Tiny guest cottages built from shipping containers may be ready for outdoors vacationers as soon as next week, the developer Jack Yeaton said in an interview last week. Yeaton is part of the Schuyler Yacht Basin and has been renovating the 160-square-foot containers, preparing for the first guests in mid-June.
“We’re pushing to get them done,” Yeaton said.
Steve Thurston (2021)
Jack Yeaton stands in the kitchenette area of a nearly-finished container cottage. A water heater hangs on the wall to his right. The air conditioner is on the wall to his left.
The blue shipping containers, on three-foot pylons are just 8 by 20 feet but have small kitchenettes, full bathrooms and room for a bed. They have air conditioning on the inside and cooking grills outside. None of them last week had been fully fitted out, but they have windows, swinging front doors and sliding glass doors on one end.
From the outside they look like shipping containers one might see on an ocean freighter or a train car. From the inside with the wood trim and light colors, they feel friendly.
“They’re basically RVs without wheels,” Yeaton said.
The Yacht Basin sits at 1 Ferry St. in Schuylerville, on a point of land at the confluence of Fish Creek and the Hudson River. Although the idea of using shipping containers to house people is not new--Yeaton has experience building tiny houses and an educational background in resort management--his idea is to turn the area into a small resort of sorts.
“My intention is to bring a new form of tourism to the area,” he said. He said he already had at least one reservation. Last Thursday, he cut the ribbon on another facet of the company: kayak and canoe rentals.
He thinks the small cottages will give people a place to stay but are small enough that they’ll attract people who want to be outdoors in the local parks or on the rivers. He said he already had at least one reservation.
The project was not without its difficulties.
The location on the point was already permitted to accommodate RVs, and since his containers are not permanent structures, Yeaton thought they fit the definition.
“They assumed a little too much” by thinking the containers were like RVs, said Bob Foster. “The project took a little pause there.” Foster is the chair of the Village of Schuylerville Planning Board.
That point of land where they sit is a 100-year flood zone, and by Federal Emergency Management Agency standards, RVs and similar structures must be able to move out within 24 hours, Foster said.
Of the containers, he added, “They don’t have wheels, so they can’t be moved easily.”
The problem that FEMA fears is floating, Yeaton and Foster agreed. Shipping containers, by design, are air tight and in a flood can be pushed off their stilts and float down river, into another building or into the street. Yeaton, therefore, needed an evacuation plan.
“We’ve been working with the planning board to meet their requirements,” Yeaton said. Foster agreed and said that final touches are expected next week.
Although options include anchoring the structures or building in panels that implode to let water into the container, the draft plan calls for a crane to come, load the units onto trucks and drive them away, Foster said.
Yeaton said he has a crane on call.
“We have to at this point,” he said.
Still, Foster said he thought people would rent nice, small cottages on the river: “It makes sense to me.”