Home Improvements

Soon it was Spring of 2017.  The foundation was ready for the house, but we still had to wait until Christmas for the house delivery.  So with 3 weeks of vacation to blow we started on some projects to turn camping into “glamping”.  The first was to get out of the dirt and relocate the screened in shelter to the top of the new foundation.  Half a box of tapcon concrete screws and some tarp clips and we had the shelter anchored down in it’s new home.  Lots less bugs and a lot more breeze! So far tested to 40 knots of wind.

Another amenity was to anchor a hook in the ceiling of the bunker for our 3 gallon solar showers. It was nice to take an inside shower after almost 3 years of camping.  BTW, the best solar showers we’ve found are these: https://amzn.to/2KjyWaL Next we turned to adding on to the container.  The first step was to take some of the leftover concrete form lumber and make a screen wall and door for the end opening.  That done, a day or so and more lumber and we had a queen sized bed stand for our air mattress. Lastly I made an end table for the bed, and some shelving for the far end of the container.

Then using solar panels and some other electrical stuff I brought I built our 360 watt solar power system. Part of this was a fuse panel with power inverters for 110V electricity and also USB power outlets.

For those of you thinking of building something like this I suggest using controllers and battery monitors from Victron  like these:

https://amzn.to/2G8UlRr

https://amzn.to/2KfRgBk

 

To finish it off on the next trip we added a rain collection roof and 1000 gallon water tank. A mistake was to put all of our solar panels on the roof as events later proved.

I secured the roof to the corners of the container with 1/2 inch thick steel cables, which a couple of months later proved to be not enough.  Using some PEX plumbing that I brought out we tapped the tank to a 12 volt boat pressure water pump and a filter system from H2O Splash.  I highly recommend these guys for your water purification needs, they are extremely helpful and responsive.  Later we bought a reverse osmosis filter system from them for drinking water.

https://www.h2osplashwaterfilters.com/bigbl20wafit2.html

Another handy thing to have is a small water filter like this one just in case the power goes off.  Ever since I graduated from the various USAF survival schools my goal in life has been to never get dehydrated again! https://amzn.to/2rD115E

Survivor Pro Water FilterNow that the water independence was secured it was time to turn to refrigeration.  At this point we were going through $10/day of somewhat hard to obtain ice to cool our food and ice our rum.  A trip to home depot secured a $150 small chest freezer.  Since we were going to use this as a refrigerator, we needed a special thermostat since stock freezer thermostats won’t set a temperature above 0 degrees F.  My survivalist friends had come up with the solution, which is an external thermostat with a probe that turns the freezer power on and off.  It works really well, and as a result the freezer motor only runs 5 minutes every hour with the thermostat set to 35 degrees F.  https://amzn.to/2wJEdqb   Our ice didn’t melt at all, and our solar power system handled the load well.

The last problem to address was easier access.  The big doors on the container were difficult even for me to close sometimes, much less Princess.  So for about $750 I ordered a walk door and a window from a company in Minnesota.  These were designed to be welded in to holes in the container walls.  There were only two companies selling these that I could find, the other in California. The less than truckload (LTL) shipping down to Miami was expensive, around $500.  That made the last leg from Miami to Water Island ($200) look like a bargain. A couple of days spent cutting the holes in the container walls and a welding session by Cliff and they were in.

 

Since hurricane season was coming Cliff also made and welded anchoring brackets to secure the container to the concrete slab.  At the time we had no idea of how timely that project was!