Container House Interior Cladding

It’s the hottest time of the year for us. It is way too scorching to be working outside on the North (sunniest) face on the exterior cladding. So we have temporarily moved indoors and have started working on our container house interior cladding.

Our aim is to finish the first living space as soon as possible. This area will be for Louis and Gwen’s private use. It won’t be long before they’re packing their cupboards and moving in their furniture. The next few months are going to be really exciting because things are moving quickly for their little container space. I, of course, know what is being planned, and I encourage you to sign up for our newsletter if you haven’t done so already. I am just so excited about what’s coming up in the next few months.

Why Clad the Interior?

As you know, we’ve been putting a lot of effort into cladding the exterior of our house, so you might be wondering why we’re also cladding the inside.

• More insulation means less energy spent on maintaining a comfortable temperature in our house in both winter and summer
• It is difficult to neatly install built-in-cupboards and bathroom fixtures (read expensive) into the corrugated sides of a shipping container
• Those corrugations will also make it difficult to keep the floor clean once it is a home as dust will collect in the corners
• Cladding allows us to hide all the plumbing pipes, and electrical conduits

Container House Interior Cladding

For insulation on the interior we used some sheets of Styrofoam. We bought some self-extinguishing sheets of Styrofoam. Louis ran our own burn tests to double check the self-extinguishing properties. We want our house to be within South African building regulations, so this was an important aspect for us.

I am happy to report that should an electrical short take place sometime in our house’s future, the Styrofoam will melt out of the way, but will not catch alight. However, even this is extremely unlikely as all our cables will run through conduits.

We had to plan carefully though, in order to make sure all our plumbing pipes and conduits were worked out and installed before we fitted the Styrofoam and boards.

Styrofoam is too soft for a finished wall, so over that, we have been fitting some of the reclaimed OSB we salvaged last year. We had a few options for this. Fibre cement boards being one of them. We will be using fibre cement boards in the bathroom areas as it is less likely to suffer from the moisture usually found in a bathroom.

We used the same type of screws that we used to attach the exterior cladding for the interior cladding. Where we will be keeping the other side of the container looking like a container, Kevin used a grinder to cut off the tips of the screws. He then used a sanding disk to grind them flush with the panel. A lick of paint and you’ll never see them again.

We painted the boards with primer once fitment was complete. Over the primer we will add our wall finishes to make it look more like a home and less rustic. But more on that coming soon to a device near you!