From DNA Info:David Boyle and his wife Michele Bertomen were worried they would never be able to afford to build their own home in Brooklyn.
The couple bought a 20-by-40-foot piece of land at 351 Keap St. in 2008, trying to get ahead of the wave of gentrification they feared would soon price them out of Williamsburg. Initially, they planned to build a tiny home out of bricks and mortar, but when they put out a bid, it came back as potentially costing half a million dollars.
"We were just sitting around one night, bottle of wine, just feeling like we couldn't do it," said Boyle, a 55-year-old contractor whose wife is an architect. "And then just, 'How about shipping containers?' came up. So Michele just sat down and did the calculations, in the terms of the size, fire ratings, how you can stack them up… And she said it would work."
The couple, who have been together for about 20 years, bought six shipping containers at $1,500 apiece and began work on what they believe is the first private residence in the city made out of shipping containers.
They worked on the design, which has the three containers stacked on top of each other with a stairwell connecting them in the middle, and erected the nearly 1,600-square-foot structure in late 2009 in about three hours.
14 comments:
I tip my hat to any resourceful individual who outwits the NYC real estate rat race. According to the article, the DoB tried repeatedly to stop them, and they jumped through every hoop. If Boyle and Bertomen like their odd dwelling, more power to them.
Living in Quonset huts was the norm for some returning WW II veterans during the apartment shortage that followed.
The DOB persecutes this innovative couple while they let major developers off the hook for major legal infractions.
Bravo! FUCK NYC!
The real underlying problem is why some people feel they "have" to live in a certain neighborhood.
Twenty-plus years ago Williamsburg -Fort Green were dumps.
First the young "hipsters" "discovered" them.
Then came families and a certain cache.
The landlord/R.E. leeches drove up the prices, and often the existing residents, the area is now so high priced that even a contractor whose wife is an architect can't afford it.
Answer: Look elsewhere.
Williamsburg has passed it's peak on the hipness curve anyway.
If there's a fire, they'll cook faster. Also must be he'll in the summertime.
I've seen quite a few homes built from shipping containers on "small home" blogs, but this is the first made from multiple containers. With their experience, I'm sure it's well-built and insulated with modern materials, so no reason it shouldn't be as safe and stay as cool as any other new home.
time to end the federal reserve....
and increase our standard of living in America.
It boggles the mind how the wife-architect thought that a new residence could be built on a 20x40 lot for less than $500,000 in Brooklyn. At some point the very smallness of the lot increases the costs relative to the savings using less materials.
I wonder what sort of bids they will get when they sell it.
My congratulations to this couple. They used what they had in excess, knowledge and experience and it worked. I'm an architect myself and design homes, cabins and shelters using ISO shipping containers for latin America. It saves more than 30% on time and costs and even more when you recoup land by using the roof as a deck.
It looks like blight to me folks. How would you like this major 3rd world crap as your neighbor? Ha! DOB job is to go after illegal crap like this to protect the owners from harming themselfs!
A shipping container will seem like a mansion for most Americans when Barry "I love Marx" Soetoro is done with us. Get your cardboard box ready, sheep.
IMHO, Its a publicity stunt. Contractor? Architect?
They want a contract to develop housing in developing nations?0
As we could see with this publicity, they got their name in the papers and today that is where its at.
but this is the first made from multiple containers.
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not really, no. There are entire complexes out there built of these things.
Wow, now it even LOOKS like the 3rd world.
Do they have a Certificate of Occupancy for this mess?
C of O, we don't need no steenkin' C of O!
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