Hannah and Tyler Bright with the shipping container that will soon become their downstairs master suite.
UPDATE: This story was updated at 10:15 a.m. Wednesday, Feb. 8.
The Brights purchased their sea foam green China International Marine Container, 40 feet by 8 feet, for about $5,000 from Cisco Containers in Tulsa in September and have spent their nights and weekends rehabbing it into home, sweet home.
The couple, 22 years old and married December 2010—he the owner of a landscaping business and she a veterinary technician—decided to build their home from recycled shipping containers after other options proved too expensive.
“I wanted to live on land, and it’s expensive to buy land,” Tyler said. His parents, Sheilah and Kent Bright, bequeathed to them a small plot of their 35 acres, and an architect designed them a 1,250-square-foot home that would have cost $220,000.
The Brights declined the offer, exploring other options—modular homes, metal kit homes—before stumbling upon a website touting the economic and environmental advantages of container homes.
“We like more eco-friendly type things, so this really fit us,” Hannah said.
Their two-story, 2,650-square-foot house will be constructed from almost entirely recycled materials, including five shipping containers—two on bottom and three on top—built upon a 40-by-40-foot slab facing southwest, toward Tyler’s parents’ farm. Behind them is a hill and 100 acres of undeveloped woods. The entire project should cost them $140,000, or about $53 per square foot.
In addition to being eco- and pocketbook-friendly, their home will also be virtually weather- and tornado-proof, termite-proof and fireproof. The steel shipping containers provide most of the framework, and the walls, windows, and doors will be constructed from recycled aluminum.
The Brights are doing most of the construction themselves, working on one container at a time inside Kent’s shop, where he, when he’s not cutting doors and windows into high-cube containers, rebuilds racecar motors and then takes his reconstructed Camaros careening down local raceways.
Sometime this spring or summer, they’ll use a crane to lay their containers on the slab, and they hope to have their house finished—or at least livable—by December.
“Our thinking is to get all the outside weathered in and finished, and then put the top floor on while we’re living in it,” Tyler said.
Its exterior will resemble a modern, ‘50s-era home, but the inside will contain reminders—metal walls and ceilings—of its former life.
Once finished, the Brights' 2,650-square-foot home will look something like this.
The Brights are the first family in Tulsa County to construct a home from used shipping containers—which made the permitting process a bit tricky—but there’s a guy in Oklahoma City who’s been working on one, and a Starbucks in Tukwila, Washington, began serving coffee out of a cargo container in December. As far as the Brights know, though, they’re the only ones to attempt a project of this size in Oklahoma.
“It’s kind of fun to do something other people haven’t done,” Hannah said.
The couple has been blogging about their experience since they began the project.
—Holly Wall, News Editor
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Tyler Bright
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