It’s becoming more common for people to put up container homes in South Africa. They can be done quite quickly and with fewer external resources. There are even a few in Baardskeerdersbos. We really like that industrial aesthetic of these sorts of homes and they can be very stylishly and neatly executed. In fact, our design started as a container conversion. As we developed our idea it became apparent that it wasn’t for us. Here is why.

1. A container is expensive

In the months that we have been planning and building our home, the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted both the steel price and the availability of containers. Not only were containers 3 times the price of the last time I had to source them in 2016 but they could just not be found. To build a home in a container, you need a Grade B or above container. This means it has only been used once or it is brand new. These sorts of containers are really expensive.

The price drops drastically when you are looking at Grade C or below but there are risks in that you can’t be sure of what was carried in it (it could even have been toxic waste), the container itself could be very rusted, and the distributers of this grade of container tend to be less reputable.

With Chinese cargo ships skipping Cape Town and heading straight to the USA, the availability and hence price of containers, sky rocketed. The suppliers that we could rely on to supply the correct grade of container had limited stock or had to order them in. This completely defeated the purpose of using a cost effective, disposable material. By the time we got all the quotes together for our design, the price for just the containers was already in the hundreds-of-thousands of Rands and we hadn’t even started converting them yet!

2. The transport is also expensive

Containers come from port towns – Cape Town, Port Elizabeth and Durban. They are also widely available in Johannesburg because most cargo ends up there. Around Cape Town there are a few places that have yards where they keep containers (in Stellenbosch and Somerset West) but if you want a container in Baardskeerdersbos you need to pay for 200km of transport (per container).

In addition to this, unless you order a bunch of 6m containers (with the transport fee for each container) then you need to also book a crane truck. In our case, we wanted 3 x 12m containers, so the transport alone was making this idea unfeasible as it was looking to be somewhere between R30-50 000.

3. The logistics can be prohibitive

If we had gone ahead with this idea and had ordered our 3 very long containers, the next challenge we faced was how we were going to get them into position. Having such a steep and at that stage, wet, site meant that we couldn’t get both a 12m+ truck and the crane truck up to the level where we needed the building to be situated. I had seen other projects deal with this issue by essentially walking their containers into position but the changes in levels on our property were too large for this to be the solution.

4. Container homes should be small

Perhaps you’re wondering by now, why we wanted such large containers. Considering that we are planning on staying here for the rest of our lives and establishing a permaculture garden and a business, we didn’t want to live a small house. We had just been living in a small cottage before and both of us had lived in small rentals up to this point. We were making this change so that we could have the space to be creative and make a new life and business. To accommodate all the spaces we dreamed of for our new home we ended up with a design of 3 off-set 12m containers. Once we started working on openings and insulation, the containers started looking less and less like containers and more and more like an incoherently designed normal house. To be true to the material, we needed to pair down the design and the space which we weren’t prepared to do. The truth is, if you have a tight budget and want to live in a container home then it actually needs to be a tiny home and this just wasn’t for us.

5. The restrictive ceiling height

In South Africa, it is the law that a dwelling must have a minimum ceiling height of 2,4m. You may think that because you are building a container home, that you don’t need to comply with these laws when, in fact, you do (and can even be more closely scrutinised for this choice of material). A container needs to be lined on all sides to allow for insulation and the construction of a proper floor. By the time you have built in all these layers inside a standard height container (2,5m), you are below this restricted level.

The solution is to use a high-cube container (2,8m) but then it starts to add to the cost again and these types of containers are even more difficult to find and still limits your rooms to about 2.6m. As a taller person, this could make the rooms feel very constricted.

6. Insulating a container is costly and complicated

To make a container habitable it needs to be heavily insulated on the inside and ideally should be clad on the outside. By the time you have done these two essential things, you don’t even know that you are in a container anymore so what’s the point? I’m being glib, there are many solutions to addressing this issue and I have seen some lovely examples where cladding is peeling partly away from the sides to reveal the container, or a roof is built over the whole container, to match the corrugations but these solutions are costly and only really work for single containers which was not our situation. By the time we had all the extra layers of the building figured out, we realised that we might as well just build a regular home and clad it with corrugated sheeting as it would work out much cheaper. And that’s the design we ended up with.

7. Altering a container compromises its integrity

If you are thinking of building a container home, you have seen a number of examples where people just cut out a hole in the side of the container and pop in a window. The really essential but easily missed part of this is that any opening you cut in a container’s sides, needs to then be reinforced with steel. The structural integrity of a container comes from the four corner posts and the shape of the corrugation. There is no beam element connecting the posts. Wherever you see large doors in containers or even if you see them stacked in a way that does not align the four corner posts, then huge and expensive steel engineering was required to make the container stable again.

To counter this in our design, we tried to source 12m containers that opened long the length because these are reinforced along the top already. As you can imagine, this made sourcing even more difficult and hard to find. In addition to this, it posed a problem of what to do with the doors that we were going to take off? And could these doors be taken off quickly enough so that the crane truck could place all the containers on the same day? The logistics and issues were only mounting.

8. Considerations for our neighbours

Aside for the fact that Baardskeerdersbos has a restrictive heritage overlay and I am quite certain our plan would definitely have been rejected by the heritage committee, the town itself is small and neighbours close and friendly and for us to have plonked a bunch of containers down would not have had our community spirit as a priority. No matter how the design would have ended up (it was going to have a roof over and plantings on all sides) it would still have looked very obviously like containers and would have been too contrasting to our neighbours houses.

Conclusion

Container homes need to be considered carefully and investigated thoroughly to understand the costs and lifestyle impacts. Tiny homes are more ubiquitous now than ever before and if this is something that you plan on building, then perhaps using a pre-manufactured building that is purpose built in a considered way, may be a better solution than converting a container – the added benefit being, that they come with pre-approved building plans and most of the construction gets done for you. Some pre-manufactured home companies that I have found that make really lovely things can be found via the links below. In essence, a container home is not always what Instagram makes it out to be.

Blockhouse – https://blockhouse.co.za/modular-homes/

Yourcube – https://www.yourcube.co.za/

SMStructures – https://www.smstructures.com/modular-housing-2/