How to Turn a Shipping Container into a Workshop
4 Upstate New York Shipping Container Holiday Homes
A place to chill out away from the fast lane life of New York City? For all the buzz of living in one of the greatest cities in the world, where something is always happening 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, sometimes even some of the most hardcore city dwellers need a break from the hustle and bustle. Sometimes people burn out and want to get out of the city to live in the suburbs or countryside permanently. Millions commute to Manhattan every day from many miles out of town. Others like their fast paced life, yet have a holiday home for the weekend.
Shipping container homes are extremely cheap to set up, and with a plot of land, you can have a place to relax and reconnect with the world, before packing up and going back to the fast lane at home. One couple have kept a blog of how they have developed their holiday homestead in Upstate New York, and we will reflect on their adventure below. Before that we will bounce through some of the holiday homes built by the New York architects Tim Steele Design, who specialise in building people their homesteads in New York State.
Tim Steele Design shipping container boltholes
The architects in question specialise in making shipping container homes and holiday homes. Let’s have a look at a few of them here:
1. Callicoon Centre, New York
According to the architects, “The 1,760 sq ft house was positioned at the high point of the site capitalising on the western views and oriented so that the south facing roof could incorporate future solar panels. Four 40′ High Cube containers were separated 2 and 2 with the high space in the middle built of conventional wood framing and a truss-roof supported by the containers.”
2. Youngsville New York
This shipping container vacation home was built using two, 40 foot high cube containers. The owners have an open plan living area, one bedroom and bathroom. It has a woodshed and glass sliding doors that connect the inside of the home with the outside almost seamlessly for those hot New York summers. Covered in cedar wood, it isn’t immediately obvious that this home is made of shipping containers – instead, it is a beautiful yet modernist home that makes for a great place to disappear to, to reduce your blood pressure and detune from the fast pace of your main home back in the city.
3. North Branch House
You can see how this two storey, 1200 square foot shipping container vacation home was built in the video below. It is built on a slope so the first floor is around half the floor area of the second floor. For added space the two shipping containers were placed four feet apart, giving that little added width that makes all the difference in the home.
4. Brooklyn Farm Girl
A somewhat eccentric artistic couple with rural roots have a loft apartment in Brooklyn. On the roof of their home, Pamela Matthews and her partner keep a vegetable garden where they grow almost enough food to be self-sufficient, certainly enough for their needs for vegetables.
They keep a blog that focuses on their rather different, bohemian lifestyle. In 2015 they announced they had bought some land in Upstate New York. Pamela had grown up on a farm in Pennsylvania and it appears she needed to get back to what made her as a person. Writing about their 7 acre farmstead, Pam said, “This is somewhere we’ll escape the hustle and bustle of NY, where we can expand our garden and eventually build a small home and maybe even a pond! We won’t be leaving NYC, this will be a place we run away to maybe 30 days out of the year, some place to call our own for the first time.”
Their farmstead seems to have been bought and developed in a back to front sort of way. They found the land and developed a garden and greenhouse. After a while they wanted to spend the odd night at the farmstead so bought a shipping container. In her blog about the shipping container being developed, Pam said, “What’s the ultimate goal? We’re not sure. Will the future home be made out of shipping containers or will it just have that aesthetic? We’re not sure, but we wanted to start the wheels turning in the shipping container direction.
Since we just have land, and we’re building the garden, we needed safe storage for tools, wood and other supplies. It made sense to us to start thinking about getting a shipping container as it could be #1 container for our future Upstate home, while acting as a sturdy storage container in the meantime.”
It is clear that the couple soon settled on making this shipping container a holiday home, perhaps to save on the driving in and out of the Greater New York City area. Either way, they recently published a blog announcing their shipping container had been turned into a place for them to stay as well as store their gardening tools.
Pam recounted, “Since this would just be a vacation home with us not spending much time there, we knew we didn’t need anything big or extravagant. We wanted a small home that had the basics, made us comfortable and made us feel like we were back in our NYC loft even though we were on a grassy field where bobcats and deer ran by at night.”
Basic or very comfortable?
While the clients of Tim Steele have gone the whole hog, with careful design of their shipping container holiday homes, Pamela Matthews has taken the build-what-you-need-as-you-need-it approach. Shipping container constructions are extremely flexible and from their basic bolthole the couple could well expand and expand their home into something far larger and more comfortable over the years as they feel the need. Perhaps the couple may retire and want to stay in the countryside in their autumn years? They could get a few extra containers and make their home large and comfortable.
Here at Gateway Gazette we have covered the full gamut of how shipping containers have been developed into large mansions or even as tiny getaways. It really is down to the scope of your imagination as to what you wish to do and how much you want. A basic shipping container doesn’t cost much and you can bolt on whatever you wish to it from there. It really is down to you! Give us a call today or get a free quote for the shipping containers for your next project.
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