How to Turn a Shipping Container into a Workshop
Brunswick Students Build Container Homes for U.S. Veterans
In Georgia, U.S. students from a technical college have set to work building a two bedroom shipping container home for homeless veterans in their hometown of Brunswick.
The Golden Isles College and Career Academy (GICCA) students are using the skills they have learned in education to convert two, 40ft containers into a two bedroomed home with a kitchen, shower room and living room.
Brunswick poverty
The students’ home city of Brunswick, Georgia, has a real problem of low incomes and poverty.
According to the nonprofit the college is working with, Rebuilding Together of Glynn County Georgia Inc, “With 65% of the City’s population earning less than the median income, the availability of affordable homes is low, particularly for the extremely-low income populations. Around 23% of Brunswick’s families live below the poverty level.”
That’s a big poverty problem and one that no doubt many of the students themselves face while learning their trades to break free. Two teams of them are working on the veterans’ housing project – the welders and construction students.
The project
Seed funded by their local Sears store, the students set to work on the home building project in May this year. The funding doesn’t cover the whole project cost but gets them to the point where most of the unit can be built before it is taken to its final resting place.
In the costing of the veterans’ container housing project, the biggest expense is the labour. This is where the students come in.
Allen Booker, executive director of Rebuilding Together of Glynn County Georgia, told the local newspaper, “What we’re expecting them to do is put in the doors and windows and the flooring for us,” Booker said. “And then we’ll move it to a lot that was donated to us and the city.”
The work is being done by the welding and construction students at GICCA during term time but once the school holidays come they weren’t expected to work through their summer break. The community has been asking local trades people to donate their time when the students down tools.
What we find interesting here is that a community has got together to build homes for those in need. There are a number of veterans in Brunswick in need of housing, and according to the local newspaper, “Coastal Georgia Area Community Action Authority offers a rapid rehousing program, and veterans who are in need of shelter will be able to work with the agency to be placed in the renovated home once it’s completed.”
An unusual construction method?
The Brunswick News wrongly reports that container home construction is somehow novel. Though it differs from bricks, wood and mortar construction, it is an emerging construction system using modular units built off-site and transported to the building’s pad where the units can be quickly transformed into a home or office.
Here at Gateway Container Sales we’re never short of stories for the Gateway Gazette, and largely only choose the newest or more interesting tales to tell rather than any old container construction story! The construction system is maturing and so many container based homes are going up around the world, most of them using tried and tested techniques,
Here’s hoping all involved in the project benefit, from the students to those who end up living in the new home!
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