Seismic calcs, weight bearing walls, roof angles - we have a Structural Engineer

Its funny how sometimes you just fall into something and look back and think, how did that happen. We we have been going back and forth with whether we use an engineer that has experience with Container Houses (yes, all 2 of them...) or someone that is local and knows our County's Building Dept. or someone near our architect....decisions, decisions. So we got a few quotes and a few less than polite remarks when we told them about what we wanted to build and even a "You can't build that in CA", sorry but its already been built in CA, so we are nixing you.

In our travels we sent our plans off to a company right here El Dorado County, D&Z Engineering. And they actually returned our call and to our surprise expressed interest, if not I say - delight, at the idea of helping us with our weird home. So we toddled off to meet with Mark and Jim (Jim is the big Kahuna but bad pic on the website) and they couldn't have been nicer and more interested. They have extensive experience with green construction and are thrilled at being able to add a container home to their portfolio.They are looking forward to working with Eric (our architect) and say they are up for the challenge.

So we are off with the next step of this process which also requires finalizing our window locations, type of windows and other little details that I am constantly changing my mind about. We are also hedging on the living roof aspect of the house. We love the idea of a living roof on the house but Jim brought up a good point, you are surrounded by 22 acres of living garden, its all you see, do you need it on your roof too? For the added cost and headache, maybe we should leave that to the urbanites that really need a living roof to look at. We will have to resume intense deliberation with Eric on the subject.

So stay tuned, next step is permiting, Ohhhhhh, Ahhhhhh. We are in the midst of calculating the permit costs, what we have to pay so these little kids can attend a nice elementary school on our nickel!! Maybe we can enroll Ziggy if we are paying for it.

Can you believe that this -

Turned into this -