Container Homes Are Not Always Cheaper

After quoting hundreds of container home projects, here’s what I’ve learned about the cost-effectiveness of modified shipping containers.

Simply put, the more containers you add to a container home, the less cost-effective the project tends to become. Container construction offers its greatest cost advantages with smaller, simpler designs, typically those using one or two containers. As additional containers are added, the costs associated with structural modifications, reinforcement, transportation, foundations, and joining the containers together can quickly reduce or even eliminate those savings compared to conventional construction. Here’s why:

1.) Metal Fabrication

Stitching container homes together takes a lot of metal fabrication, including cutting steel, weld preparation, welding, coating and sealing seams. All of this metal fabrication takes considerably longer than the carpentry work required to build a comparable wood-framed home.

2.) Extensive Modification

Oftentimes, multi-container projects require so much modification or removal of the original container that you’d be better off using standard building methods.

Take this case, for example: a three-container build with an “open” floor plan may require the middle container to be stripped down to little more than its roof and two 8-foot end walls, meaning roughly 44% of the container is cut out and discarded.

3.) Waterproofing

Combining containers can create long intersections that need to be waterproofed. While it’s certainly not impossible, there is no widely available, purpose-built commercial system for joining and waterproofing containers in this way. That means custom solutions can take a lot of time while still making it more difficult to achieve the weather resistance of a standard home.

4.) Structural Integrity

The corrugated walls of a shipping container provide a significant portion of its structural strength. Any time you make cutouts for windows and doors, the structure can be compromised if those openings are not properly reinforced.

Structural integrity can be further compromised by cutting out large sections of walls to combine containers or by stacking them in non-standard configurations.

5.) Stacking

Unless you plan on stacking the containers in an orientation similar to how they are stacked for shipping, your project will require so much engineering and reinforcement that the cost can far surpass what it would take to build a comparable standard home. This is because the 4 corner posts of a shipping container are designed to handle the load of stacking. The roof of a container alone is not designed to handle the load of another container placed directly on top of it.

6.) Logistics

Containers require dedicated trucking and equipment such as forklifts or cranes for delivery and placement. Obviously, standard homes also require shipments and delivery of materials, but it makes little sense to spend $1,000+ transporting a $3,000–$6,000 container to a site only to spend thousands more on metal fabrication to cut away large portions of it to accommodate extensive modifications.

Here’s what it boils down to:

Container homes built using two or fewer containers can be a cost-effective way to achieve a durable, low-maintenance home.

Homes consisting of several containers are often more of an aesthetic or architectural choice and will likely cost as much as, or more than, a comparable conventionally built home.