Home sweet home, made from shipping containers

For Zack and Brie Smithey, the smell of old tires will be forever associated with home. "It reminds me of the beginning stages of the construction here," he said, in the couple's dream home in St. Charles, Missouri. (Note: The house does not smell like tires.)

In 2016, the couple built their three bedroom, two-and-a-half bath, 3,000-square-foot, two-story structure made out of eight shipping containers, those big metal boxes you see transporting all manner of goods (including, sometimes, tires). 

Those containers, manufactured in Shanghai, traveled around the world 12 times carrying goods before they landed in a yard in St. Louis, which is where the Smitheys went to inspect their future home.

Brie said, "It was still, like, kind of surreal to go to this container yard with thousands and thousands of shipping containers and think, 'We're going to live in this'?"

Malcolm McLean, an American trucker, first applied to parent the shipping container in 1954, and his invention has changed the way we live and trade. Today an estimated 90% of all goods pass through as many as 170 million shipping containers circulating around the world.

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