Shipping Container Tiny Home and Sustainable Pop Up Restaurant

Hello, my name is Evelyn and I will be in 10th grade this fall.

I've always loved the charm of tiny homes and I took this opportunity to make a model of a tiny home inside a shipping container. This home features a small living area with a television, a wet bathroom with a compost toilet, a loft bedroom with storage, and a small kitchen. The white block above the sink in my TinkerCad model represents a hydroponics system. The owner of this affordable tiny home could grow their own plants like herbs and vegetables and sell them through the shop window as either produce or in simple dishes.

I made this design using TinkerCad and then 3D printed the model.

Supplies:

• TinkerCad
• 3D Printer (Optional)

I started off with the shipping container model provided in TinkerCad. The link is on the Make it Modular contest page, but here it is again.

https://www.tinkercad.com/things/4QWbxUq7O95

I changed the walls of the shipping container to a nice clean white and made the floor brown to represent wood. I added a door and two windows, one at the top of the left wall above where the loft bed will be and the other on the wall closest to the front. That window will be for serving customers a nice healthy meal grown sustainably in your own hydroponic garden. (This garden is represented by the large white block on the adjacent wall.) The hydroponics system would be made using cleaned upcycled materials like PVC pipes.

Next, I added walls in the top left corner of the building to form a wet bathroom with a door. In theory, this would have a shower and a compost toilet.

Finally, I made a white ladder that will provide access to the sleeping loft.

After all the walls and doors and windows were constructed, I built a small kitchen area. There is a stove, a mini fridge, a counter, and a sink. I also included a counter below the window for a chef to place a customer's orders when they are ready to be picked up. This counter could be folded down when not in use.

I then made a small sofa and wall mounted flat screen television so that the owners of this tiny home would have a place to relax after a long day of running a pop-up restaurant.

Next, I added a floor above the entrance area and bathroom for a small sleeping loft. Who needs a Murphy bed to save space when you can have a whole second floor? I also made a storage cubby area to act as a nightstand and dresser and general place for storing things.

The loft bed was very simple to make. I made a white rectangle for pillows and a blue rectangle for the covers.

The TinkerCad model is finished!

If you have access to a 3D printer, I would recommend printing this. Ideally, I would have made this model into a thing I could lasercut and then decorate it, but that didn't end up working out. I might make a model of this anyway since I like building things, and if I do I will update this article.

If this affordable and eco-friendly tiny home and pop-up restaurant existed in the real world, there would be many additional features.

While a hydroponics system indoors would be cool, in order to run a restaurant that could turn out a profit you would need a larger garden. That's why next to the home would be a garden for the restaurant that also has community plots. Anyone from the community who helps care for the garden would get a discount on the restaurant's meals. There would also be a compost bin to help regenerate nature and a recycling bin to promote recycling. There would be a sign and an outdoor dining area of course, and a bicycle storage lot to promote eco-friendly transportation.