Shipping containers provide a readily available and sustainable material for building with. Whether it be for your home or for another project such as a pop-up shop, portable workshop, or studio, there are many pros to choosing shipping containers as your construction material.
Affordable
To build a decent sized two-storey house can take as little as five shipping containers to achieve, making it a very affordable alternative to traditional building materials. Coming in at around half the cost of a standard home per square metre, it’s easy to see why shipping containers are continuing to grow in popularity. In Melbourne, shipping containers are readily available, with refurbished and recycled containers going for even cheaper prices. As the housing market continues to soar out of control, home ownership feels like a distant dream to many of us, but shipping containers provide a low cost solution to get your foot on the property ladder. With their low construction and maintenance costs, shipping containers are the material of the moment for money-saving builds. Designed to endure stormy weather and long-distance travel, containers are also highly robust, meaning they make for a strong and structurally sound building material.
Recycled
Due to the high cost of shipping empty containers back their point of origin, there is a surfeit of unused empty containers across the globe, with some estimates coming in at 14 million disused containers worldwide. Repurposing shipping containers prevents them from being melted down for scrap, thus saving a whole lot of energy. Making use of these containers to build your home or business gives a new lease of life to a previously useless item, reducing waste whilst at the same time eliminating the need to cut down any trees for your build. This is why many of the eco-conscious among us are opting for this as a green alternative to traditional wooden structures.
Quick Set Up
Due to the prefabricated nature of shipping container homes, they are comparatively much faster to set up than a conventional structure. They are an easy material with which to employ a modular building technique, as they can be stacked to create height and depth. This not only makes for a simple build, it also allows you to maximise space, especially if you are constructing your home on a small plot of land. With the basic structure already in existence and offsite construction a common approach to building container homes, you can avoid living on a construction site whilst your house is being created. Furthermore, it simplifies the design of the house without compromising creativity, as you have a ready-made basic blank canvas structure to work with. Container homes can then be delivered and installed very quickly. This also makes container homes a popular choice as a temporary home for those having building work done.
Shipping container homes are a cheap, fast and eco-friendly way to get yourself on the property ladder. They provide a great modern alternative to traditional building materials and make for a solid and attractive home.
