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The Mulder Life Podcast
Ep 167. Grow Without the Shop: What Shipping Containers Taught Me About Business
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Welcome to this week's episode of the Molder Life podcast, a live show featuring your questions about all things landscaping, equipment, business and life. Join our live show weekly on Instagram oderoutdoors Monday nights, 8:30pm Central Standard Time to ask your questions or tune in here for the replay.
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And now from the Incon Studios Incon, a world leading manufacturer of toe rotators and attachments enhancing your business. Here's your host, Andy Mulder.
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What's going on everybody? Welcome back to another episode of the Molded Life podcast. We are live here Monday night an hour earlier than normal. But I had to do this for some other reasons, timing wise. And so excited to be here with you guys tonight. Big shout out to our sponsors this week. Pave Tool Innovators. Pave Tool.com Go check them out. You can use that Coupon code molder outdoors 50 and save yourself $50 off. $500 or more at checkout. Also CMP attachments, CMP attachments.com both of these companies, huge supporters of the podcast and I'm very grateful for their support. Definitely go and check out both of these companies and let them know that we sent you also Albany's Candy Factory, the official Candy of the Moto Life podcast on this episode and I'm thankful for their support during the podcast season. So guys, we're gonna this week I decided to choose a topic that we've never dedicated an entire episode to. And so I thought it would be good to do that and mostly because every time I show these we are I get lots of questions on Instagram and I thought that it would be really good to just have a dedicated episode to this information and I hope that it can help somebody like this has helped me and I've spent a lot of time over the years learning a lot of things about these and so today we're going to be talking about shipping containers and specifically how I have run my company for the last 12 years out of, well really 10 years, I should say 10 years out of shipping containers. And it started as a just a way to store salt actually, and then turned into basically the way that I was going to run my business until we could save enough money to buy property and build a shop for Mulder Outdoors. We'll go back about 10 years and prior to moving to the property that we live at now, we lived in a small house in a normal suburban neighborhood. We had a park down the street, we had sidewalks and that's where me and my wife, that was our first house that me and my wife Bought together. We had our first son in that house. And that's where I started the company. And and so when I started the company, we had one truck and a small 8 by 6 by 10 trailer. And I was able to keep that in my yard, in my driveway, at my house. Quickly after I went full time, I graduated basically to getting another truck and a dump trailer. And very quickly was like I cannot have this in my driveway in my little neighborhood that where we live on at our. My 1200 square foot house with no basement. So we then moved everything to my mom's house and we ran it out of my mom and dad's house for another six to eight months. I guess it would have been till the end of the first or second season. First season. Maybe it was the. I don't know exactly timeline, but roughly around then. So we ran. My dad had a 40 by 60 pole barn. We were able to put some stuff in there, store some stuff outside of the building. I purchased another truck, we borrowed his truck for a while. And then me and my wife sold our house, our first home. And we moved to the house that I live in now. And that house lived, had one acre of land and no, it just had a driveway. And the back 100 by 100 foot area was open with just grass. And so my plan was, my plan was to eventually dig a driveway to the back and make a stone parking lot to be able to park trucks and all that stuff. So then at the same time, when we had moved out to where we live now, we moved about an eighth of a mile from my brother and sister in law and my father in law. And they had a barn, the barn that we're sitting in right Now, a little 30 by 40 pole barn that was not being used. I've told this story many times. So we ended up for a year and a half we ran out of this building. It had a leaky roof, it had a stone floor, it had terrible lighting. But it was somewhere for us to store some things. And I parked some trailers outside here because it was 35 minutes from my mom's house. And so it was hard to like justify that much drive time when there was somewhere to park stuff here. I began then to develop and dig out the backyard at my house and put in stone. And we put in just enough room to be able to back a trailer in. We could not turn it around, but we could back it in. And leading into the first winter where we had that, I. We were doing quite a bit of snow removal at that time. And arguably up until this year, more snow removal and salting then than I had ever done. And I needed a place to store bulk salt. And so I was trying to figure out how am I going to store the salt and have a tarp over it and keep it dry and keep it from freezing and all this stuff. And so I did some research on why wouldn't. I just. Couldn't I just buy a shipping container and put salt in it and it would be easy to store, it would be covered all the time. It wouldn't be out in the open, it would be nicer looking in the backyard. And so I proceeded to buy my first shipping container. And that shipping container came from. I don't remember exactly how I made the connection. Maybe it was my uncle. It came from Chicago, downtown Chicago. It was on this place called. I don't remember what it was called. I wish I remember, but I remember the guy's name. His name is Wendell. That's all I remember. James, what's going on? Thanks for being here tonight, man. We're talking about shipping containers. For anybody that is tuning in. I'm telling the story of the biz, how my business has basically been using shipping containers for the last 10 years to grow and keep overhead very low. And then I want to talk about specifics on shipping containers and things that you look for, things that I've learned, all kinds of stuff. I have a list of like 20 things that we could talk about about shipping containers. So anyway, so I got a hold of this guy in Chicago, I said I'm looking for. I need a 20 foot shipping container. I've never bought one before. And. And he proceeded to tell me we could buy brand new ones. We could buy 20s, 40s, high cubes, regular elevation, regular height ones which are 8 foot high cubes are 9 foot, they're 8 foot wide, air and water tight. You can get ones that are not air and watertight. It basically comes down to how nice of a container do you want and how much do you want to spend. So at that time I had a deck over trailer. I was. Any amount of money that I could save to do anything was very important to me. So I drove my dump truck and my deck over trailer. I had a 20 foot deck over trailer, drove it to Chicago, drove, found the ship, they showed me the shipping container that I could buy and I bought it and they loaded it on the trailer. I drove it home, we dragged it off the back of the trailer and we slid it into place. And that was my first shipping Container. My wife was like, oh my goodness, what are you putting in my backyard? So we put it in the backyard. And all I had was a driveway to my backyard, enough for the shipping container and enough room for me to park something next to it. We could not turn around in the back. So then I would have semis that would back down my driveway, back down the small stone area, dump it in front of the shipping container, and then I would bucket the salt into the shipping container. And that's how we would store our salt. And so that was the. That was how we first got our shipping container, was the necessity for salt storage. And we did that for many years in this one shipping container. I still have the one shipping container that I bought. It is definitely beat up. And that is really what started the shipping container thing. I think I paid $1,800 for that shipping container. Don't quote me, but I think I paid $1,800 for it. Now that one was. This is when I started to learn things about the importance of what to check when buying a shipping container. And I'll get to that in a little while. And so then we're gonna just kind of fast forward a little bit. As time went on, I quickly realized that, oh, these are amazing for storing things. We don't have anywhere to put anything. I'm gonna buy another 20 footer. So then I bought another 20 footer. No, no, no. Then I bought a 45 footer. That's what it was. And I bought it from the same guy in Chicago. So I bought that shipping container sight unseen. I called the guy, I said, hey, Wendell, I need a four. I want a 45 foot container. This is amazing. I love shipping containers. I want more in my backyard. So around the same time, I was starting to dig out more of my backyard, bringing more stone in. And we had just enough room to basically we had a stoned area enough to get this 45 foot shipping container in the backyard. So I went ahead and ordered this 45 footer high cube, and this thing shows up in my driveway. And of course, none of you guys know where I live. But when he pulled up with this trailer and I looked at the street, the length of the container and my driveway, I'm like, that thing isn't going back there. There's just no way. Thankfully, the guy that delivered the container was a magician with this trailer. Had this sliding axle thing. Like, he was like, yeah, we're good at in there. No problem. Literally backed it in there. We put it in where I wanted it to go almost exactly. I was able to kind of shimmy it around because at the time I only had my case. 1845. See I didn't have a lot of. I didn't have a lot of equipment. We get it where we want to go. Again. My wife's like what are, what else is in our backyard? Oh my goodness. It had a big sign on the side that said mole. I think it was Mol L L E or something like that. Big sign on this. So now I have two shipping containers. They don't match at all. It looks insanely ridiculous. But I needed a place to store stuff. I needed a place for equipment and for hand tools and for all kinds of stuff. So that one I. If I remember right, I think I paid $4,000 for that one. That one was way nicer than my 20 footer. The doors opened and closed. Really nice. I still have that one today and it's amazing. So I basically any shipping container that I'm going to tell you that we bought, I still own them all because I have an obsession with shipping containers. So that was. We ran like that for at least two years. Two shipping containers in the backyard. I thought, I mean I didn't think. I knew it was the best thing ever. We kept our mini excavator and our track machine in there at that time. We ended up buying a mini excavator track machine through that those years. That was if you had been following me on Instagram for a long time. That's when I had the issue where I had a dead battery in my excavator and I couldn't. It was stuck up against the side of the, of the shipping container and I couldn't open the lid, couldn't open the engine bay to, to, to charge the battery. And it was a whole thing. I went on and on about it for, for a while on Instagram. It was quite funny. And anyways that was in those days. And so then over time I continued to buy them. I ended up buying two more 20 footers. So then in my backyard I had a 45 footer and three 20 foot shipping containers in my backyard. They were very ugly and my wife was like what are you putting in my backyard? And we also of course expanded the parking lot. By this time I have 100 by 100 foot stone parking lot in the backyard. I have six. Got four, five or six guys parking in the backyard. I have. We grow to 6, 5, 4, 4 trucks. 4 trucks, trailers, track machines, excavators. This is all in My backyard. We painted, we ended up painting all the shipping containers the same color as my house. I had quite the operation going in my house and this continued on then like that until two years ago, a year and a half ago in July. It'll be two years since we were finally able to purchase land and move my shipping container farm and my business off of the property. And so basically what I'm saying is I ran my company from zero up to. We didn't. I mean there was a one year we did $3 million in revenue, but a million dollar, multimillion dollar landscape company out of shipping containers. And I reason, I say that is that I want everybody to know that it's possible to run your company and be extremely, extremely accessible, extremely successful by running your business out of shipping containers. At one point during the time that we spent in my backyard, I trenched power and water and gas from my house all the way to the back. We never did anything with the gas line, but I ended up putting a frost free spigot in the back and I put a 100amp sub panel from my house in the back and we had some power back there. We had lights in the containers and that was really, really nice because we didn't have any power. And there was time in the winter where I would run 200ft of extension cord, actually I think it was 300ft of extension cord from my house to the back to plug in my skid loader. So to make sure it would start in the winter. And I had plastic bags over each connector so they wouldn't get water in them because it would trip the breakers, of course. And we did all kinds of stuff but. And we had to do it because we didn't have any money to do anything else. And we were growing the business. Everybody knows I've run and grown my business completely debt free. And so I was not going to go into debt for a business. I was, I did what I needed to do to keep the business going and not go into debt. And so that's what we did for 10 years. We, we figured it out, we made, we had this building, we eventually fixed up this building. New roof, insulation, concrete, electric. So then we had a place to work inside that was 8th of a mile down the street from my house. And we did what we had to do and it worked out really, really good. And, and I'm just going to tell you like we've done massive projects for hundreds and hundreds of clients and none of them have ever asked me if I have a Shop. Nobody ever asked me why I run my business out of shipping containers. Nobody ever didn't hire us because we were running our company out of shipping containers. And so I may be building this incredible facility right now, but that's only because we did what we needed to do for 10 years. Yeah, about 10 years before we could afford to build what we're building now. And what we're building now is most certainly a luxury. It's not something that we have to have to run a successful business. I think it's the right thing that we need to do for the next chapter of the business. It's a good investment, it's good for the business, but it definitely was not something that held me back in business because we were able to do it with shipping containers. And so I would say my first one, my first, my. My three 20 footers that I bought at that time were about $2,000 each, maybe 2,500 max, just for figuring. So that's five grand. That's $7,500 in the 320 footers. And I know I played $4,500 for my 45 footer. So that is $12,000 I spent on storage for salt, hand tools, fabrics, power equipment, just stuff to keep it out of the weather. And that was a small price to pay.
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50. We are back here Tuesday night here, second night. Now we're gonna finish up this podcast. So we started a podcast last night and I'm bradshawed. I had to quit eating candy, but I have a bag of gum, Albany's just for this. Nice. So last night we got cut off because of power shortage on our podcast. And so we're going to finish up that podcast today. So it's going to go for about 30 minutes or so. We were recording for about that long last time roughly. And I just really wanted to finish this podcast and be able to release it for you guys tomorrow or Thursday. So we left off before talking about what we used our shipping containers for at my, at our. When we used to run it out of the house. And then, and so I was getting, gonna get into the different sizes and different things about shipping containers that are specific and forgive me if I may have talked about this stuff yesterday, but I just wanted to make sure I didn't forget it. But. So when you're buying shipping containers, you can buy 8 footers, you can buy. I'm sorry, you can buy 10 foot long ones, you can buy 20 foot long ones, you can buy 40 foot long ones, you can buy 45 footers and you can buy them in regular 8 foot tall or you can buy high cube ones which are nine feet tall. So I have, now I own. So then when we, so after we bought the property that we're at now, that property came with two shipping containers. Both of them were hide cubes, high cubes. One was a 45 footer and one was a 40 footer. So now I have two 45s, 140, those are all high cubes. And then I have, I have. Wait a minute, is that right? Yeah, that's what I have. And then I have three 20 footers. And then I bought another 40 footer that has side doors. So then you can buy them with side doors, you can buy them with roll up doors, you can buy them with just the front door, you can, you can customize them obviously a thousand different ways. So the quality of when you buy the shipping container to me has become very important. When I first started buying shipping containers, they, I didn't, I only bought what I could afford at the time. So definitely was buying used shipping containers. You know what I was just thinking? I actually have like, I have 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3, 4. I have four 20 footers, two of them have side doors that roll up. I have a lot of shaving containers. I'm kind of thinking through how many I have and it's kind of making me laugh. But anyways, the quality of them. In the beginning I bought used ones that were just air and watertight and I didn't always go and check them before I went before I got delivery of them. And I learned that my lesson the hard way on one of my 20 footers. The doors were messed up. That's the first thing you need to check when you're going to go buy a used shipping container is how do the doors open and close. They get really beat up. They may hold water and they may hold out rainwater and air and stuff but the doors could still be a nightmare to open and close. And so I have one, one of them that's really bad and it's the doors are rough. Honestly I need to like take it, cut out all the doors and maybe put a roll up door or something. I thought about paying I so I was going to get to it but I have a company that now I've been working with for shipping containers where they will customize them for me as needed. And they have done two or three different containers for me and made them customize and painted them and they're very nice. So anyways, it's very important. The most important thing when buying a used shipping container is checking the doors. How do they open, how do they close? The next thing is is there any holes in the roof? Not ultra. Like obviously you want them to be waterproof but like they can, you can fix them pretty easily. But then I would say the second thing or the third thing would be really checking the floor. Is the four floor beat up? What is it made out of? Usually it's a really thick wood and then they have like steel runners that run down the middle. Sometimes it's like a composite material. I have a couple of them that are have a really nice composite floor. It seems like it's composite super, super heavy duty. So if you're buying a used shipping container it's very important to check the condition of it. Don't buy it sight unseen. I have bought my containers from a shipyard so to speak where they do a lot of shipping near it. But then they also sell used containers. I've bought a couple different ones from Facebook Marketplace. Facebook Marketplace can be a zoo for shipping containers. Sometimes you're dealing with just a normal person. Sometimes it's a scam, sometimes it's not at all what the pricing is, not at all what they have listed and they just want to attract you to try and get you to buy their or talk to them or whatever. I've had overall decent experiences with buying them on Facebook. The most recent one, I bought it because it was literally 10 minutes from my shop and it had the doors that I wanted. I wanted a 40 footer and it had four sets of folding outdoors and it was a high cube and it was in very good condition. And again 10 minutes for my shop. So I was able to scoop that one up for. I think I got it for 6,000. I think that's what it was. 5,000. I don't remember now but something like that. And the doors were phenomenal. It was just used to keep boxes inside. And we got it moved, transferred over to our shop and put in location. So now I have because I've moved a few different containers different times because we had to move all of our containers from my house to my new property. And so I have a couple good connections for people that can move them for me. They have the right kind of trailer. The 20 footers I can move by myself. Well, I can't anymore. I don't have a deck over. You need to have a deck over if you're going to move them yourself. Two machines can pick up a 20 footer empty no problem. Like two track machines, no problem. But the 45, the 40 footers and 45 footers you need a semi to pull them up. And so you got to take that into account when you're buying them on Marketplace. Sometimes they have no way to deliver them. The most recent container that I bought was at my shop. Once at my property when we were building our fuel area I wanted a small container near it where we could keep the def fluid next to it. And that, that one I found on Marketplace I there honestly the, the ten footers I found a really nice ten footer I think it was, they call it like a one trip. That means it's only been used one time basically potentially on. On a ship or whatever. Usually in really nice condition. So if you see a container that you're going to buy and it's a one trip, that's going to be a nice container. Not brand new but it's a one. It's almost brand new. Usually the doors are flawless. A lot of the newer shipping containers have on the first door that opens they have a one latch and then the second door is a two. So it's actually easier to get into the newer ones. It's faster. I have bought. I have bought. So anyways, let me go back to that 10 footer. So I found this 10 footer on Marketplace. I messaged the guy, he seemed legit. We ended up talking in the phone. He said he could deliver it the same day. Sometimes that, that gets me a little leery. I want to make sure that it's. I want to make sure that it's legit deal. I'm not going to pay him before he comes. None of that stuff. So they ended up delivering it. I was in very good shape. I paid the guy came on like a tow truck kind of truck and he put it right rollback kind of a truck and he put it right where we wanted it and then we painted it. So it's just important when you're buying them. Like I said, it's very important to make sure that the doors function properly. And then you, after that you can get into all kinds of customization. So I've made a connection with a local shipping container company. They do all kinds of storage solutions, mobile storage solutions for all kinds of things. They have mobile offices. They have obviously shipping containers. They have like the storage box where they put it in your driveway and pick it up and bring it back and store it for you. Like they do all kinds of stuff. But I've really come to like these guys. You may pay a little bit more but most of the time they're really fair pricing. They have nice shipping containers. They are, they come painted, they're very clean. They're almost, you're almost buying new containers from them or they were one trips and they painted them or whatever they did. I've had them custom paint them black before. They do a phenomenal job painting them. I've had them put roll up doors in two different 20 footers where there's two 10 foot roll up doors on the sides that can end up getting a little price. You can end up in the 6 to $7,000 range for a customized 20 footer. That's very nice. Roll up doors are brand new and it's painted and it look. So after I started buying new shipping containers it pretty much ruined me because I've struggled with used shipping containers for a long time and I'm using struggle and air quotes here. But it's the doors. The doors can be super frustrating. It's just really the most important thing for me because if you're going to be in and out of that thing a lot, you don't want to have doors that you struggle with all the time. Like I said. And as far as pricing goes, it's important to remember that shipping container pricing ebbs and flows ups and Downs, depends on the market, depends on shipping, depends on all kinds of things, whatever that means. But the pricing is usually going up and down. Some of it, like I said, based on availability. And I've paid, I've really been all over the place. But I usually check around and see, okay, what's, what are the things going for right now and just make sure that it's what I want to do and it's a legitimate person that I'm buying it from. And it's a good container. So the next thing I want to talk about is arguably maybe one of the most important things when you're using shipping containers is the ventilation. So I learned very quickly through maybe the first two winners that ventilation side of a shipping container can mess up engines if you don't have enough ventilation. So they come with these. Most of the time they come with at least two or four of these little vents in the upper corners. Usually two on each side if it's a 20 footer. Brilliant. Gardens. What's going on, dude? Four on each side if it's a 40 footer, so on and so forth. You understand they're little vents and you would think that's enough. But when you're in the winter and they get snow on them and then the sun heats up and it warms that metal, you immediately get gate condensation. And so the spring, the late summer kind of going into spring, when you're getting some of that snow, cold nights and then sun, immediately in the morning, you're gonna get lots of condensation. They're gonna be dripping. So ventilation is huge. I ignored it for too long, I would say, and I just kind of dealt with it. But I definitely have had to fix small engine carburetors, rust and float bowls rust in the carburetors. Some different stuff where I can't get certain things started because of them sitting in a. Too much moisture inside of a shipping container. So you really need to watch that. And the things that I have found to work well without having some kind of solar powered vent, which they make plenty of, those is the whirlybird vents. So it's, it's a dome vent and it has fins on the side and you mount it on the top. I typically have mounted them on the top towards the rear of the shipping container. I also have found there's a plate that you can buy on Amazon. It's annoyingly expensive. They're people that make stuff for shipping containers, are they are. They're proud of it. That's all I could say. And you know what? I didn't. I'm not the one that came up with it. So whatever. Basically what it is, you buy the whirly birds, you can buy them at Home Depot, whatever. It's like a whirly bird vent. It's very standard. I believe it's a 12 inch circle at the bottom and then it has a mushroom kind of top on the top that spins when it's windy. Right. So somebody created a ribbed piece that fits the ribs of the roof of a shipping container and has the 12 inch circle on top. So the, so you can cut a square in your shipping container, put this, you know, you get some quad adhesive, like a really good silicone or ceiling sealant of some sort of. You do a bead of that around, you put it right over that hole. You can screw it all in with self tappers and then you put this whirly bird over the top and put that in and you have an super easy vent. But the key to that is yes, it's going to be bringing air in, but you need to create something where it's moving the air in and out of the container. So then what I've done and I need to do this on more containers, but I just, I get busy and I don't do it. So I have several of my containers with these whirly birds, but it is going to be pulling air in through those vents that come in it. But if you add a bigger vent towards the front of the container at the bottom, that has way more airflow, which they sell all kinds of them. You can go to the website called containernut.com obviously, Amazon, YouTube, you can search container nut they have a ton of stuff about containers and you can learn all kinds of stuff. They obviously have a website dedicated to it, but they have these vents that you can buy and you cut, you literally just take a grinder and seal them in there, put it, and then you get, you get air sucking in from the bottom and pulling out from the top. And so that's, that's really important to get that airflow going through them. So very important to help with, to, to try and minimize the condensation as much as possible. I've heard plenty of people that have built these things out with spray foam and all that stuff, but I'm not interested in that right now because I need them for storage. I don't need to live in them. We don't heat them or cool them. I guess that's my biggest thing in the winter is you have to remember, at least with how I do it is nothing's, it's going to freeze in there. So keep that in mind too. So that's really important is the venting. And that whirly bird vent works really, really good. And then having that extra vent in the front on the bottom, if you're going to, you know, again, you just trying to create that cycle of air through there to keep it from condensating. So that has helped a lot and I highly recommend doing something like that.
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The Molder Life podcast continues in just a moment. Andy asked me to highlight a company that enables you to truly work smarter with their hydraulics over hands philosophy, enabling you to operate at a high level of efficiency. Obviously, I'm talking about CMP attachments. They make all kinds of attachments and buckets. Andy loves and uses their Hydra grapples and Hydra buckets. Cmp attachments is 100% made in America and has some of the industry's highest quality attachments for excavators, skid loaders, mini skid loaders, tractors and more. CMP can take on any custom project to help make your business more efficient and profitable. Visit them at cmpattachments.com or click the link that we've provided in the podcast description.
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These products are amazing. They're built to last and they'll help you make more money. Again, that's cmpattachments.com I think the whirly birds are like 70 bucks a piece or something. And then these other vents, these vent, these vent. What was I gonna say? Like the adapters are expensive, but I think it's worth it. I just think it's important to, to pay attention to the ventilation. Now depending on what you're keeping in them, that may not be an issue for you. And there's some of mine that I could care less that they're vented. There's some that my one that has the doors that are messed up. The door leaks so bad that I'm not really worried about it because it literally, it leaks terrible. Like there's tons of airflow going through. So I'm. Once we move into the shop, I very well may be selling that one because the doors are really bad. It's either that or like I said. And it's also the one that we stored salt in for three years. So it's pretty beat up. The ceiling is messed up from pushing salt up in it and ramming the. Ramming the tops of my arms of my skid loader up against the roof of the shipping container. But like I said before in the podcast, we had to do what we had to do and to get by. So as far as lighting goes and shipping containers, I've done a few different things. So I mentioned before that we did run power back to the back of my property and we had a sub panel back there and then I had them put two, two, two gang boxes. So there was eight outlets back there. And we will, we were able to, we were able to run extension cords then to each container. And then each container we had like a string of those construction lights. And that was, you know, it has a plug at the end, like a, like an extension cord, but it has lights every six feet or something. And we put those at the top and zip tied them to the top and just left them plugged in. Or we could unplug them, but most of the time they just stayed plugged in. Whatever, who cares? That worked for years. It was phenomenal. But when you don't have power, like I moved the containers from my house to my property and then I didn't have, I didn't have, I didn't have power. So then I was like, oh man, we need lights. Like, it's really frustrating not to have lighting. And so what we did was I, and I don't think this ultimately didn't work as it worked initially, but it didn't work as well as I had hoped. I bought a bunch of small 6 inch round lights that were battery powered. Then I bought stick on magnets where I stuck the magnets to the back of the lights. They were motion powered lights. You could have them on all the time or you could have emotioned. And I thought, okay, it'd be great because they can be battery powered. Like I'm talking, they ran off of AA's. They can be battery powered, but then when you open the door and walk in, they just turn on as you walk down the container. And so I put like six down the middle of the longer containers. And the 20s aren't a big, aren't a huge deal for light because It's. You're only 20ft and you get a lot of natural light when you open it. But at night, obviously pitch black. So I did this and then just magneted it to the ceiling and it was pretty awesome. The problem is the batteries died rather quickly, specifically through the winter. And I also found that the magnets from the freezing and the thawing, the magnets became unstuck from the bottom of or the bottom of these lights. And then the lights fell to the ground and broke. Some of them still work. I need to go around and put new batteries in them. It's one of those things that like I got really excited when I came up with this idea. I bought a bunch of them. I probably spent 250 on all these to put them all in the containers, put them all up and everything was amazing. I'm a genius. And then it kind of like you get busy and things fall off and you get. And you just forget. And now three quarters of them don't work. So it's just the lighting can be an issue. But ultimately this goes for anything I'm going to talk about with mounting things on shipping containers. Just remember it's a big, big metal box. So magnets are your friend and welding is your friend. You can do a lot on these things because they're metal. So. And that brings me to. So I don't. The. The construction string light worked really, really good when we could run an extension cord into the shipping container. And I ran the extension cord into the container, got a bigger hole in one of the stock vents and was able to get the cord up in there so that it wouldn't let water in. But I could get. I could have an open hole but it wouldn't let water in because it has a little shield on it and that just. They just all come like that. So ran an extension cord in there. That was awesome. My long term goal with the containers still at my property that we are going to still use after the building is done is I'm going to run power to every single one of them and we're going to have lights in every single one of them going down the middle. And so I'll do more with that in another time. And yeah. So John Amborn says I love sea cans conex boxes. I lived in containers on several deployments. Deployments. 5 star hotel. Compared to living in the. In a tent in the Middle east, dude. I can't even imagine that would be probably so much better than living in a tent, dude. And thank you for your service, man. I really appreciate it. I can't imagine what, what you went through there and just thank you, man. I appreciate you, John. So. And for those of you that are just tuning in, this podcast is. And the one we started yesterday that got shut off because of a power outage. We're talking about shipping containers and the importance and how I ran my company for the last 10 years out of shipping containers. So that's. We. That's kind of how we did lighting for the last 10 years. For three years I didn't have any lighting. Then we had plug in lighting and then I went backwards to I bet went back words to these battery powered motion lights. They were okay, but I think I could have done a. I need to do a better job with the magnet setup. But pretty much I just one of those things I like I said I just kind of let go. The motion part of it was pretty awesome because you could just walk through the container and the lights would come on and then as you leave, you don't have to worry about them turning off. So that was nice. I the concept is phenomenal. I think just needs to be refined, but I don't know if I'm gonna spend the time to do that. But as far as hooks and hangers on shipping containers, I've done several different things. I've bought the. They're called gator hooks or something like that. They're on Amazon and they're very strong magnet hooks. They have a lot of very much direct marketing. And so if you say the word gator magnet or gator hook, you basically have a thousand ads on Facebook for the next. For the next, you know, thousand years. But anyways, they're super strong. We use, we've used some of those again, big metal box. So think anything that can be magnetic is going to work. Harbor freight has some different hooks that we've used, specifically smaller ones for keys. But ultimately what I finally found to be the most effective for hanging things was mounting E track on the inside of the shipping containers. So I Amborn Stone says or Breckshred says, how many racks inside of a container? Oh, you're talking about to Amborn John. Amborn says, ever thought about the wheel kits for the containers to be able to move them around? John? I'm going to talk about that because I bought those about three months ago or two months ago and they major game changer. Well, we're going to talk about that next. So the E track is in my opinion the gold standard of mounting hooks on the side of a shipping container. So we basically just took steel E track and we welded it to the side of the container, all the way down the side of one of mine. And then we had infinite places to put hooks to hang things. So I have one 45 footer that has an E track all the way down the one side. And that was a massive game changer for us. And I love it. It's phenomenal. It's a more expensive way. But it's never going to fall off the side of the wall. Really just worked awesome. So I highly recommend that obviously we have a bunch of shelving units. We bought a bunch of the six by two shelving units from Costco or Menards or something. And I have one shipping container that's supplies. Basically it's like our big Home Depot and both sides are lined with these shelves and they have racks and they have bins and everything is in them to do our jobs. And that's we've been. I'm going to continue with those for sure for all of our PVC fittings, all of our irrigation fittings, all that stuff is going to continue to remain inside of those. That shipping container because it works very well and it doesn't need to be in the heat. It doesn't need to be an ac. It doesn't need to. They don't go bad. Condensation doesn't matter. So those things will definitely still be in a container like that. Our hand tools that's in the other one that has all the E track on. There's a lot of that stuff that's going to probably stay in there still because I don't need to muddy up my shop with a big wall of hand tools. The guys, if they need another shovel, they can go in container number one that has all the shovels or whatever, grab a new one and bring it from their. Bring it to their truck because I'm putting the containers right next to our truck. That's a whole nother episode that we can talk about yard organization and why I did what I did in the yard and and how it's all going to work. So that's kind of how we've done hooks and hangers and different things like that. E track is amazing. Shelving units work amazing. We've done. I did a rack to hold basically hold our. Our straw mat or ECM and we did some of that with some two by fours and that performed okay. I it hasn't broken and it's worked good. Breckstrad says. I did E track in my tool trailer and snowmobile trailer. It's the great. It's so great, dude. I know. I have E track in our landscape tool trailer. It's phenomenal. AP cover says any good things to be aware of as a first time container buyer. So I would go back and re listen to this podcast. This podcast will go live tomorrow or Thursday morning. It has about 20 minutes before this episode that I'm recording right now that will be added to the front of it. And that's where we talked a lot about buying a container. And so the whole episode is dedicated to shipping containers. So I encourage you when this episode gets released to listen to it and I hope it can be helpful to people. So about buying them, let's talk about now, the wheel kit. So for years we moved them around with skid loaders, we moved them around with a loader, we moved them around with a truck. We've pushed them, we've pulled them, we've tied changed them, which we wished. We had bigger machines every single time. They can be a bear to move around if you don't have equipment. We have been able to purchase bigger and bigger equipment and that has made it easier and easier. But I've always needed to empty them all the way. A 20 footer, you can get away with some stuff inside, but you get a 40 footer or 45 footer and you got stuff in it. They're very heavy. And not to mention when you're basically dragging them. So whatever you're dragging them around, you're messing stuff up. If you're pushing them, you're pushing them into the ground. It's, it's heavy. They're, they're heavy. And that's the point, right? They're not gonna blow over in a windstorm, I can assure you. So I finally broke down and bought a shipping container wheel kit. And I believe Those came from containernut.com and I have no affiliation with them and. But they have some awesome products. So it's a wheel kit and basically it comes with a bracket that slide. It's made to fit into the bottom lugs of a shipping container. And you put them in there and you turn them up and it locks into that. And then you can put a five lug wheel or an eight lug wheel, depending on what size you buy. And you basically lift up the back of the container with a machine. Or they could, they sell jacks, they sell this special bracket that you put in there and then it has a L thing that actually it goes in the block and then it has a thing that goes like this and then a plate like this. And you can fit a bottle jack underneath it and jack it up. So if you didn't have a machine to lift it, you could do it with a bottle jack. And then you can put these wheels on the sides with two people and then lower it down obviously on the wheels. And then the back is sitting on wheels and then you go in the front and lift it up with Whatever you think you're going to lift it up with, you're going to need a machine. They also have. You can get four wheels for them. But I'm not sure how you turn. It could be kind of difficult. But basically I finally broke down and bought it. I think they were like 1800 bucks or 1200 bucks. I don't know. I bought it with the wheels because I didn't have any spare wheels laying around that we could have used. I mean, maybe. But I bought it with the wheels and they got delivered. And I will tell you, I wish I would have bought those 10 years ago. And I really mean it. I didn't really have the money 10 years ago, but even six years ago, I wish I would have bought this wheel kit. We were able to move all of our containers from the front of our property all the way back to where they will stay now forever with the wheel kit without emptying anything out of them. The amount of time that saved us is way more than the cost of the wheels. Because I was expecting to have to. Because I didn't really want to pay a trucking company to come or a tow company to come or somebody to bring their giant loader or something to come and to move these for us. I wanted to just do it on our own time when it made sense for us. So we were able to lift up the back. At the time we were demoing a John Deere 333, which has a lot of power. Lifted up the back, completely loaded, put it on. Of course, we're maxing out the capacity on these wheel kit, but I don't really care. It handled it. I wasn't going down the highway. I'm going from. I'm going. I'm pulling them a thousand feet, basically and putting them. It was just so amazing. And I have some stuff on my YouTube that you can watch on one of my episodes where we moved the shipping containers. And I have a few clips, I think, in one of the episodes showing the wheel kit. Absolutely amazing. Then we would just put a chain in the front, stick the forks under the container, put a chain through it, lift it up just barely enough to get off the ground because it's heavy. And then we were able to just move the containers exactly where we want them. It was not messy. We didn't destroy the parking lot. Nothing had to get unloaded from the shipping containers. I am just telling you 100% worth the money buying those things. So if you're doing to do some shipping containers and you think you're going to move them around. Highly recommend. It's one of those things like you're going to use it and then they're going to sit for six years and then you're going to want to move it and you're like oh yeah, I have the wheel kit. Let's go find that somewhere because it's just phenomenal.
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You're listening to the Molder Life podcast because you want to get better at your craft. Andy is always working hard to improve himself and pass on that knowledge to you. He's even improved his molder outdoors.com website to make it easier to use and to use you several ways to support the podcast. When you visit molderoutdoors.com click on the Shop link to pick up some of the coolest merch around. Choose from camo hats and beanies to fluorescent work shirts and super warm hoodies. While on that page, scroll down and check out the video courses, contracts and worksheets to make you and your company highly effective and profitable. I recommend the Everything bundle which gives you access to all the training and forms while saving you money. If you need to book a one on one consultation, you can do that as well@molderoutdoors.com support the show while growing your business. There's also a link you can use in the show description.
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Highly. Highly recommended. Highly recommended. It's very controlled. I'm going to use it to move so I have one of my 40 footers. The newest one that I bought has these side doors that I said and I'm going to take currently that that container is on the south side of my new building and it's going to turn completely around and then be put up right against the back side of the building. We're going to run power into it and lights for a few different things that I have planned in that container and it's going to be sitting on a concrete pad and it's going to be really not. I mean it's going to look like it's part of the, part of the building, whatever. It's going to be really nice. And so anyways the plan then I'll have these wheels and I can just easily pick it up, move it around, turn it around with the machine, push it back, put it right on the pad, do it nice and controlled. Nothing's getting broken, nothing getting, getting scratched. The new concrete just wheel it right on top. It's just, it's very much one of those things like I can't believe I didn't buy this six or eight, 10 years ago, I had had those in a cart on Amazon a hundred times and I was like, nah, we'll figure it out. There's always another way. I don't want to spend that much money. Amazing. 100% worth the money. So highly recommend the wheels. Very important. We have painted all of our containers except for one. They've been painted. So I've painted them. At one time I painted them the color of my house so that they matched and didn't look like an entire junkyard of containers in my backyard. And to make my wife happy. And basically she was looking at my business out of her kitchen window for 10 years until we were able to move it all out of there. So I tried to make it as nice looking as I could. And so we painted them. So I, I have paid people to paint them before. Typically ideally you try and get them, you wash them before you paint them. Sometimes when I've hired people to wash them, they use some kind of like degreaser or something that's going to be basically like, I'm not trying to like, I don't overthink the painting of these things. It's going to be a paint job that looks good from 50ft away or 100ft away going 50 miles an hour. You know what I mean? Like, you got to remember that, okay? Like I don't. I'm not going around priming a bunch of stuff. Like we're pressure washing it, getting off the loose stuff and we're painting it. So last year I bought my own spray gun because I wanted, I knew I was going to be painting all of my shipping containers black. I, they were all like a beige color, color of my house or whatever. So I was like, you know what, I don't want to pay a painter. This is a great job for somebody to do. I ended up being, I just really, I enjoy doing it. It's kind of like therapeutic to paint with a paint gun. So I ended up painting them all myself, which is fine. But I really like using the paint gun. It's kind of awesome. So it's, it's a nice paint sprayer. It's a gray coat. You stick it in a five gallon bucket of paint and you can just paint for days. It's phenomenal. So I've painted them with just, I just go to the paint store and I say, listen, I need this color, I need it to be black. And it's going to be going painting on metal and what do you have? And so they, I'll do Like a paint and primer or something like that. I'm sure there's some paint guy out there that's like cringing about what I'm talking about. But like you gotta understand like these things are boxes. Like I'm probably gonna paint them again in another five years. It keeps them looking fresh and clean. I. The color black that I used, I. Sometimes it looks too. It looks kind of gray. I thought about getting the. I bought a. I got a new black that's gonna be. They're gonna paint all the doors in my office. And it's called tricorn black. It's pretty common color black. I really like it. I may repaint them all that black. And that seems excessive because basically you need. And this is, I think this is what I took. Basically it's five gallons of paint to paint a 40 foot container. So if you're gonna paint a 20, you can pretty much paint two 20s with five gallons of paint. I didn't paint the roofs on them because I forgot to wash them when I was painting them. And they were pretty dirty. So I didn't paint the roof of it. T. Campbell, what's going on? Tom says also great for self storage. I am up to 83, 20 foot conexes for rental. Dude, Tom, that's awesome. So like you have them in one place and you just. People just rent them from you. Like just. Or you bring them to people's houses. Like I'd love to hear how you're doing this. Cause that's phenomenal. 83 of them sick. So. Yeah, very paintable. You're typically painting them with a paint. Like I said, that can be good on metal. Obviously very important. I'm sure you could paint them with a roller. It would take forever. Spraying them is going to be the way to go. And depending on how much time you want to take prepping it and how bad the current system, how bad they are, you can decide how much work you want to put into it. I don't tape off the handles. When I've paid the guy that we've done custom containers for, like when he's done roll up doors and stuff like that. When he does that, I'm like, okay. Sometimes I just, I feel lazy and I just pay him to paint them. And so he does a super nice job. Like it's very nice paint job. Like legit primer paint. All the handles are masked off. It's very nice. I don't spend that much time with it because I frankly don't care. But if I'm buying a brand new one and I'm paying him to paint it. I know it's going to be nice and I've done that like I said one time. And that's the container that is down by my pond. That one is super nice. The doors are really nice. The hand, like the whole thing is just dialed. But that's like a more of a recreation use that I'm using this shipping container for. It has our boat, our little rowboat in it. It has a grill in it, some chairs. It's a nice container. So that's why I did it like that, for that one. One thing. So security and shipping containers, obviously very secure, but you need to buy a good lock. There's a really nice lock that I buy on Amazon. I'm gonna look it up because I actually meant to write it down and I forgot before this. It's a really nice padlock that I've all of my. Everything that I own. This is the lock that I use. They're expensive. I think they're like $70 a lock. But it's a combination lock, which I like because I never have a key with me. It has a shackle guard, which I think is important. And they're just beefy locks. I did some research for a while on combination locks. I didn't. Like I said I didn't want to have a key or have to lose a key. So my favorite lock right now, and I have probably 25 of these locks and they've been phenomenal, is a bus a B U S 190 CS 60 high security solid steel combination padlock, closed shackle. It's $70 for one. And I have a lot of them and they are very nice locks. So that's the lock I would recommend. I'm not saying it's. Maybe there's something better out there and that's fine. But I basically chose between a combination between cost and quality. And I think that's a really good value and a really good lock. And so that's what I use for all my shipping containers. Again, very secure. Obviously you could cut through it with anything that cut through metal. We all know that. But a thief is going to get in if they want to get in. So that is how we've. That's what we've used for our locks before. Again, very good lock and I really, really like it. The one other thing that I really want to talk about, and this is something that I've just learned over the years, is the freeze and thaw cycle and what that can do to the doors and being able to open them. So when you're installing a shipping container, it's very important to remember that your initial. Depending on how you're using them, your initial thought is I want to be able to, for me, I want to be able to get in and out of them really easily. Sometimes with equipment. And the shipping container ledge is I would say 6 to 8 inches tall. So it can be, depending on what you're trying to drive in and out of them, it can be kind of tall. So it's important to remember if you're going to make some kind of ramp to get up into them, that you remember that come winter time the ground's going to freeze and thaw and freeze and thaw. Now this is obviously in our area we have this and it's going to heave. And I have had big issues before where the ground heaved overnight so much that I couldn't get the doors open because the latch for the handle was too. The ground heaved and wrapped around the latch enough to where when I opened it, I couldn't pull it out because the ground was too high. And we're talking the ground probably heaves an inch. I don't know. I mean, everybody's place is different. But specifically on like a crusher run or like maybe not a well draining base, it's going to heaven. And so I've had bad nights, specifically in the winter when we are trying to salt. When I first learned this was an issue where I couldn't get the door open to get the machine out to load the salt. So it's very important that you remember that when you are grading stone up to the entrance of these, of these shipping containers in the summer, you may not think anything of it and the door just clears the stone and it's wonderful and we can get in and out pretty easily. But then you forget and it freezes and then you just don't think about it for a few days. Freeze, thaw, freeze, thaw, maybe a month, whatever, I don't know. And then all of a sudden one day you go there and you open it and you cannot get it open and it's rock solid frozen. I've been out there with torches before. Like it can be very frustrating. So remember that when you're doing some kind of grading up to the doors of the shipping container that come winter time, if you're in a freezing thaw cycle, that you could run into an issue. So you need to make sure that you're using some kind of well, draining base in that area or whatever. We don't store equipment in our containers anymore, so I don't need to have such a really smooth approach. We just walk over that ledge. So. So yeah, it's. Those are some of the things, guys, that came to my mind when I was thinking about shipping containers and the things that I learned and the things that have helped me run my business out of shipping containers for 10 years. Remember for us, I didn't need a permit to have them. I didn't. They aren't taxable. I didn't have to ask anybody to get them. I just put them on my property. I don't need to get like, you can have all this covered space and I don't need anyone's permission. They're movable, they're temporary. You can paint them. They look great. I think they look great. There's a bajillion other uses for them than what I'm talking about here. Of course, There's a million YouTube videos on shipping containers and people that live in them and houses and I understand all that. We didn't even talk about roof structures you can mount to them. There's a million things you can do. But what I wanted to do is just share a podcast that was dedicated to something that has really helped and allowed our business to grow completely debt free over the last 10 to 12 years. Going on 12 years now and then allow us to save and save and save to where one day. Now we are, like I said, we are building our own building on our own property. And I'm not going into debt with for it because I kept my costs very low for as long as I possibly could. It's just, it worked out really well. And as I said in the beginning, I have never lost a landscape job because we ran, we were running our company out of shipping containers. We have done massive projects for wonderful people that are been in magazines, won awards, all these different things. And we're just running our company out of shipping containers. So just don't be afraid to think outside the box. Don't be afraid to come up with creative ways to be able to grow your business at the speed of cash. And you don't have to have a shop, you don't have to rent space. If you have somewhere to. Maybe you have somewhere to put one of these and you can use it for some storage. Like it helped me grow slow for 10 years and really set ourselves up for success. And now we're building a building of my dreams that, like I said, I. It's not something that I have to have to for my business to continue on, but it's something that I know that is good for the business, good for our team, good for our future, good for an investment. But like I said, I have had tons of growth and have been able to do everything we've been able to do if you've been following us for any length of time by running it out of shipping containers. So I hope that has helped people. I hope this whole episode helps people. If you have more questions about them or whatever, feel free to send me a message on Instagram at Molder Outdoors and yeah. So guys, I want to thank our sponsors this week. Pave tool innovators pavetool.com go check them out. Use the coupon code molder outdoors 50 save yourself some money at checkout. They have all kinds of awesome stuff that we use every single day. CMP Attachments CMP Attachments.com I'm so thankful for their support. Albany's Candy Factory and NCON for being our studio sponsor. So guys, thank you so much and we will catch you on the next one. Thanks.
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This has been a molder outdoors and Mr. Producer production.