The newest craze in eco-friendly building is shipping container homes. These unique houses use new or used cargo containers as their primary construction material. And since these shipping containers are cheap and plentiful, you can build your very own shipping container house for a surprisingly low cost.
But before you make the choice to construct your very own container home, there are a few things you should consider. Just because container homes are becoming very popular with the green building set doesn’t necessarily mean that you should make the plunge yourself. You need to think about your personal needs, your financial situation, and local building codes before you make the investment of building your own container home.
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Dad was a Master Builder of the old school and known for his quality workmanship. When his teams built a house, it was solid, square and built to last. Before I could follow in his footsteps, the credit squeeze of the 1960’s hit, he closed up shop and we went farming, but I have always been interested in developments in the building industry.
Traditional structures are built with frames of timber or steel, and with materials not as plentiful as they were, framing timbers are not the quality they used to be. I still have friends who are in the building game and one is a plasterboard fixer. These days one of his greatest frustrations is trying to hang plasterboard on frames that are not square and which have warping in the timbers. If the underlying structure is not square and flat, the finishing off cannot look as good as it should. He is often delayed in his work while the framers are called back to square up their work.
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Shipping containers are useful, but are cluttering our ports. Without them America wouldn’t function as the America we all know. Goods and merchandise would arrive into our hands by very different means and likely a much higher price! The containers that carry our goods and vehicles into this country are stacked very high at times along the ports in order to make more room for new arrivals; and the containers continue to be stacked up more and more–it’s clutter! An innovative and green approach is to use these containers as homes. Yes! As homes…
The idea is to convert the rectangular boxes into viable homes. The benefits are that they are extremely sturdy and surpass all building codes in terms of rigidity and strength. They can withstand hurricane force winds and are excellent tornado shelters when placed underground. The main concerns would be getting the plans past the building department. There is a new uniform building code for shipping container homes beginning to work its way around the industry though, so passing code could be more easily achieved.
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