A great deal of container selling in northern New South Wales is a website and a mobile number pointed at a depot several hundred kilometres away, and the first proper inspection happens when the thing comes off the truck at your place. We have a yard you can drive into, so this is what to actually do when you get here.
1a Reid St, South Grafton. Open Monday to Friday 7:30am to 5pm and Saturday morning 8am to 12pm.
Ring (02) 5616 9099 before you come. Not because we are precious about it, but because containers get sold, moved and stacked, and a phone call means the unit you are interested in is on the ground with a set of doors you can open rather than second in a stack. It also means somebody is expecting you instead of on a truck.
Very little, and none of it is exotic. A torch, even in the middle of the day — the whole first test depends on your eyes adjusting to the dark. A tape measure if the container has to fit a particular spot or a particular load. Boots, because a container yard is a working surface. And the measurements of whatever is going inside it, which is the thing people most often forget and most often need.
Shut the doors and stand inside. Do this first, before anything else, and give your eyes a full twenty seconds. Then look along the roof line, into all four corners, and along the bottom of the doors. Any daylight is a leak. We would put more weight on this than on anything else on the list, and it is the one thing a photograph genuinely cannot do for you.
Walk the whole floor, slowly. Listen and feel rather than look. A soft or springy patch means water has been sitting on it for a long time. Check the corners and along the edges where staining shows, and look for plywood that has been patched from underneath.
Work both doors, fully. Open them right back, shut them, and throw the locking bars. Doors that need a hip against them today are only going to get harder to work, not easier. The seals should sit flat and feel pliable rather than hard and shiny.
Look low. Rust starts at the bottom rail and the door sill, where water sits. Surface rust across a panel is completely normal on a used container and is not a fault. Flaking layers, or steel you can push a screwdriver through, is a different matter.
Look at the roof if you safely can. Not by climbing on it — a container roof is thin sheet and a footprint becomes a puddle. From the ground, or from something stable, look for dishing and for a build-up of leaf litter, because ponding is what finishes container roofs off.
Smell it. Genuinely. A container that has been shut up damp for a long time tells you so immediately, and it is a fair question to ask what was in it.
"Used 20ft" is not a specification. "Used 20ft, cargo-worthy" is. Every cargo-worthy unit here is checked wind and watertight before it leaves the yard, which is the specific test described above rather than a slogan. As-is units are a legitimate and cheaper option for the right job, but they are not sold as watertight, and we will tell you what is wrong with one before you buy it rather than after. The grades are set out in full here.
While you are at it, ask what cartage to your address will be. Delivery is quoted with the container, because it depends on distance and on what the truck has to get through at your end — but it should be a number you have up front, not a surprise on delivery day.
Plenty of people cannot, and that is fine. Ask us for photographs of the actual unit, with the serial number visible, and we will send them before it is delivered. That is a reasonable request of any seller and the answer tells you something either way.
Send us three photographs back in return — the gateway from the road, the approach looking in, and the spot itself taken far enough back to show what is overhead. Between those and a description of the ground we can usually settle the truck without a site visit.
Some people want to cart their own, particularly farmers with a decent float already sitting in the shed. It is possible and it is not automatic, so ring and ask before you plan around it.
The things that decide it: an empty 20ft general purpose weighs a bit over two tonnes and a 40ft closer to four, so the trailer has to be rated for it and so does whatever is towing it. It has to be restrained properly — twistlocks or rated chains to the corner castings, not straps over the top — under the national load restraint rules, and the driver wears that, not us. And it has to come off at the other end, which means a machine at your place with the reach and the capacity to lift it, not a tractor and some optimism.
Tell us what you are bringing and what is lifting at your end, and we will tell you straight whether it works. We would rather say no on the phone than have you drive to South Grafton for nothing.
The yard sits on the south side of the river, which makes most of the valley an easy run: down through Ulmarra to Maclean, the cane country around Woodford Island, and on to Yamba and Iluka; west along the Gwydir Highway past Ramornie; up the Armidale Road towards Nymboida; and north up the Pacific Highway to Woolgoolga, Coffs Harbour and Sawtell.
Come and open a set of doors. Ring (02) 5616 9099 first so the one you want is on the ground.
Mains or off-grid, what a licensed electrician has to do inside a steel box, how to get a cable in without ruining the seal, solar on a container roof, and why the generator never goes inside.
Straight answers for the Clarence Valley — what wind and watertight actually covers, why rising water gets past the door seals, why an empty container floats, and how to site one on the flats.
What a tilt-tray, a sidelifter and a crane truck each need, how river silt and coastal sand behave under a loaded vehicle, and the three photos that settle it.
One call, one delivered number, cartage included.
Or skip the form entirely.
Call (02) 5616 9099