Boxed Set

The Stankeys have always brought a less than conventional approach to the forty wooded acres they own just south of Duluth. Not for this family the familiar log or frame cabin—not when a caravan trailer will do. When the trailer proved too confining for the growing clan, brothers Paul and Scott and their wives, Sarah and Krista, again looked for something different and decided on—what else!—a pair of eight-by-twenty-foot shipping containers.

The Stankeys purchased the big steel boxes for $1,000 each at a Minneapolis rail yard, then, using Paul’s diesel pickup and a rented tandem-axle trailer, hauled them north.

How do you move a pair of 5,000-pound containers without a railroad? Very carefully, says Scott—meaning one at a time, at forty to fifty miles per hour, keeping to the back roads. Getting the boxes off the trailer and into position was another challenge, this one met by using a car jack with old conduit pipe and railroad ties serving as rollers. “Quite an adventure,” Scott remarks.

Once in place, the containers were propped on concrete piers and connected by a glazed common area. The boxes provide sleeping, sitting, and storage space—most of the family’s activity is still outdoors—with a “dining hall” in between. A wood stove generates heat, and insulated paneling is being added. A kitchen is already on the drawing board.

But why containers? Scott, a Twin Cities–based homebuilder, says he for one appreciates a “different approach” that offers, among other things, the tactile pleasure of “unlocking and opening the [boxes’] big swinging doors.” Plus, he says, there’s the “history of the boxes having traveled around the world carrying only God knows what. There’s a unique mystery to them that you don’t get from a bunch of two-by-fours.”