shipping container house for sale | A Shipping Container House in Panama

I have been promising you, and promising you some more, that I would make a video of the house. With this post I announce that I am half-way there. I have completed a seven-minute video of the exterior of the house! I wonder if it will break any box office records as Star Wars has just done… ah, probably not, never mind, dumb thought. Here it is (full screen is better) :

This was no small task for me as I had to acquaint myself with my GoPro 3+ camera and the GoPro Studio editing software. I even built some equipment including a slider so I could get smooth side-to-side shots. Commercially-built sliders are available for a bunch of money, but I built mine for not-much with a couple aluminum shower curtain rods, a cut-up plastic kitchen cutting board, and some PVC pipe fittings. I bought the wheels online. Here is my slider. The shower rods were my idea and make for the lightest-weight five-foot slider in the Universe or anywhere…:

The GoPro 3+ camera with an articulated extension arm is mounted on the dolly.

I saw the DIY PVC pipe fitting dolly on YouTube. I put an extra port on the dolly so that in the future I can mount an LED video light for closeup work:

P1030543-001

I bought a gimbal. Until recently, gimbals were only used in big movie productions and cost many thousands of dollars. Now they are available for the hobby market for just a couple hundred dollars. A handheld gimbal allows a video photographer to walk over rough ground, climb stairs, and even run, and the gyros in the gimbal keep the camera stable. I love what miniaturization is doing for tech. Here is Cynthia modeling my gimbal:

That gold and black thing on the right side of the gimbal is one of the three gyro stabilizers. Yeah, I know the camera is upside down. I use it this way as our car dashcam because the power cable fits better on the right. There is a setup option in the camera to reverse up/down of the image… (Cyn was holding it tightly which is why her fingertips are so pink.)

Not counting building the slider, this shoot took me about twenty-hours to video, edit, find music on the Web, and add the audio track. I also had to diagnose and fix a problem with my computer — when I would download and play an audio clip, it sounded all garbled and fuzzy. The problem was that I had an older version of VLC Media Player. Once I uninstalled the program, the audio opened on Windows Media Player and sounded just fine.

I spread the shoot over a couple days to get the sun at its best advantage. Sorry, the sun doesn’t shine on the north side of the house at this time of year so this side is in shade — I’d have to wait another six-months to complete the video. I opted not to wait. Overall I had a good time, and especially enjoyed making the opening and closing credits. I learned a lot… I like steep learning curves!

I hope that you enjoyed my video. I’ll work on the interior shoot soon. I promise.

That’s all for now. Thanks for stopping by.

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Our shipping container house / art house in Panama is for sale.

Here are some details about this house and this area of Panama’:

Lot size = 1,600 square meters (.4 of an acre)
House size =
- Inside Living Space – 2,996 square feet / 278.33 square meters
- Additional Covered Space (outside workshops, bathroom, storage deposito) – 609 square feet / 56.58 square meters
- Outside Under Roof – 1,360 square feet / 126 square meters
Two large bedrooms with full bathrooms
Interior laundry area with washer/dryer/sink
Two, half-bathrooms
One outside toilet/shower
Two-car carport / bohio with tile floor
Tastefully furnished (some personal items not included)
Mature landscaping
Lots of light
Lots of birds (and our front windows are protected to avoid bird strikes)
Good, quiet neighbors, some are working-class, some are business people who live in the city but come here on weekends
Our house is just three kilometers outside of El Valle (El Valle de Anton), a pueblo with restaurants, two banks, two gas stations, a zoo, a frog sanctuary, a large rain-forest waterfall and zip-line tour, numerous hotels and hostels, orchid center, butterfly haven, public library, large public market, grocery and hardware stores
El Valle is on the floor of a volcanic crater. Our house is on the rim where it is cooler, quieter (there is a lot of weekend music in the pueblo), and less congested than down in town
40-minutes from the beaches and the town of Coronado where you can buy most anything that you need
Price = $498,000 USD
See a seven-minute video of the exterior of the house in my post, EXTERIOR VIDEO!
See 93 photos in my post, PHOTOS!

I am not sure where I will go with this blog in the future. Most likely, it will become dormant. In the States, a soap opera will go on for years. Generations even. But in Latin America, the soaps have a limited duration like a book or a movie without a sequel. I suspect my blog will be the later.

I would like to leave this blog up as so many people seem to have enjoyed it. Perhaps it will be like a book up on the shelf, ready to be pulled down and perused by someone who stumbles across it. However, it might all be up to the new owner of the house; perhaps they will want it or perhaps they will want their privacy more and I will be called to take it down. If I make a new blog, I’ll put a link to it here if this blog still exists.

I want to thank each and every visitor, both to my blog and those who made their way to visit us to see it in person. I have very much enjoyed these mostly-Sunday sessions where I cull through photos, tweak them, and write about the past week-or-two. Thanks to Cynthia who, after I have proofed my writing four- or five-times, has proofed it again. Special thanks to subscribers and those of you who have left your comments. I have

That’s all for now. Thanks for stopping by. Fred