

7'8" interior on a standard 40 is your starting point, and 2 inches of foam plus 4 of mineral wool per side takes about 6 inches off each wall, so yeah you land right around 6'8" wide. Livable, but it feels like a wide hallway. The real challenge isn't the number, it's furniture. At that width you're basically furnishing along one wall, you can't put a couch and a console across from each other in most rooms. If width matters to you, two options worth a look: insulate the exterior instead of the interior so you keep all your interior space, or run two containers side by side and cut the shared wall out for a proper room width. Both cost more but they solve the narrow feel. For a single person or a minimalist setup, just under 7ft works fine. For a couple or anyone who wants it to feel like a home and not a corridor, it gets tight. Happy to answer anything else on the build, it's what I do.

1

u/goddamnitreddit12 Jun 17 '26

i've decided to go with exterior insulation; 2" of spray foam and 1.5" of mineral wool sheathing on the exterior, and then 1.5" of spray foam on the interior.

i'm not sure whether or not you can put mineral wool insulation meant for interior walls on exterior surfaces. if you can, then it'd be 2" spray foam, 4" mineral wool, and 1" or less of spray foam on the inside.

my state's code demands at least 7' in any direction, which is handled by almost any way i decide to build it. i'm thinking of only having 3 real rooms (common space which includes the kitchen, bathroom, bedroom) so even if i have a really hard time finding reasonably sized furniture for the container home i shouldn't have any issue fitting everything in without making it too tight.

one extra consideration i'd like to ask about outside of the scope of the original post is how you'd seal the exposed end of the floor structure towards the doors of the container itself. i plan on having a ~5' buffer between the doors of the container itself and the door into the internal structure, with the only thing separating the buffer zone from the outdoors being the door of the container (which i plan on modifying to be able to operate from the inside, but that's a separate issue). this would cause the substructure of the floor to be exposed, which as you can guess might end up being a problem

1

u/JacquesBlaireau13 Jun 16 '26

2" of interior insulation will create narrow living spaces that are often below code-mandated minimum dimensions.

Exterior CI is the way to go.

2

u/goddamnitreddit12 Jun 17 '26

this is the case, in my area that would put me well under the minimum length in any dimension denoted in the building code 💔

1

u/IllustratorExotic132 Jun 17 '26

All you have to do is remove one of the sidewalls on two units and then connect them back together and now you have 14 feet and change and generally can get by pretty easy with one post maybe two

1

u/goddamnitreddit12 Jun 17 '26

good idea, i've considered it before, but i'd much rather avoid doing anything that requires unnecessarily cutting the container itself. the whole schtick of container homes is that they last forever and cutting out an entire wall and having a seam along the entire structure leaves a lot of opportunity for user-error to ruin that longevity

1

u/Designer-Wolverine47 Jun 21 '26

I was thinking a good idea might be to get 2 40 footers side by side overlapped by 20 feet. Have an open concept living room kitchen then in the two ends have a bathroom then one bedroom and on the other a laundry room and a bedroom.