Must-know

Shipping container homes are indeed a trend.

We see them pretty often on social media and in online magazines ...but is the hype worth your attention and money?

Here are a few questions you might be wondering:

• are people really building them?
• is it a safe choice to build your home with recycled steel?
• are they easier to build?
• are "container-homes" really cheaper?
• is there a better alternative to container homes?

And here are the answers...

When we go shopping for food, we naturally check the quality of the groceries before we buy them. Strangely enough, when building a house, customers tend to focus 99% on the appearance of the building disregarding other important aspects.

Luckily, more and more people care about how their home is going to be built and wish to build only with environment-friendly materials.

One good example of such building material is MHM (Massiv-Holz-Mauer), a cross-layered wood panel where timber boards are joined together with aluminum pins.

MHM looks a lot like CLT (cross-laminated timber) but is produced using no adhesives or chemicals.

An eco-friendly house is a type of house that utilizes significantly fewer resources than a traditional one.
Eco-friendly houses consume energy and water more efficiently than their conventional counterparts.

To make this happen, factors like building orientation, geometry/shape, building envelope, window-to-wall ratio, shading & daylighting need to be planned in great detail.
Consequently, planning and design are the most important stages in building an eco-friendly home. 

House manufacturers are very skilled in doing part of their job, namely producing houses.

Unfortunately, there are other aspects of the house manufacturing business where the entire Industry lacks know-how, tools and vision.

As a matter of fact, the problem in manufacturing houses is not in the manufacturing itself, but in everything that comes before that...