Who'd Have Thought That the Humble Container Home Can become This?

Overview of the Shipping Container House

This shipping container house has 6,027 square feet of space, making it the largest of its kind in Australia where its located. The modern shipping container home sprawls over three levels, featuring clean lines, quality finishes, and open spaces. The glass in the house maximizes the natural light and a mix of building materials, to include the signature steel containers, which are cleverly used to chic industrial effect. This shipping container house was featured as Episode 1 on the Grand Designs Australia on 9 October 2013 on the Lifestyle channel on Foxtel. The home is Brisbane, Australia took six months to build.

Unique Design Features

This shipping container home has plenty of interesting details that make it beautiful and unique. From the exterior, there are different finishes used from the shipping container painted white on some surfaces, while others are clad in different wood finishes to give a lovely finish. On the back of the shipping container home, you will even find a wall of graffiti. The interior is a beautiful mixture of finishes from wooden floors, to painted sections of the shipping container from black and white walls and wood. There is even a swimming pool in the back of the shipping container home.

Cost Benefits of Shipping Container Homes

There are several benefits to building with shipping containers. Price. In many cases, you can find shipping containers built quite affordably, perhaps even cheaper than an equivalent home using traditional construction techniques. While there are a large number of variables that influence the cost to include size, geography, design, interior finish and more, generally steel container homes do offer cost savings for most owners. And, if you are interested in doing some of the construction work yourself while being resourceful with some of the other building expenses, the savings on a shipping container home can be significant.

Environmental Advantages

Eco-Friendly. Another advantage of building a steel container home is that it can be eco-friendly. There are millions of shipping containers found around the world, but only a fraction of the shipping containers are in service and used actively. Many of the remaining steel containers are wasting away in storage yards, and steel containers as the basis for home design is a great example of adaptive reuse. For each 40-foot steel container, you are repurposing more than 8,000 pounds of steel. You are also reducing the amount of other traditional building materials that you will need, such as masonry and wood.

Off-Site Construction Benefits

Off-Site Construction. Another advantage of a steel container home is that it can be built off site and then delivered to your property ready to move in. Sometimes a piece of land isn't suitable to build on. There can be several reasons for this. For instance, it might not have any electricity on the site so that you couldn't power your tools there. Another benefit of modifying your steel container at a local workshop is that you don't need to make your steel container watertight right away. If you were converting the steel container outside, you'd want it watertight, so that no rain gets inside the steel container during construction. However, converting the steel container inside means, you don't need to worry about making the steel container watertight instantly.