Simple Living – Highland & Co. Acres | Highland Cow Farm & Tiny Home in Kalama, WA

Jaimie and Dave, owners of Highland & Co. Acres farm, smiling together outdoors in winter clothing during outdoor adventure

About Us

Choosing Forever on the Deck of Our Shipping Container Home

The brain is a difficult thing to understand. Your life and health may seem fine one day, and completely skewed the next. The procedure on Dave’s brain did that to him, to us and for a brief season, it seemed that everything that we had worked together for was going to be gone. Choosing joy was my only option. The reality of my life without Dave was to much to handle, and so I CHOSE JOY, again and again.

January 9, 2020

Highland & Co. Acres completed shipping container tiny home nestled in forest with multi-level decks, wooden stairs, and natural stone landscaping

About Us

The Home Stretch – Transforming a Shipping Container into a Home

The foundation was poured, the containers were placed, the welding was done, the walls were framed, plumbing and electrical were in, insulation was sprayed, sheet rock was hung. It was time for the final transformation of 2 metal boxes into our home.

January 3, 2020

Jaimie and Dave from Highland & Co. Acres with Bryce and Rasa from Living Big in a Tiny House YouTube channel after filming shipping container home episode

About Us

That Time ‘Living Big In a Tiny House’ Came to Visit Our Shipping Containers

God gifted us with angels. Angels that were wanted to share our story. Dave and I told Bryce & Rasa, that while we were so honored that they wanted to film our home, it was our story of love and perseverance, even when all seems impossible that we wanted to share. Our prayer was that if by sharing, we could touch just one person’s life, then it was all worth it.

December 20, 2019

Building a Wood Box Inside a Metal Shipping Container Box

Our shipping containers are structurally much stronger than a stick built home, for obvious reasons, and so we were able to use 2 x 4 material instead of standard 2 x 6 material to frame our home. We were building our home to code and it was fully permitted. Our framed wood walls were 16” on center, standard code, but we needed to make sure that they didn’t touch the metal shipping container at any point. To accomplish this, we used the D ring tie downs that are standard in containers and use bailing wire to stand our walls 1” off of our container walls.

December 13, 2019

The Brain Bleed That Re-Routed Our Shipping Container Home Adventure

I am not going to lie; seeing the size of the blood pool in Dave’s brain was terrifying. Hearing the doctor say that he shouldn’t even be alive, much less awake and coherent, was nothing he could explain. He was hopefully optimistic that Dave would continue to stabilize and that the bleed would not progress beyond it’s current borders. It was currently almost 2” x 2” and laying deep in the left side of his brain.

November 15, 2019

Shipping Containers – Are They Really Just Giant Oversized Legos? Part #6

I think that many people, us included, think that building with shipping containers is a lot like stacking Legos. In reality, it couldn’t be further from the truth.

October 16, 2019

Permitting A Shipping Container Home, Part #5

They already knew us; we had been talking for weeks. They had assisted in some critical design pieces. So, when the BIG day came and we headed to Building & Planning and attempted to submit our design and supporting documents to build our shipping container home and were told ‘NO’, we were shocked.! They had ‘dropped a surprise bombshell’ on us.

April 25, 2019

The Goal = Turn Two 8’ Wide Metal Boxes Into A Shipping Container Home, Part #3

Every woman wants a kitchen to call her own, especially a mother. It’s her space, whether she is a gourmet chef or simply trying to feed the kids. Dave and I have 5 of those amazing big people together, and while 4 of the 5 aren’t living at home, I still wanted to try and have a space where they could come and enjoy a home cooked meal. My kids thrive on mom’s cooking and not making room for their needs in our tiny home, even when they were older and no longer living with us, just seemed selfish.

April 17, 2019

About Us

The Dream = Shipping Container Home

They called us crazy. In hindsight, we probably were a little crazy; or maybe a lot. Everyone’s adventure has to begin somewhere, and this is where our’s began.

April 8, 2019