Big Steel Box in Kelowna opened up shop in the Okanagan seven years ago. Part of a Western Canadian chain of locations, the company can deliver storage units to almost every work site in British Columbia. Big Steel Box Kelowna manager Troy Doell says the storage units have been used as storage in countless ways, “Tool cribs and homeowners moving are really common. We have helicoptered containers to mountain tops to be used as offices and dressing rooms for a movie set. We have used the boxes to create the supports for jumps at the Centre of Gravity festival.” The majority of Big Steel Box business is moving and storage. The company has an excellent trucking and logistics system for transporting full containers around the country. The process is radically simple for homeowners. A phone call orders a container delivered to their home, the container is filled at leisure by the homeowner with household items. A second phone call has the filled container picked up and delivered to a new home or to Big Steel Box’s secure storage yard. Construction companies have been modifying Big Steel Box units into site offices for years. It is simple work to add lighting, air conditioning, flooring and shelving. “We have modification yard in Abbotsford that will custom outfit your office,” says Doell. “The exterior can be modified so it looks nothing like a container.” Building whole homes out of Big Steel Box containers is a nascent idea that is gaining traction as homeowners and homebuilders are inspired to seek out new, cost effective ways to build a home. “If we can keep or cover aspects of a container for an office, it is not difficult to bring containers together and create home,” says Doell. Constructing a home out of Big Steel Box containers can cut the cost of construction by as much as 50 per cent. While creating temporary housing in work camp situations is the most obvious application, Doell says Big Steel Box is looking for builders who are interested in learning how to build homes out of containers and meet code. “Something built out of three, four, five containers, would be a cool house N to live in.”
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