Bill Hebner, a former youth pastor from Kelowna, Canada has been building affordable housing for the less fortunate since the 1990s. The first homes he built were made of wood, but more recently, he started using recycled shipping containers as the primary building blocs. Availability, sturdiness, and ease of constructions are the main reasons for this choice.
He’s since come up with a fast and simple approach to building homes which is fast, and can easily be reproduced even by unskilled laborers without any loss to quality. The homes that are built in this way using shipping containers are also safe and lockable, as well as scalable in time and materials.
Back in 2010, Hebner and a team of five unskilled workers finished their first repurposed shipping container home. With the aid of a welder they built a simple three-bedroom prototype home out of two 40-foot shipping containers. It took them less than a week to build the entire home. The house features a fully-equipped bathroom and kitchen, and cost less than $10,000 to construct.
Building those first homes was a learning experience for Hebner, and he has since used this knowledge to construct nurseries, schools, and, of course, homes for the poor. Over the past 20 years, he’s raised more than $2.5 million through private fundraising to build these structures and homes.
Hebner is also not slowing down. In 2014 he helped design and build several housing projects across the world, including a dorm for women in Mtwapa, Kenya with the help of the Canadian organization Hope for the Nations, as well as the Khaya Centre in South Africa.
The plans for his homes are available in his newly released book “How to build a simple three bedroom container houseâ€, which can be downloaded from Amazon.
In British Columbia, how did you meet code? what type of insulation did you use and what R value did you get.
These are great questions. There are different for all the different projects and sizes. On the basic house. On private land in South Africa you can build what you want. The school and nursery complied with local building regs. Insulation was spray on R7 on the external surfaces of the containers on the house. Baton insulation was used in the loft space, R20 to keep cost down. I don’t know where you are getting your containers from, but I have not paid near that amount ever for a High Cube container in Africa or the UK. I would suggest Ebay for containers adequate for use. There is not too much more in the house beside the containers. We make the interior walls from the material folded from the un-used container walls so aside from some door frames surface electrics and basic plumbing you are done. Window quality will add more depending on the specification you are after. But in the townships of Africa a basic NC2 window was adequate with security bars. If you have any questions watch the videos or get back to me. Hope this helps.