Any info about building house out of shipping containers?

This has been done in California, I saw it on the T.V. They built it all eco friendly and it was a nice house.

I am a retired plumber. I have built or worked on early construction of many pre-fab Log Cabins, Condos and single family houses. One of the strongest and most innovative I ever worked on was one made of Box Cars and Cargo Containers.

Total cost at build time was about 1/2 of what new construction would have been. The building as finished has withstood four hurricanes, seven floods and is still standing strong.

The owner was an architect type with a degree in Engineering.

There were no 'green' incentives when it was built, he was way ahead of that fad, but did have an inkling of it.

Today one can use Shipping Containers, Boxcars or many other Containers. If I were to do it, I would use Shipping Containers, the food or cold storage ones because they have prefabbed high insulation properties.

The engineers house relied more on I-beams and lag bolt design with welding after placement.

Shipping containers often have hard wood boards and beams. Insects are more likely to make nests in hard wood. Hard wood can be very hard to nail together. If you are making a temporary shelter, forget about a slab. Just pour concrete beams for it to sit on. Get it a foot off the ground. Still at best I'd give it less than a 15 year usefulness expectancy. Have fun, your biggest cost will likely be your tools and roofing, if you work it right. That way you can replace it like you would your shirt, pants, and boots, OK? Oh, wait, you are talking, maybe about those metal containers that come off of a trailer from an oversea container ship. They will need to be waterproofed, possibly. Use the concrete beams I mentioned above, but put threaded studs into the concrete, so that the container can be fastened to the concrete with steel plates or real thick washers. It will likely outlast you.

I can only see drawbacks apart from price:

1. Planning Authorities may well reject it, as not in keeping with the area...i.e. who wants to see

a pile of shipping containers

2. Building Control will have a whole raft of issues:

- Insulation - L2 Compliancy (New builds these days need to meet strict criteria on energy usage)

- Ventilation

- Fire protection / Safety

To me it's a non starter.