Shmuel Thaler/Santa Cruz Sentinel - MCT
A worker helps guide a shipping container into place to create a cabin in California. Connie and Kam DeWitt plan to use their container home for weekend getaways with their son, Kyler.
ZAYANTE, Calif. -- Suspended from a crane in the Santa Cruz Mountains, Connie DeWitt's kitchen and bathroom are inches from nudging a madrone tree.
The 30-foot shipping container was the largest of six trucked from Oakland, Calif. Before dinner, less than eight hours after the containers arrived, workers from NorCal Construction in Santa Cruz, Calif., had ground the final bits of rust off the boxes and welded them together to create DeWitt's two-story mountain retreat.
"The crane guy said it might be tough, but if we put a man on the moon, we can do it," Dewitt said.
Homes built from used cargo containers are a growing trend, but the Zayante cabin was a first for nearly everyone involved in its construction. Pieced together like Lincoln Logs in a single afternoon, the construction project seemed to belie the time it took to design the cabin - and fit it within the DeWitts' budget and space constraints.
"There have been more consultants on this project than I've done on certain high rises," Fenster said.
A place to grow
As a young girl in upstate New York, Connie DeWitt had a 1,000-acre wooded wonderland at her disposal. She wanted the same for her 7-year-old son, Kyler. In May 2009, she and husband Kam DeWitt purchased 10.8 acres with the idea of creating a mountain cabin. Connie DeWitt knew she'd be working on a budget. She didn't want to compromise on the design, though. She wanted a light-filled, minimalist retreat, a world away from the family's 1912 home in downtown San Jose, with its postage-stamp backyard.
"I wanted a clean aesthetic, not something that would get moldy," DeWitt said. "I didn't want to spend all our time maintaining it."
A prefab home seemed like the obvious choice, maybe a Michelle Kaufmann or a Rocio Romero. Both designers offer a modern aesthetic, with relatively predictable pricing. But trucking a prefab home into the Santa Cruz Mountains posed challenges. Even if a truck could make it up through the steep, winding road through the redwoods, a private bridge was too narrow to fit a house.
"Some (prefab homes) are flat-pack, like Ikea houses, and the constructor puts it together," DeWitt said. "But (the designs are) not that flexible. And our land is terraced, as the creek has worked its way down over the eons." DeWitt's research eventually pointed her to shipping containers, reused by a growing number of people to build homes and commercial structures.
No money saved
SG Blocks, the New York-based company DeWitt used to purchase and customize the containers, bills them as "earthquake-, hurricane-, fire- and tornado-resistant." In 2006, Sun Microsystems created a modular data center inside a shipping container and rattled it through a magnitude 6.7 earthquake.
Cabins in Zayante, many of them built in the 1970s with the wood paneling and shag carpeting to show for it, start around $200,000. DeWitt estimates she will have paid close to $600,000 for her custom home. The DeWitts contacted a homeowner in Richmond, Va., who forewarned them that if they were hoping to save money, they should look elsewhere.
The same proved true for saving time.
"It's been a much bigger project than any of us anticipated," DeWitt said.
The final design is "all about light and shadow," with five glass doors to the outside, 23 windows and nine holes for skylights, preinstalled by SG Blocks.
