Building the Apricot Centre – Building with Shipping Containers

In 2006 on taking redundancy from my lecturing job, I decided to use the money along with a grant and a loan to build a small training centre in the middle of my organic orchard in North Essex.

I had a top budget of £36,000 and wanted to build a space of about 80 – 100 square meters to house training room, food processing kitchen for jams and cordials and an office. I was applying for a redundant building grant and for this reason could not go over the £36,000 thresh-hold. This gave me a budget of between £360 - £450 per square meter, and seemed to me more than enough money, having carried out a number of house renovations before. The difference this time was that being a mother of 2 including a newly adopted baby, and my husband working full time we didn’t have time to do much of the work ourselves.

Discussing the plan with a local architect I found out that normal building costs would be about £800 per square meter, and if we wanted a “green” breathing wall construction the first plan, then were looking at a much higher price than that. His solution was to go and find a lot more money. However with the permaculture adage “the solution is in the problem” ringing in my ears I kept asking for more quotes, and casting about for different types of building. Of course the solution was right on the doorstep!

We live not far from Felixstowe docks where mountains of old containers are piled up, they are a waste product of globalization where products are shipped around the world. A local company modify them for offices and mess rooms for buildings sites. With this company we came up with a design that fitted our plan – 2 x 40 ft containers cut down to 30 ft welded together with the walls removed, the ends sliced off and fitted with sliding door windows a bit like a huge box. Another 40 ft container cut down to 24 ft with the end sliced off and fitted with sliding door windows is the kitchen and the forth similar container contains the office. Doors are cut through and a toilet built in the end of one of the rooms. The whole structure was welded together and clad and stained to fit in to the orchard, and a sedum roof was installed on top of a roof decking to provide insulation. The inside was insulated and lined with plaster board and wooden floor and painted in the normal way.

The whole structure sits on a plinth of engineering bricks 2 wide, and 4 high, the foundations are relatively shallow – in our case there was an existing concrete pad where an old building had sat. (In fact the Machinery shed and Battery chicken unit of my predecessor). In other circumstances the foundations need only be dug around the perimeter of the building greatly reducing the amount of concrete required and therefore carbon budget of the building.

The building was ordered in February and craned onto site in April 2006, it took a further 3 months to clad, paint, hook up to amenities, (water and electricity), and have a ceramic stove installed. No trees had to be removed they simply hoiked the containers over the existing trees so it now sits nestled amongst a group of established trees.

The cost of the building on site was £27,000 for 82 square meters, £330 per square meter. The cost of the plinth, and the hooking the building up to services was extra, as was “greening” the building, the sedum roof, the ceramic stove and a small wind turbine were added so the building could run more or less carbon zero. It came in one budget and on time. The heating is provided from wood from the orchard, the wind turbine providing electricity for running lighting and small water heaters for cooking and cleaning. We had permission to install a composting toilet, but complications with building regulations – composting toilets and disabled access ( as we are open to the public) could not be resolved and as the toilet was yards from an existing drain we installed a conventional one in the end.

The whole process was taken through planning permission and building regulations with surprisingly little problems.

It is in no way a deep green building, we deliberately used mass produced materials to keep the cost down, but overall the materials used were considerably reduced by using the containers as the structure of the building. We were also using up a waste product – the containers. The low cost has in turn helped us to install the equipment we needed to run the building as much as off the grid as we could. It is also a surprisingly beautiful building, box like it has beautiful space and light, it had incredible passive solar gain all year round because of the huge windows and N/S orientation and high insulation. I would be very happy to live in it.

The containers are incredibly versatile, they come in 20 ft and 40 ft lengths, but they are all about 8 ft wide – probably the worst draw back as this can be a bit narrow for some rooms. They can be stacked on top of one another, have walls removed to make them wider, and windows can be cut in the sides or whole ends removed to provide doors and windows. They can be clad have pitched roofs put on top, and made to look not like containers! They can in the end be easily removed from a site leaving only narrow concrete plinths behind. And they are incredibly cheap !

Marina O’Connell

November 2008