Life in a Box
Building green doesn’t usually mean building cheap, but local home designers found a way with 417-land’s first shipping-container home.
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Imagine a brand new, energy-efficient home overlooking a river with a price tag of $150,000. Sounds too good to be true, right? In most cases, it is—but not for Marti Montgomery.
Lucky for her, acquiring land didn’t eat up any of Montgomery’s $150,000 budget. She already owned 48 acres in Rogersville that overlooked the James River. She had the land divided into four lots, keeping an 8-acre portion for herself.
But despite having a place to put it, trying to build an energy-efficient home for $150,000 was still quite a challenge. Montgomery had discovered The Workshop 308, a Springfield-based design and building company owned by Michael Mardis and Jason Mitchell, through a series of stories in the Springfield Business Journal. She was worried about sticking to her budget, but she decided to talk to them anyway.
“I had nothing to lose,” she says. “I told them I had land, and I wanted a modern house with galvanized metal and a lot of glass.” And to Montgomery’s surprise, Mardis and Mitchell answered: “No problem, we can do that.”
Workshop 308 developed house plans, and Montgomery approved. But it was over budget. And that’s when the guys at Workshop 308 had a new idea. “We said ‘Well, we could go to shipping containers,’” Mardis says. At $3,000 each (including shipping), a few shipping containers cost much less than building all the structural components of this particular house, which would require steel framing. Mardis says he knows of one other shipping-container home in Missouri, located near Kansas City, and he says they are a little more popular along the coasts. “They’re really big in Europe, but they aren’t too popular in the States yet,” Mardis says.
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