Shipping containers

Yesterday our long-awaited shipping container arrived. This was quite exciting, as now we can store tools and building materials on site out of the weather rather than having to cart everything back and forth and unload the car a gazillion times.

We arrived a little while before the truck, and were a bit surprised to find about 30 cows and a handful of very small calves on the property.

We suspect they're the same cows that were in the next paddock over a few days ago that looked at us suspiciously when we were digging our veggie patch. We don't mind at all that they're there - in fact we'd been having discussions on and off for weeks about who we would need to talk to to arrange to borrow some cows or sheep. You see, the grass is getting quite long, and whilst my dad very kindly offered to lend us his ride-on lawn mower that seems like such a waste! We could certainly use it to cut down paths or rough driveways, but mow an entire 25 acre block? It'd take a week and way too much fuel to bother with.

Unfortunately, the cows were comfortably settled right on top of the spot we'd left our concrete blocks the other day, which we needed to go under the shipping container. So Kyle had to chase them off down the hill, poor dears.

The truck with our shipping container arrived right on time - apparently there aren't any problems with the 5km or so of unsealed road, though we had extensive phone conversations with the driver beforehand giving directions and making sure he was well aware of the road conditions and the layout of the property.

We talked through where the truck could reasonably get to without sliding or hitting rocks (not very far, it turns out, as the ground gets a little soft as you get further into the property).

I'd had a very amusing (for me at least) conversation with the person in the office that does the ordering for the containers - she kept insisting I had to think carefully about which way they had to load the container onto the truck. We had to, apparently, make sure we'd measured the space we wanted it to go and ensure the doors had space to open. If they didn't, we had to rethink. I said I thought we'd be ok either way, but she was very insistent that it trips up a lot of people. Nice of her to check I guess.

While the container was dangling a little on the crane we rushed around to the corners and put a concrete block under each one. We got these from the tip a few days ago for about $2 (for 10 of them - love the tip!).

Top tip - check that the doors open and close properly before the truck leaves. Our spot isn't entirely level (just a little bit off) and we didn't want it to cause the container to twist and make the doors impossible to open. This would be hard to fix later without the crane.

Of course the first thing we did after the truck left was do a little happy dance and put stuff inside.

It's very dark, though, so we'll need to get some lights with magnets to clip to the walls we think.

The container itself is a 40-foot high-cube - we figured if we were going to the trouble of getting one we may as well get the biggest we could find, as if we went smaller and regretted it it's hard to change. Cost a bit less than $4500 AUD all up, including delivery (about $1400). We went with the mid-level model - they have brand new ones, which were expensive, 'cargo worthy' ones which are old and rusty, then the mid level is basically the cargo worthy ones cleaned up a bit and given a fresh coat of paint. The one bit that wasn't really painted was the wooden flooring, so Kyle will go over that with some very basic paint before we really start to fill it to make sure it lasts for a few years.

I got quotes from every shipping container supplier I could find on the internet (about 10 different companies could deliver to our area). We ended up going through Port Container Services. For price these guys ended up around about the middle of the various quotes we got, but were extremely pleasant to deal with.

A few colleagues of mine have had very negative experiences with getting shipping containers delivered, from various other companies - issues with delivery time confusion, miscommunications, etc. We were very keen for this to go smoothly, as our window for when delivery could occur was very narrow (we wanted it right at the start of our two weeks off work, so we'd be there when it came but could make the most of it while we're on leave). Port were very lovely, everything went exactly as they said it would, and they were very clear about every step of the way. The only thing that was a little different was it showed up with no lock box, but looking back over my quote requests with them I requested a lock box on every other quote I got but theirs, so totally my fault not theirs and it's not really a big deal.

In the spirit of a happy relationship with the council we did check we are allowed a shipping container, and they did confirm this was fine so long as it was 10m from a boundary .