31 Mar Why are Park Homes Popular?

Park Homes Are a Popular Moneysaving Option

The average lifespan of shipping containers in active service is somewhere between 10 and 12 years. After retirement, they are often recycled as scrap metal. However, for a significant and growing number of these rectangular metal boxes, their post-retirement destiny is now repurposing rather than destruction. When refurbished and in the right hands, they can provide the ideal starting point for constructing park homes and other forms of temporary or longer-term accommodation.

One of the main reasons they are seen to be so well-suited for this purpose is their uniform size and shape. This allows them to be assembled in numerous ways, rather like a child’s Lego blocks, to create a wide range of possible structures as required. Furthermore, being made of metal, individual units can be either welded or bolted together in various configurations, namely, end-to-end, back-to-back, or even one above the other, to create multi-storey park homes.

A Perfect Option for Domestic Use

A refurbished and re-styled shipping container has become an attractive and highly practical feature of many suburban homes in South Africa. Constructed by experts to the owner’s design, this could be the ideal addition to the poolside, providing the family with a comfortable refuge from the sun between dips, handy changing facilities and perhaps even a built-in bar area complete with dartboard or table soccer.

That said, shipping containers are primarily storage vessels. So, rather than the elaborate and more costly conversion to a park home, adding a suitably robust door lock, a couple of windows and burglar bars could provide a more convenient means to store all that stuff cluttering up the garage and relegating the family car to the driveway. Alternatively, an equally inexpensive conversion could serve as the much longed-for workshop.

Practical Solutions for the Commercial User

There will be numerous occasions on which many of those engaged in commerce find they require some additional space. In such cases, it is unlikely to be park homes in the strictest sense of the term that will solve their problem. Nevertheless, shipping containers can be adapted for many different purposes. For example, a site office is invariably a must on any new housing development. At a later stage in the project, once the first show house is complete and open for viewing, a sales office could be the next requirement. Converted shipping containers are a perfect option, especially since they can be easily transported to another site when necessary.

Together with quality park homes, spaza shops, classrooms, cold storage units and ablution blocks are just a few ways in which Absolute Containers can repurpose decommissioned shipping containers to meet clients’ needs.