Modern customers demand aesthetic creativity and customization. This has been fueled by the advances in prefab building technology. Recognizing this phenomenon companies are exploring such designs as; solarized floating Container House, cliffhanger homes, sloping hillside homes, suspended homes, prefab igloos, and pod houses.

When it comes to owner input in the actual assembly of a prefab house panelized or precut are the most DYI'er friendly.

Security is very important in the storage of goods and there are various ways to eliminate unauthorised access through a variety of locking systems, such as lock boxes or tri-cam locking systems. Keeping a container on site also eradicates the need for expensive permanent storage facilities on a site. The containers can be moved, so the land they are occupying can be used for other purposes. This is especially useful on a building site.

The sheer versatility of containers makes them an excellent storage facility. They can be used for extra warehouse storage, equipment storage, for storing archives, unused and old furniture, gardening equipment, as a tack shed as well as for hay and grain storage. In fact they can also be used as a utility building. Shipping containers can be adapted for any particular use prior to delivery.

The advantage of having a unit on site is that it is affordable, portable, offers ground level access and is secure. It can be used for as long as needed and then moved as required, making containers an excellent option for storage.

Another style of prefab house that is DIY'er friendly is modular buildings. However, these type homes require a bit more knowledge.

From shipping container homes to pop-up architecture, modern prefabs definitely don't have to look like a double wide trailer. And they certainly are not the homes Sears sold through their catalog.

Whether you are seeking to buy or hire a container there is no shortage of companies who can provide them. Many of these can be found on the Internet and you can also put in an order via their websites. The availability of Container Houses suppliers on-line make it easy for you to compare prices and get the possible deal.

Britco has managed to keep on by offering a diverse portfolio of high-quality Container Houses and offices to countries all over the world. In terms of architect-designed prefab, they are a bit of an exception among manufacturers, at least partly because Faliszewski is an architect by trade and appreciates modernist sensibilities.

No doubt about it, the sleek lines of mid-21st century modernism are a large part of prefabs’ current appeal. “I think that there is a true interest in reviving modernism,” says MacAllen. “But at the same time so much of it is just a look, an aesthetic. The true heart of modernism isn’t there. Even the most respected trade magazines show houses with 2,500 square feet or more. I don’t think that’s modernism, that’s a real estate agent’s dream.”

Prefab housing has been used in Japan and Europe since the post-WW II re-building era. Japan has fully-automated home factories including Toyota’s prefab Housing Corporation and four other large housing conglomerates specializing in prefab steel and panel homes. Interestingly, even with all their high-tech bells and whistles, the Japanese import as much as 40 percent of their prefab housing from Canadian manufacturers like Britco, which does use assembly-line methods but with traditional construction with wood, hammer and nails.

Robotics-infatuated Japan could also provide us with a good cautionary tale about rushing into high-tech home-building. Since the bubble economy burst in the 90s, the prefab industry has been particularly hard-hit. It peaked in 1992 when 17.8 percent of housing starts were prefab; sales steadily declined until 2003 when the drop in prefab housing starts was more dramatic than the decline in general housing starts.

Japanese prefab homeowners have also expressed dissatisfaction with their prefabs, including problems with concrete cracks and effluorescence.

In Eastern Europe and the UK, low quality and poorly planned housing developments gave prefab a bad name, but a variety of more successful prefab housing schemes have cropped up recently.

MacAllen notes that famed architect Frank Lloyd Wright championed smaller scale living in the suburbs, with a little garden and shared facilities. “His Usonian Homes were small practical modern homes with a lot of prefabrication.” Similarly today in Japan, says MacAllen, “there’s a whole whack of young architects building small architecturally designed houses with prefabrication. It’s not fancy, doesn’t try to look beautiful but utilitarian with shared continuous spaces that share a Modified Shipping Container Home. I think that’s where modernism is sitting right now.”

If a person has just a little manual dexterity — say the ability to drive a car — then he will have no difficulty in doing practically all the building that has to be done on a homestead. Carpenters, masons, plumbers, electricians love to make a great mystery of things — and the building codes, the building supply people, the utilities and appliance manufactures do their best to keep the average householder from doing any building on his own. But, the truth of the matter is that most of the skills of the average mechanic are pretty simple to master. Naturally, their speed and accuracy is based on years of practice. But, just as anybody who can read music can play all the notes in a difficult piano piece, anybody can build a barn or a house if he'll get some good manuals on building and good plans for what he wants to build, the difference is that in the case of the amateur at the piano, the piece won't sound right played so slowly, whereas when the building is finished, no one will ever know whether it took a day or a year to build Mobile Toilet.

Since container gardens cost more to set up, it makes sense to focus on the most valuable crops that will reduce your produce bill at the grocery store as much as possible. I focus on salad greens in late winter and early spring as well as snap peas in my container gardens. This arrangement has other benefits besides the return on investment. Growing salad greens on a second floor concrete balcony offers big advantages over the regular garden in a place such as Oregon where the slugs will literally grow several inches long. I have enjoyed salad greens completely untouched by slugs ever since I moved my salad greens to the balcony. Similarly, my carrot seedlings were completely wiped out by slugs in the regular garden but are flourishing in my container garden, and my pea seedlings were badly damaged by slugs in the regular garden but are quite happy in my container gardens.

The Shelburne Museum, located in Vermont, features a Collectors House designed by interior designer Albert Hadley and architect Adam Kalkin. It was created by using 3 overseas shipping crates that make a very striking house. The building features glass garage doors, a large patio area, living space, bedrooms and a full sized kitchen.

Hzxiaoya has designed houses out of shipping containers before, but his last one is actually a luxury dwelling for the rich. He unveiled his creation at the Art Basel Miami Beach art show in December 2005 and the attendants were surprised to see lavish furnishings and a beautifully designed interior inside a shipping container. The project has the interesting title of "Push-Button House" because it can be loaded in the back of a truck to be moved and it opens up like a Murphy bed to expose the interior.

To return to our barn, a couple of rainy weekends, a garden waiting to be planted, plus the inescapable fact that Cassandra, the goat we'd bought but hadn't brought hzxiaoya yet, was due to kid in two weeks, made us call a carpenter to help finish our barn. I am not going to take time to describe in detail just how the interior of our barn was finished — you can get a good idea of that from the sketch shown in this article's image gallery. If you want to build a small barn, we've had a draftsman work out complete details with a number of variations.

Need a house? If you can provide the Sentry Box, module seaming and utility hook-ups, weeHouse can do the rest. Created by Alchemy Architects, weeHouse is a prefabricated modular housing system that can be placed anywhere that is accessible by truck. Available in four standard models designed to suit most sites and lifestyle needs, weeHouse was inspired by sustainable design principles such as building small and efficiently.

The original 435-square-foot weeHouse Studio, with a sleeping area and a bathroom, retails for $79,000 to $89,000. Because of highway and road restrictions, the architects designed a 14-foot wide transportable module that can be snapped together with other modules—like Legos—to make larger homes. Since its inception, the standard weeHouse has evolved into a line of structures that are used as homes, offices and studios. WeeHouse Pair, for example, combines two of the modules for a three-bedroom, 1,450-square-foot home that retails for $185,000 to $209,000.

Most weeHouses are prefabricated in an independently owned factory and trucked to be “set” on site. Each standard weeHouse comes ready-made, with tongue-and-groove bamboo flooring, tile floors and showers, floor-to-ceiling glass doors, EPDM cold roof, primed gypsum board ceilings and walls, electrical and plumbing systems, appliances, fixtures and cabinets. Alchemy will subtract the price of appliances from your home if you prefer to buy local, and the company will customize your weeHouse with greener materials and systems such as active solar, geothermal, green roofs and other solutions as applicable.

WeeHouse meets International Building Code (IBC) and International Residential Code (IRC) standards and is stronger than many site-built structures because the frame, doors and windows are secured to withstand being moved and the subfloor and sheetrock are glued and screwed to the frame. Fully insulated with R values of R19 in the walls, R35 in the floor and R44 in the ceiling, the homes have vented roofs that temper extreme heat or cold. Standard exterior siding is corrugated steel, available in many colors and finishes. “Container siding” made of highly durable cement fiberboard with vertical battens, or “corncrib siding,” a horizontal rough-sawn pine rain screen finished with solid or semi-transparent stain, are also available.

“Ideally, we see consumers purchasing modules as customizable, off-the-shelf products,” Scott Ervin of Alchemy Architects told The Wall Street Journal. “Most car and computer manufacturers offer a way to build or customize your own car or computer on their Web site. We are hoping to be able to make enough progress in the next few years toward handling the permitting and volume issues in various locales to allow modern dwellings to be ordered in much the same way as cars and Modular Home.”

Container Houses hopes to at least partially restore the the lost sense of security experiend by many displaced people with its shelters, which come with locks and keys. The shelter was developed last year, when Green Horizon founder James Pope inked a $25m deal with the US Federal Emergency Management Agency to provide disaster relief housing. Since then, 300 units have been sold in Trinidad, India and Peru.

“An entire house can be shipped in a small bundle and set up in less than four hours,” Pope says. Panels fit into a single frame, and residents choose their own siding material. Each comes with a shower, toilet and kitchenette, running between $35 and $50 per square foot.

Thousands of Global Village Shelter’s flat-packed, durable units have been deployed to Pakistan, Honduras, Guatemala, Grenada, and New Orleans – as well as MoMA’s permanent collection. The coolest thing about them? Its architects, Dan and Mia Ferrara, also created a modular factory that could be shipped anywhere for on-site production, bringing each unit’s $2,500 price tag down to $1000.

“Our system is the only system that is low cost, meets all international standards, can be easily shipped in containers, provides jobs for set up and manufacturing and works with local entrepreneurs,” Dan Ferrara says. The company has factories in Los Angeles and Mexico and is seeking funding to produce their shelters on a broad scale.

Built especially for hurricane-prone areas, the HuSH2 only needs to be unfolded and bolted together to shelter a family of five. When a storm rolls in, the wooden unit can be reconfigured into a triangle that protects against Category 5 winds.

Extremis has raised nearly $300,000 in funding from private investors and organizations, and disaster-response agency Shelterbox has even helped test the $5,000 unit. CEO Julia Glenn says their first deployment is slated for early next year, though they are still tweaking its design. “We don’t want to be a western company that prescribes aid by our own definition to other areas of the world,” she says.

Before assembly, the Intershelter looks like a stack of Pringles potato chips. But when put together, its circular shingles form a 196-square-foot dome that can hold up under 200-mile-per-hour winds and 40 feet of snow.

“There’s something about a dome that is very comforting,” says Don Kubley, CEO of Intershelter. “You can’t be cornered.” Since Kubley bought the Prefab House company in 2007, he has deployed 20 units to downtown Los Angeles for the homeless and another 24 to Japan for victims of the 2011 earthquake. Each retails around $7,000.

Hzxiaoya Inc. is a custom ISO shipping Container Houses modification company based out of Ironton, Ohio and has a manufacturing facility in Worthington, Kentucky. With an expertise in designing, engineering, and building customizable portable solutions DropBox Inc. has built a name for itself around the world. Building portable containerized offices, break rooms, restrooms, showers, Blast Resistant Modules (BRM), and a wide range of other products for industrial and commercial construction contractors DropBox Inc. has been able to build a reputable client base.

Working to provide customers with site specific solutions designed to meet their individual project needs DropBox Inc. just completed construction on the modification of a shipping container into a blast resistant, portable office with a kitchenette and restroom.

The shipping container modification pictured in this weeks blog is an 8' x 40' BRM with a blast resistance rating of 8.0 PSI Over Pressure. This custom unit is meant to be used as a break room or office space with the added features of a kitchenette and restroom.

The kitchen portion of this custom shipping container modification is plumbed with a fully functional sink, refrigerator space, and counter space for microwave oven. It has cabinets both above and below the sink and is climate controlled and fully insulated.

The restroom in this custom ISO shipping container modification has a sink, toilet, mirror, soap dispenser, as well as paper towel and toilet paper dispensers.

Once delivered to the customers this unit will be offloaded, connected to power, plumbed to water and sewer lines and put to use as a blast resistant space to hold meetings, take breaks, and offer restroom and dining space.

Because of work like this custom shipping container modification Dropbox Inc. is recognized around the world as a leading shipping Modular Home design, engineering, and modification company.

According to David Cross of www.hzxiaoya.com, "a container has 8000 lbs of steel Container Houses which takes 8000 kwh of energy to melt down and make new beams etc... Our process of modifying that entire 8000 lbs of steel into a "higher and better use" only takes 400 kwh of electrical energy (or 5%). Granted it takes a bit more "muscle" but we call this Value-Cycling which we feel is that next step up from Re-cycling."

A manufactured home can come in many different sizes and shapes. It may be a simple one-story "mobile home," or it can be so large and complex that you might not guess that it was constructed off site.

Local building codes do not apply to manufactured homes. Instead, these houses are built according to specialized guidelines and codes for manufactured housing. In the United States, HUD (the US Department of Housing and Urban Development) regulates manufactured housing through the HUD Code instead of local building codes.

All shipping containers are the same width and most have two standard height and length measurements and as such they provide modular elements that can be combined into larger structures. This simplifies design, planning and transport. As they are already designed to interlock for ease of mobility during transportation, structural construction is completed by simply emplacing them. Due to the containers' modular design additional construction is as easy as stacking more containers. They can be stacked up to 12 high when empty.

The welding and cutting of steel is considered to be specialized labor and can increase construction expenses, yet overall it is still lower than conventional construction. Unlike wood frame construction, attachments must be welded or drilled to the outer skin, which is more time consuming and requires different job site equipment.

Each container measures 8 feet wide by 40 feet long by 9 feet tall. SG Blocks sells the finished structural systems (also called SG Blocks) for $9,000 to $11,000 per unit. The finished units have one or two walls removed and include the necessary support columns and beam enhancements.

Delivery times vary by brand and time of year, but on an average, they are delivered in 6-8 weeks. They take two to four weeks to set-up depending on style, so financing aside, it's often feasible to move into your new home in 8-12 weeks!

The standard dimensions of an ISO container means that they are an excellent modular unit and their inherent strength, weatherproof nature and availability makes them an ideal modular structural component or as a whole standard accommodation unit.

Containers can provide temporary solutions to a particular shortage, be it housing, office space or another accommodation need. They can be used in disaster areas or areas of need and for key worker Prefab House or student housing. These temporary solutions may use brown / green field sites, flood planes, areas earmarked for future development or virtually any flat surface with enough ground stability.

Sometimes building green Modular Home seems to be a purely First World Problem. Housing, however, is a huge problem for the world’s poor. A number of architects do spend time drawing up designs for very low-cost small houses—and thinking up clever names for them. We recently covered the iShack and Hut-to-Hut concepts, which are design frameworks offered to slum DIY builders.

The Abod and the Habihut are panelized prefab designs that have now been put up in numbers qualifying as small villages. They favor a business model of getting non-profit charities to raise the money for multiple houses for a particular charitable destination, and shipping them there from factories in the US heartland.

Produced in Bondurant, Iowa, Abods are catenary-arched roofs of corrugated metal installed on rectangular concrete slabs or recycled rubber mats. Light streams in through translucent plastic corrugated panels that fit in place a a few of the metals ones. Modular end walls rigidify the shape, which is identical from one Abod to the next; but a wide variety of interior options have been worked out, as well as double-long and triple installations. All are tall enough to accommodate a cozy sleeping loft for the children. Quarter-twist fasteners hold them together, and can easily be undone so the shelter can be packed up and moved.

Fascinating geometric exercises from Bozeman, Montana, called Habihuts, have been shipped to Kenya and to Haiti. The Habihut website features a “Village In a Box” including Habihuts as water kiosks, a battery-charging solar kiosk, and several outhouses.

The floor plan is a perfect hexagon while the roof is three squares at right angles to each other. Figure it out if you can. It’s a strong shape, and facilitates combining units as modules in larger buildings, beehive style. The translucent polypropylene walls and roofs come in 14 stock colors. The company takes great pride in their strength and durability, beating on them with baseball bats in their video and warrantying them for the first 5 years of their stated life expectancy of 10 to 15 years.

A 118-square-foot Habihut costs $2,500, or $1,995 in orders of 20 or 40. I have not found full spec sheets for either of these Mobile Toilet products, but I see that Abod photos show built-in features, and Habihut photos do not—possibly explaining much of the price difference. Both take less than a day to assemble or disassemble.

If the builder does not list the Container Houses in MLS, your agent will not be able to obtain comparable sales from MLS. However, you can still obtain the hard data from a title company, but you may not know which homes were sold with which upgrades.

The advertised sales price means very little.

While you're looking at comparable sales, check to see how many deeds were mailed to the property address and how many were mailed elsewhere, indicating that some of the homes might be owned by investors. If the market suddenly dips, investors are typically the first to bail and, besides, part of the reason you are buying in a new subdivision is to be surrounded by other buyers just like you, not tenants.

Consider hiring a real estate lawyer to review your contract before signing. Standard purchase agreements are designed to keep everybody out of court, but they don't necessarily contain language that protects the buyer.

Builders often prefer their own lender because the builder will be kept fully informed of your personal progress; it's one-stop shopping for a builder. But a builder's lender might not offer you the best loan and interest rate. Moreover, the builder may own the lending company. Ask your agent for lender referrals.

Hire a qualified inspector -- not your dad or your buddy contractor -- get a real inspector. Be present for the inspection and ask questions because a new home can contain defects. The HVAC system might be too small or the plumbing could be installed backwards. Construction workers make mistakes. (And let's not even talk about the empty Taco Bell Big Drink cups stuffed in wall cavities.)

In some new home communities, it is standard practice to leave the furnishings in the model home. This means the furniture, artwork on the walls and knickknacks stay with the home, if you ask for them. When putting these items into the contract, state they are to remain with the Prefab House without consideration and without warranty.

Once completed, a shipping Container House does not take up much space. During construction, however, a significant amount of free space is needed. First, enough space must be available at the building site for the containers to be delivered and placed. Containers must be moved using cranes and other heavy equipment, which must have room to maneuver and move.

Second, modification of shipping containers requires free space around the construction area. As steel is cut and containers are connected, workers must have ample space to operate welders, torches and other tools.

Modular home manufacturers build and transport each section of the home separately. When the home is delivered, the sections are attached and leveled. A home can get out of level when excess ground moisture causes the soil under the home to shift or erode. Relevel a modular home as soon as possible to prevent structural damage to the home from sagging areas.

Remove all skirting around the modular home for full access underneath. Loosen all tie-down straps with an adjustable wrench about halfway.

Place a 4-foot level horizontally in the center of the home where two sections meet. Observe the level to determine which support footing needs to rise up to become level. If the bubble in the level is on the right side, the right side needs to raise up to level this area.

Place a house jack underneath the trailer next to the supports that need raising. Jack the frame up slightly above the supports. Insert wood shims into the raised space by hammering them in. Place concrete pads in large spaces. Lower the house jack and recheck the level.

Move the level to the next room on the right. Level this area in the same Prefab House. Work to the right side of this section and then from the center to the left side of this section.