I have a fascination with shipping containers and try not to miss any opportunities to incorporate them into things that I build.
Basically; a container is a recycled steel structure that is both a watertight box and a massively strong beam - $8000 worth of steel that you can have delivered to your site for about $2400, depending where your site is.
Here are two examples of my uses so far, one is a two story cottage and the other is a two car garage with lots of storage space.
The two car garage can be built for well under $20,000, depending on how it's finished and mechanical systems.
I like to set containers on geo-thermal piers, which serve as both heating ballast and foundation.
The drawing of the two stacked containers which form the base for the cottage were done with Vectorworks Architect in under an hour -
a totally accurate representation of a complex object drawn in 3D. The other drawings were made in Sketchup, which I used to use for schematic drawings,
before I became efficient in Vectorworks.