Hi,
I'm new to this site and happy to have found it. My wife and I just bought a fixer-upper home on the Sea of Cortez in Baja California. It is 30 miles south of the last power pole, and completely off-grid. No power, no water. The house is a small concrete block structure. Everything has been ripped out including wiring and plumbing, but the brick fireplace is still intact and the structure is solid. We are currently designing the solar system and water system, incorporating gray and rain water collection. We really want to make this place as self-sufficient as possible.
To get started, we want to install a shipping container so we can securely store all of our things, and construction tools. Eventually we envision this shipping container will become part of the garage.
So I'm looking for ideas to support this shipping container. The attached photo shows the house, and we plan to put the container to the right of the motorcycle: deep sand. One option is to just set it on the sand, but I prefer to keep the dunes as they are and support it slightly above them, maybe a foot off the ground. Concrete piers are an option, but digging in this sand to build forms will not be easy, and I'm concerned they may move over time.
This is an interesting footing I found, and thought maybe I can make something similar by driving steel rods into the sand:
https://www.pacificfootings.com/pile-cap-s150/
Does anyone have experience or creative ideas on an easy way to support a 10,000 lb shipping container in sand?
Thanks!
