6 Good Reasons To Buy A Shipping Container Today
People are adapting these containers to their own purposes for a number of reasons, and here are some good ones:
Shipping Containers Are Eco-Friendly
If you build a brand new facility for storage, you’re going to be digging through the dirt, laying a foundation, running backhoes and trucks through the area all day and night. This can be taxing on the local environment, scaring off wildlife and uprooting trees. With a storage container, all you need is a flat piece of land and you’re good to go. The container is dropped off in one trip, and it is ready to be used. Simple as that. No loud machinery coming in and out at all hours, no shovel required.
Shipping Containers Are Cheap
It’s difficult to give a ballpark guess as to what you’ll wind up paying for a shipping container, as the business is sort of custom-order-by-definition. But if you go and get a quote, you’ll probably find that it’s less than you expected.
Shipping Containers Highly Customizable
If you’re thinking about using a shipping container as a permanent structure, you’re probably deciding between a shipping container and a prefabricated building. Prefabs have a lot of things going for them, but customizability isn’t really one of them. With most prefabs, what you see is what you get. Try cutting a wall down to extend a bedroom and you might wind up with the whole thing collapsing on you if you’re not careful.
Shipping containers are really nothing but a big sturdy box. If you’re doing a tiny house, you can order a container with some adjustments already made, or order a simple 40-foot shipping container and cut windows wherever you want, install your own walls, and pretty much decide for yourself the floor plan of your new home. Likewise, if you use your shipping container for storage, it’s up to you where the shelves go, or if you want to put in a window and have a workshop in the back. The only thing that’s really set in stone is whether it’s a 10-foot, 20-foot, or a 40-foot long container. Other than that, it’s up to you what you want to do with it.
No Assembly Required
As soon as your container has been dropped off, it’s completely ready for whatever purpose you might have in mind for it. If you’re keeping a classic car in storage, for instance, an enclosed carport takes some time to put together, and an extension to your garage could take weeks or months, depending on the scale of the project.
Availability of Shipping Containers
Simply put: There are over seventeen million shipping containers in use right now, and in 2010, it was estimated that there may have been as many as 570 million in total. It shouldn’t be hard for you to find someone willing to sell you one.
Shipping Containers Are Pretty Cool
Let’s be honest: There’s something kind of cool about repurposing a shipping container to serve as a home or business. In Austin, Texas they’ve sort of kicked off a trend for using containers as the setting for hip bars with the aptly named “Container Bar.” And of course, your customers don’t need to know that your hip, modern business actually cost a fraction of what it would have cost if you had built the whole structure from scratch. Of course, with the rising popularity of container buildings, the novelty won’t last forever, but it’ll always be cool to have people point out your office and say “That was the first shipping container building on this street.”
It really all comes down to accessibility. Between zoning, permits, and cost, building a new structure from scratch isn’t always an option. But, if you just want to drop a shipping container into place, all you need is a piece of land.