Hi, I'm Ben and this is the house I built out of shipping containers. Now I've been interested in shipping container architecture for quite some time, but I had a really hard time finding good information about how to get building permits or how much would it cost. Well we did, the research, we documented everything that we did. And now we're so excited to share with you what we learned. So check it out.
This is episode eight, and we're going to build out the bathroom. The bathroom for the main container is located in between the kitchen and the bedroom. It's a walkthrough bathroom because we wanted to avoid wasting space on hallways. I'll show you some different floor plan options that we considered at the end of this video.
Even though it's small, this bathroom has some really cool features like this Moen smart shower system, complete wall covering with many hexagonal tiles. And my favorite feature, this transition between the hexagonal floor tile and the wood flooring in the bedroom. The openness of the floor plan is what led us to try to think about clever transitions between the spaces and the narrowness of this seven foot wide space made us make unusual decisions like this very narrow vanity, which doesn't encroach too much into the walking space.
Now we tried to make up for the storage space lost with the small vanity with this really cool mirrored cabinets that has drawers that slide out from either side. All of the materials and products used in the bathroom came from Home Depot and I'll put a link to a Roundup webpage that has links to all the individual products, including the tile, the cabinets, as well as the plumbing fixtures. The nice people over at Moen, and wanted me to try out their new smart shower system.
In general, I prefer analog tech, but this does have some cool features. You can create different user settings for the exact temperature that you like your shower at, and then just hit one button and it'll alert you when your shower is ready and what better way to celebrate a custom shower experience than with a nice close, comfortable shave, which brings us to the sponsor for this video, Harry's. Harry's is a men's personal care brand that is reinventing the way you shave Harry's founders were tired of overpaying for gimmicky over-designed razors. So they bought a razor factory in Germany, and now they help millions of men shave each day in a premium hassle-free way.
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All right, but enough of that, let's get back to the building, but let's backtrack a little bit and look at the plumbing infrastructure that goes underneath and behind all these really pretty pieces of tile and plumbing fixtures. We use black pipe for the drains that go to the septic tank and for the vent stacks they go up through the roof of the container to vent out any unwanted gas. These drain pipes go above the concrete foundation and amongst the steel beams that make up the structural floor of the container.
Now, remember we had to cut some of those out, but we insulated around them. And then again, added another layer of insulation on top, we use copper pipe to provide clean water to all of the fixtures and started wrapping up the plumbing ruffins. The Moen smart shower has a specialty valve that needs an access panel, so we framed out an area for that right behind the shower wall. Once the ruffins are done, we can start closing up the wall.
Now, first we have to add that layer of plywood. And then the drywall goes on top. We use standard drywall and most of the rooms, but in the bathrooms we use the moisture resistant green board. We use red guard, waterproofing and crack prevention membrane over the green board. This rolls on just like paint. Once the red guard is fully cured, we were ready to travel on some thin set and start adding the mini hexagon tiles.
Now, if you want to save some money, tiling is a definitely a DIY friendly task, especially with these sheets that have a mesh backing. The tricky part about tile is just keeping your cracks and lines consistent. And these sheets with the mesh backing, make it really easy to do that. That being said, we are under a really tight time crunch to finish before the big photo shoot that we had scheduled, so I brought in some pros and they knocked out this whole bathroom, in about two days.
We put cement board down on top of the plywood sub floor before adding the thin set and the tile. Now we're going to use a hexagonal tile for the floor, and we're going to blend that into the wood flooring. I started laying out the portion, that's going to go into the bedroom so that Marcos would know how far to extend the cement board.
Tony had already installed the shower pan because the wall tile had to go over the flanges on it. We're using fusion pro grout in bright white. I've used this for a bunch of projects. It's a little bit more expensive than typical grout, but it comes premixed. It's super stain resistant and it has a little bit more flex, which is going to be really important when we do the transition between the hexagonal tile and the wood flooring. The tile guys finished up for the day and Jesse and Tony stayed late to install the glass shower enclosure. This just involves screwing some metal tracks to the wall, a little bit tricky because you have to drill through the tile and then inserting the glass panels and adding in a few pieces of hardware. I'll put a link to a special page on the Home Depot website that has all the products that we use for this container house. So just check the description box below.
When the tile guys came back, they knocked out the floor in no time at all. Blending hexagonal tile into wood flooring is a design detail I've wanted to do for a long time and had already worked out the rough design simply by taking a knife and then cutting away the mesh and the tile sheets and fitting the pieces together until it looked the way I wanted it to. We're shooting for something a little bit of organic, but not so complex that it would make it too difficult to cut the wood. Before the tile guys called it a day, I had them secured these pieces that encroach into the bedroom so that I could spend the night figuring out how to put the wood flooring around them.
This flooring is about the same thickness as the tile, so I'm going to have to add a layer of plywood. That'll bring the surface up even with the cement board, I got some pieces of half inch thick plywood, and I'm just going to use construction adhesive and some screws to secure this to the sub floor. I'm using an engineered flooring product that's pretty thin. If I was going to use solid wood flooring, that would be closer to three quarters of an inch thick. I would have to trim back that cement board to the profile of the tile.
Now I made sure to order a few extra sheets of this tile so that I can make a template that I use for showing me exactly where to cut the wood flooring. Basically I just cut these extra sheets of tiles to mimic the existing tile that was already glued down and then placed them over the flooring boards so that I could trace the outline with a pencil. Now this did present some complications for laying the flooring boards, because typically I would start from the wall. In this case, I'm going to have to start from the tile and then work my way to the walls.
Once I had traced all my outlines, I use some painter's tape to temporarily fastened the boards together and then use my Ryobi multi-tool with a plunge bit to cut along the lines. I don't use a multi-tool that often, but it's so good in applications like this because you can just cut straight lines and tight corners. When I laid out the floorboards, I was careful to make sure I didn't end up with any tiny little slivers that could easily break. After doing a quick pass over the whole collection of boards. I then finished cutting all the way through them individually.
I then did my first test fit and found that I had to trim out a little bit more on some of the boards to get everything to fit perfectly. My plan was to tape them together and then apply a construction adhesive and glue them down as a whole. But they all came apart, once I tried to lay them. The edges of the floorboards have sort of a tongue and groove type channel. So you insert one into the other at an angle and then snap them down. I really wanted to make sure that these were firmly secured to the sub floor. So I made sure to spread the construction adhesive evenly, then I put some boards and some heavy boxes of tile down on top of them to hold them firmly, pressed into place while the construction adhesive cured. We did a good job of getting the flooring around the tile, but not so great of a job establishing a line parallel to the walls. So in the next video, I'll show you how we fix that.
We use painter tapes to cover up the wood and then grouted in between all the tiles, once again, using fusion pro grout in bright white. Initially I was apprehensive about the space in between the tile and the wood. I was worried that there'd be a little bit of flex and that the grout would pop out. That's why I did a series of experimental projects earlier in the year, where I tested this type of grout as an inlay material for wood. And because this ground has a little more flex, it held up really nicely. With the floors done, we are now ready to bring in the toilet and install the vanity.
Installing the vanity like this isn't too tricky as basically like placing a cabinet or almost a piece of furniture and then just anchoring it to the wall. We didn't place the sink and faucet and brought in the plumber to connect the drain pipe, but we were able to connect the supply pipes ourselves.
Now I love the durability and aesthetic of completely tiled walls in the bathroom, but it does make tasks like hanging the mirrors and towel bars a little bit more tricky because drilling through tile. Isn't that easy. That being said, once we screwed the frame for this mirrored cabinet to the wall, the rest of the pieces just plugged right in. This cabinet basically installs like a heavy picture frame. And the only really trick is just making sure you getting it level. So you don't want your drill bit to slide up and down or to the side when you're trying to drill through that slippery tile. I cut some three quarter inch thick poplar to trim out the pocket door that separates the kitchen from the bathroom.
Pocket doors are great, but you do need to make a thicker than normal wall to accommodate them. So we couldn't use one on the bedroom side, since that wall cavity is housing, the control panel for the smart shower. I made an access panel out of the dry wall and plywood solid Oak bookshelf that hangs over it to kind of conceal it just a little. Now I almost didn't do this shelf because I considered using a barn door sliding system to create a door on this side. But instead we went with a linen curtain. We just thought it'd be a little bit more ethereal and light looking. I'm mostly happy with the bathroom. I'm not sure I'd use the smart shower system again, and it's not a knock on that product, it's just that the existing options already worked so well. I absolutely love the floor transition detail though. And it's holding up great after a year of heavy use.
But let's for a minute talk about the layout of the floor plan itself and why I chose a pass through bathroom with such a shallow vanity. This layout allows visiting guests to access the bathroom without having to walk through the bedroom, moving the bathroom to the end of the container would provide a more efficient layout for the bathroom, but now the bedroom is a pass through space and you'd have to consider some Murphy bed type options in order for the bed, not to become a major barrier. A skinny bathroom along one side with a hallway to bypass it is another option, but this just eats up more square footage because that hallway is going to need to be about three feet wide and isn't very useful space.
Now I am in the process of planning out another container project and for this one, I most likely will do a loft layout like this, which does feature a bathroom at one end. But for now I'm very happy with how this one came out. Although I'm thinking about doing a custom vanity that runs the full length of the wall that it's up against. Thanks for watching. Be sure to check out our other episodes of this project and don't forget to subscribe to this channel. If you haven't already.