Some purchases are completed on autopilot. But on occasion there are those where you are not even sure where to start.

My attempts to purchase a decommissioned shipping container eventually took me to a local container yard, which made me feel really, really small.

But the road to that container yard was a winding one.

I first poked around the internet. It wasn’t difficult to find websites that offered shipping containers for sale. But they usually were new, pretty new, pretty pricey, or all of the above.

Plus, you usually couldn’t just add a shipping container to your shopping cart and check out. Instead you request a quote and get call backs from brokers. Some of them are “local” (i.e. within a two hour drive from Chicago), but most were not.

That was not my cup of tea. I was looking for hyper local to keep transportation costs down.

I pulled my mind out of the internet and went old school: I asked around my network for recommendations. My friend Mark Wille at Build Small Casitas put me in touch with a local broker, by the name of Ron. And that is how I ended up in that container yard, only a couple of miles from our house, feeling really small.

Ron led me to a stack of containers that were water and wind tight and in my price range. But it was impossible to pick one. If they are stacked two, three, or four tall and a couple of rows deep, you can’t see much of them.

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But no worries! Ron had arranged for the container handler to move any unit that looked interesting onto the ground so we could open it up and inspect it. After three or four, I came across the one container I liked.

We discussed and made arrangements for delivery, but more about that in another post. First I had to get the yard prepared for the container placement.

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• Container rational