Many people today are seeking affordable, earth friendly alternatives to traditional housing. One very interesting new alternative is the eco-friendly container home. These homes are constructed of sturdy inter-modal steel building units (ISBU) which can often be purchased at bargain prices. Shipping container homes can range in size from single unit tiny homes to multi-unit dwellings of several thousand feet. In this article, we will explore the possibilities of life in a shipping container. Read on to learn more.
How was the idea of shipping container homes conceived?
Shipping containers have been in use by the military as impromptu offices, barracks and medical buildings for a very long time. Additionally, they have been put to use as emergency shelters in worldwide locations following a variety of natural and man-made disasters. Clever and enterprising people have also made good use of these nearly indestructible units to create safe rooms, art studios, playground structures and more. It’s easy to see that the concept of shipping containers as a home is not much of a stretch. Smart people looking for sturdy, eco-friendly housing have found a natural match in the humble shipping container.
What are the advantages of shipping container building?
If you are seeking an indestructible home, you simply cannot do better than a shipping container. Remember that these giant steel boxes are designed to carry thirty tons of cargo across rough seas free of damage. Additionally, they are designed to be able to support a great deal of weight. When used for overseas shipping, these containers are often stacked to lofty heights. It is not unusual to see nine of them stacked securely, one on top of the other.
The fact that it is possible to stack them also makes tremendous variations in structure size possible. You can use one shipping container to make a cozy, indestructible tiny home that will be safe in any kind of inclement weather or disaster situation. You can also stack and configure them to create a huge structure, such as the one-hundred room, eight story shipping container hotel which recently opened in London.
In addition to being impervious to the elements, shipping containers are safe from infestation by termites, rodents and mold. They are also fireproof and are structurally sound to comply with all building codes in challenging areas where hurricanes, earthquakes and other natural disasters are common.
Affordability is another tremendous advantage. With all these advantages, you would think that shipping containers would be too expensive to be practical, but the fact is, you can usually pick up shipping containers for a song. Very often, shipping containers are just stacked up in port after delivery. Shippers find it less expensive to simply purchase new shipping containers along with each order of cargo rather than go to the trouble and expense of reusing shipping containers. The result is, stacks and stacks of sturdy, environmentally friendly containers are just waiting to be re-purposed at ports around the world.
How are shipping containers environmentally friendly?
The recycling of the actual steel in shipping containers would be labor and resource intensive, so it is actually more environmentally friendly to re-purpose them than to melt them down and make other steel objects from them. Additionally, when you build your house of already constructed steel units, you are making the most of the labor and resources that went into constructing them in the first place, and you are saving a couple of acres of trees.
How can a big steel box be turned into an eco-friendly home?
There are many creative ways to set up, configure, stack, insulate and decorate shipping containers. With their standard height and width of approximately eight feet and standard choices in length of either twenty feet or forty feet, they make a tempting challenge to both professional and do-it-yourself designers who love to play with blocks! Once the basic configuration is decided upon, creative designers can add all kinds of custom touches. All it takes is a blow torch to open up lofts, create big airy windows and turn your basic stack of containers into the framework for the home of your dreams. From there, adding standard finish, design and decorating elements from from solar power to just the right shade of carpeting is really a very simple matter.
It goes without saying that anyone who would want a shipping container home is likely to be creative and innovative. The fact that today there are thousands of interesting shipping container homes all over the world that have been immortalized by innovative container design architect, Jure Kotnik, in a lavish coffee table book entitled Container Architecture just pays testament to this notion. People interested in creating fabulous alternative container living space need only peruse this book and multiple online venues to find a wealth of creative, attractive ideas for designing and building the ultimate in eco-friendly, custom made container housing.
