Shipping Container Garage

Width is the whole game. A mid-size sedan is 1.80–1.90 m across the body but 2.00–2.15 m across its mirrors; a full-size pickup runs 2.03 m body and ~2.45 m mirrors-out. Against the 2.340 m door opening, that means: sedans and crossovers enter with mirrors folded and ~20–40 cm of total side clearance; full-size trucks clear only with mirrors folded (mirrors-out they are wider than the opening); anything with a body over ~2.2 m is a no. The doorway, not the interior, is the gate — the diagram above shows the clearances, and the car in a container guide tabulates them model class by model class.

Once inside, length and doors take over. In a 20 ft box a 4.8 m sedan leaves ~1.1 m of total nose-to-tail slack — park hard forward and the driver’s door still only opens onto ~25 cm of wall gap, so the practised routine is: fold mirrors, drive in centred, exit through a part-open door. Height is the non-issue: at 2.280 m the opening clears every car and SUV; only vans and lifted trucks over 2.28 m need a high cube with its 2.585 m opening.

One car — 20 ft. The minimum viable garage: car up to ~5.4 m, plus wall hooks for tyres and tools in the remaining sliver. Nothing else fits beside the car; storage lives above the bonnet or on the end wall.

Long garage — 40 ft. The versatile format: two cars nose-to-tail (2 × ~5.4 m with a metre spare), or — far more common — one car in the first bay and a 6 m workshop behind it with bench, compressor and racking at full standing height. One box, one delivery, one permit conversation.

Double garage — 2 × 40 ft plus roof span. Set two boxes parallel, 5–6 m apart, and span a steel or timber roof between the top rails: the containers become secure workshop/storage wings and the covered bay between them parks two cars side by side with full door swing — the layout the 2.35 m interior can never offer. The roof structure needs engineering (the top side rails are not designed for heavy point loads mid-span; posts or a properly sized beam carry the span into the corner posts), but the result is a ~9 × 12 m building for the price of two used boxes and a roof kit.

Factory cargo doors are the wrong daily-driver interface: two leaves swinging 270° through a 2+ m arc, four vertical lock rods, no operation from inside, and gaskets that stiffen with age. Fine for a monthly airing; miserable twice a day in the rain (full hardware anatomy in the door dimensions guide).

The standard retrofit is a roll-up door in the end frame: the cargo doors are removed or welded open, and a 2.2–2.4 m roll-up sheet door with a ~300 mm coil headbox mounts into the existing structural opening — no new cutting, $1,000–3,500 fitted. Note the headroom trade: the coil drops clear passage to ~2.0–2.1 m in a standard box, which is why garage conversions favour high cubes (2.585 m opening leaves ~2.3 m under the coil). A side-entry roll-up — an opening cut into the corrugated side wall — allows drive-through layouts and wider doors, but a side cut removes structural wall and needs a welded steel frame and header sized for the span.

The loads are modest — box (2,230 kg for a 20 ft, 3,740 kg for a 40 ft) plus a ~2-tonne car — but a garage adds one requirement storage doesn’t: the floor must take a car’s wheel loads (~500 kg per contact patch) repeatedly, and the box must sit dead level or the retrofit door racks in its frame. The economical answer is a compacted gravel pad (150–200 mm, $300–1,000) or concrete piers under the corner castings ($1,000–3,500); a full slab ($4,000–8,000) is the premium option that also gives a clean apron at the threshold. The 28 mm plywood floor handles car wheels as long as its steel cross-members are supported — which on soft ground means pads under the rails, not just the corners. Full options in the foundation guide.

The container wins on price, speed (secure the week it arrives), and relocatability — and it is steel-secure from day one. The stick-built garage wins on width (a 3.6 m single bay swallows any vehicle with doors flung open), on unconditional permitting, and on resale integration with the house. The honest summary: a container is a superb secure vehicle shelter and workshop; it is a tight fit as a daily garage for anything wider than a mid-size car. Prices for the boxes themselves are in the prices guide.