Photos by Vicki Cox

Montgomery built her river paradise from discarded shipping containers.

Montgomery wanted her home to be environmentally responsible. She used recycled cedar for the ceilings; her coffee table is a piece of cast off wood.

Marti Montgomery

Living inside a box

"I've dreamed of living by the river since I was 10 years old," said Marti Montgomery. Her lifelong ambition seemed nearly impossible when the Rogersville, Mo., resident learned building a conventional house on her wooded property would exceed her budget by $30,000. Then she discovered shipping containers.

Thanks to four 8x10x40-foot steel structures, Montgomery, 66, got her sanctuary near her beloved James River — a two-bedroom, two-bath, 1,300-square-foot retirement home where she and Morgan, her daughter, now live.

"There's not a place from the house that you can't see the woods or the river," said Montgomery.

Walk out porches bookend her living room and office. Floor-to-ceiling windows provide a bird's-eye view into the leafy upper stories of trees growing out of the ravine behind the house.

Montgomery's home is one of the few shipping container homes in Missouri. In the beginning, Montgomery never envisioned she would end up living in a box. She just wanted to retire on her 48-acre property along the James River.

"I use every spare minute I can sitting on the land or taking my kayak on the river. It's been my therapy, my entertainment and my dream for where I wanted to live," said Montgomery, an attendance advisor for the Springfield R-12 school district.

Carrying a shoebox full of magazine articles and photos of things she wanted in her home, Montgomery approached Jason Mitchell of Workshop 308 in Springfield.

"I didn't want anything high maintenance, just simple, inexpensive and unique," said Montgomery of their initial meeting in 2007. "The land there is just beautiful. The house needed to do the site justice."

Mitchell drew up plans, but the proposed excavation, construction, a well, septic tank and utilities exceeded her $150,000 budget. Then she dug through her collection of clippings for a pamphlet about a two-story East Coast shipping container home.

"It was a one-day decision," Montgomery said. "I looked at the budget and said, 'We could always go with the shipping container house.' The process started from there."

Nationwide, there are only about 1,000 similar residences. However, containers are also used as motels, university structures, as well as apartment buildings in Europe and Russia.

Yet, shipping containers are plentiful. Estimates of the number of containers range from 11 to 18 million. Almost 90 percent of the world's goods are moved in containers annually, stacked nine high in ships' holds. Because their country of origin can buy new containers cheaper than retrieving them — and the United States imports more than it exports — 300,000 empty containers stack up in U.S. ports. That potentially translates into 90 million square feet of living space.

Shipping containers appeal to homebuilders for multiple reasons. The steel construction makes them termite, fire and hurricane resistant. They are easily and quickly transported to their new location and once in place, require little maintenance. For the environmentally aware, the energy saved in modifying one steel container, instead of melting it down, could power a 70-watt light bulb for 15 years.

Montgomery's architect went back to the drawing board. He contacted a Memphis container company and purchased four 9-year-old steel containers.

"We ordered them on Monday and they arrived less than 24 hours later," said Mitchell. "We saved 40 percent of conventional construction by using containers as main infrastructure."

After cutting in doors and windows, the boxes were joined together and placed on concrete pilings in three hours.

Beyond recycling the steel containers and reducing construction costs, Montgomery wanted her home to be environmentally responsible, using material already considered surplus or salvage. The cedar ceilings are really composed of scrap byproducts from a factory manufacturing cedar linings for closets. Radiant heat fueled by a solar panel, heats the home. The floors are concrete. Sliding bathroom and closet doors were scrap from the containers. Wood for her coffee tables came from an architectural salvage store.

"I didn't wanted this house to use much energy or damage the land," she said. "The river is so precious to me. It's my duty to protect this area as much as possible."

Montgomery purposefully limited the interior decoration to a few pieces of artwork and essential furniture.
"I wanted to keep it simple," she said. "After all, the beauty is outside."

The galvanized exterior is painted earth tone. She planted buffalo grass in the front yard, eliminating the need for lawn mowing.

"It's not like we've taken a country villa and plopped it on the hillside," said Montgomery. "Galvanized metal is standard building material for outbuildings and barns. The house looks like it belongs here. I find it hard to understand why more people aren't doing this. It's cost effective, simple and fast."
— Vicki Cox