Container House or Conventional Construction?

I was in Lyttleton at the weekend meeting a client that we’ve done a massive repair job for them, and renovation. Basically rebuilt their house about three years ago. Anyway they subdivided their section and they’re looking about another house down the back. They got in touch with us because they’d like to work with us again, which is really cool.

They’ve got, the back of the section falls off really pretty steeply, and they’re looking to build a house. They’re thinking that they would like to have a hundred squares on top, 50 squares below. The client’s idea was that the use containers for the bottom part, because then it’s going to make it pretty simple with foundations and whatnot. They think that they might be able to save a little bit of money or speed up construction costs. There’s this possibly merit in the idea, and they’ve been and talked to a couple of engineers, and engineers don’t really want to have a bar of it.

Really when they approached me with a problem, how I thought about it is, well you know there could be merit in the containers. Initially what you want to look at is, if you’re going to do that, what’s the footings for the containers going to be? By engaging an Engineer and a Builder, the Engineer could give us a little bit of feedback, we could run pricing on what would be conventional construction method. Which would be a concrete slab on the lower level, block basement wall and then build the foundations over the top, versus the containers. So really it’s like you look at it, would it work? Yeah, you could definitely engineer it. Is it going to be worthwhile? Well, check the numbers and see.

Rather than going, well you know, it’s going to be hard to design, I don’t think you should do it. Let’s actually look at the numbers see if it works for the client. I’ve advised them, that if the numbers came out and they’re pretty similar, I’d be going with the conventional methods because it’s tried and tested, there’s less risk of variation. For us, you don’t know until you try something, and we’re more than willing to look at things. Really just like our values on site, you know, we try to approach things from a pragmatic point of view. So that’s what we’re doing for the client. Once we come back from holiday we’ll have a wee meeting with the Engineer. It’s pretty cool, see how it works. Cheers.

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