Container Houses — Advantages, Disadvantages, and Cost Comparison

Container houses are exactly what they sound like: homes built from steel shipping containers—the same boxes you see carrying cargo on trains, trucks, and ships. From these giant building blocks, people are creating houses of all shapes and sizes.

The smallest containers make a compact box of about 100 square feet of floor space. Eight larger containers can form a two-story house of about 1,400 square feet. Hundreds of container micro-apartments can make up a huge apartment building.

Advantages:

Prefabrication: Many container houses are available as prefabricated modular homes, which shortens construction time. Some companies advertise delivery in 10 weeks! Most building-code inspections are completed in the factory, which makes the process simpler and faster. Or, if you are designing a custom home or building a DIY project, containers give you an interesting pre-built structure to work with.

Easy to transport and site: There is a global system for moving containers, and once they reach your site, they can be installed relatively simply on a prepared foundation.

Predictable costs: Most of the work is done in the factory shop at a fixed price. Delivery to the site, site preparation, foundation, assembly, and utility connections are the only variable costs. That said, container homes are not always cheap. Estimates vary; some put savings at about 5%–10%, depending on what you compare them with.

Recycling: The environmental appeal of container houses is that you reuse surplus products from the shipping industry to build homes. That can be a good thing, but as we will see, it is not always true—or always best.

Disadvantages:

Structural issues: Containers are very strong at the corners, but the roof is less so, so another roof is often built on top—especially in snowy places. Corrugated steel walls are also important to structural strength. That means cutting large window or door openings anywhere requires new reinforcement. When containers are stacked to make larger homes, whenever two containers join at points that are not corners, welded (expensive) reinforcement is needed. Any later renovation also requires substantial engineering and welding.

Cost comparison

So how much does a container house cost? It depends on many factors, including size and finish level, and shipping costs are often included as well—every example differs. Reports say a simple container house self-built by an engineer in Canada cost only about $20,000 USD, which can be far cheaper than a traditional home, while remaining movable and lower-impact on the environment.

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