When we think of shipping container homes, we usually think of square blocks with their original corrugated metal walls, but the range of residential uses for shipping container homes has really increased, and has been for a while. The shipping container home trend is becoming a significant part of architecture and design, for everything from sheds and storage buildings to offices, guest houses, cabins, tiny homes, large mansions, apartment complexes and a lot of others.
Recently we’ve been looking at shipping container buildings — especially residential — more because of the sometimes lower cost of building with them. When you buy shipping container bins used, its for a couple of thousand dollars, and there is a big variety: some are fully bins, some have doors, some have ribs instead of walls, some have roofs, and so if there’s supply appropriate, they can fill in big parts of a building’s material needs.
We also found a company that has been collecting shipping container builds and putting them together in a collection (a pdf book called “Shipping Container Homes”). They’re called Container Home. Here’s one of the houses they’ve collected from Pierre Morency and Julie Robert of Beulac-Garthby, Quebec. In addition to the shipping containers, they poured a concrete basement, so this is a hybrid project. This three bedroom shipping container house cost the pair around $135,000USD.
Shipping containers used:
3 containers, each 40 feet long, used creatively.
“The house has 3 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms and a separate living and dining area. The basement is constructed from reinforced concrete with the second and third tiers consisting of 3 x 40’ containers making a total of 1500 sq ft (140 sq m) of built area.
“This places the construction costs at approx $90 sq ft. Some people might argue that we $90 a sq ft is not really that cheap but this home is not about building the cheapest container home possible – we break down how to build a hyper low cost container home in the members area for those that are hyper cost sensitive. This house is about how you build a high style home on a very reasonable budget.”
Check out the gallery of photos below (all images on our site are expandable, even the featured image at the top).
Find more from “Shipping Container Homes” and other companies we’ve indexed in our Home Designers and Builders Directory. You can search the company’s name and look builders near your area. And to see more shipping container buildings, click here.
