The Container Project: Chapter 1

So let’s suppose you have around 5000 square feet of work space, with no walls and oh, around 25′ – 30′ high ceilings. It’s a warehouse, so there’s, well, dust. You also have stuff that makes more dust, like a woodshop, and stuff that doesn’t want any dust at all, like a 3D printing farm and an electronics and digital imaging area.

You’re also committed to recycle-reuse… oh, and the place gets a little drafty and has no AC. Noisy too, not great if you want to have classes and maybe kids in there.

Yeah, we came up with the idea of moving in container studios too… you’ve been reading the spoilers!

The next series of posts will be telling the container story, from how we contacted Wayside Trailers in Peabody, they fell in love with the idea and helped us at every turn, to the move-in and outfitting of the spaces. It was, first and foremost, a great challenge that was a lot of fun, but more, a huge learning experience and an amazing solution.

So here’s the story of how we went from that ^^^., to this:

The Plan

We were supported in large part by a grant from the Mass Development Collaborative Workspace program, and so we were able to think about this as a complete and professionally-executed project. Not to say we don’t approach everything like that, but it makes it a whole lot easier when we have some reasonable funding, and a huge shoutout and thanks go to the folks there. The first step was putting the plan together, and to do that, we pulled in all our resources in our Rapid Prototyping studio to 3D print scale models, laser cut and CNC machine our scale spaces.

This let us make some intelligent decisions about how many containers we’d need, and what size we should get. It also helped us spec what we wanted for door and window holes cut it the boxes, as well as how we were going to lay the space out once we got them moved in. (…not to mention letting us demonstrate the power of Rapid Prototyping for a project like this.)

We settled on a 20′ long, “Standard” size container, which is 8′ wide and 8′ 6″ high from the inside. Just for some reference, these weigh about 5000 lbs, and can support something in the neighborhood of 85,000 lbs if stacked on the corner supports. They’re typically moved around with pallet jacks, dollies and, of course, huge forklifts (which we didn’t have access to.)

The Move-In

The challenge here is, more than anything else, receiving the containers, prepping them with painting and HVAC, and then moving them into a working shop without causing too much down-time and hazardous traffic problems in the shop. Fortunately, we had a big area inside the garage doors to stage most of the work.

Here’s how that went:

Painting and Prepping

Once we got the boxes in, one at a time, we could paint them:

They came to us cleaned and painted in “Battleship Gray”, which is fine if you’re painting a battleship, but we wanted a little more fun feel to it. We settled on an airless sprayer after starting with a HVLP system (“High Volume Low Pressure”). The HVLP was a beautiful finish, but was really slow… the airless was described as “good for painting bridges and other large structures…”, pretty much a perfect description of what we were doing, right? The airless was astoundingly fast. To paint the inside and out with the HVLP took a few hours, with the airless, only about an hour for the whole thing. Using cardboard sheets to mask the floor was a brilliant move – they cost $25 for 5, from Grainger, and are 4′ x 8′ – just right, and faster than tarps by a longshot.

Here are the other two boxes: