Flat-Pack Container Office: Six Sizes, 80 to 800 Sq Ft

What actually turns up on the truck

A flat-pack order does not arrive as an office. It arrives as a floor cassette, corner posts and panel rails, a roof cassette or bolted purlin set, and insulated wall panels. The doors and windows are already glazed and sealed in their frames. Fasteners, gaskets and sealants come as a named list rather than as a loose bag.

Each part is marked for its place on the assembly drawing, and that marking is the whole job. A numbered panel goes into one bay and no other. This is because its edges, its receiving channels and its service routes were cut to match that bay. Swap two panels and the wiring no longer reaches. Our pack list names every component and every quantity, and a crew checks it against the delivery before anything is lifted.

The parts are protected differently from a finished module. A welded office rides one trailer and uses its own skin as packaging. Meanwhile, cassettes and panels have exposed edges, coated faces and bolt holes that all have to reach you undamaged. So the packs are restrained, stacked to a set height, and kept clear of the ground until the crew needs them.

Welded in the works, bolted on your site

Welding still happens, but it happens in the factory. The base cassette, the roof cassette and the subassemblies are welded on a jig, checked for square, and only then galvanized or painted. Cut edges get their coating repaired before the parts leave, so what reaches your site is a set of finished, protected pieces.

On site the connections are dry. Posts bolt to the base and the roof through captive plates, and panels slide into receiving channels and clamp onto gaskets. Nothing is welded in the working position unless a project engineer has designed that joint. We avoid it, because site welding burns the coating and removes the reason you bought this build.

Why the rate sits above a welded cabin

Buyers ask why a building that ships in pieces costs more than one that ships whole. It is a fair question, and the answer is not clever. A bolted building carries far more connections than a welded one. Every connection is a machined face, a captive plate, a bolt and a gasket. The parts also have to survive handling that a sealed box never sees.

There is a second cost that never shows on a drawing. Cassettes are trial assembled or jig checked in the works before dispatch. This is because a bolt hole that does not line up is cheap to fix here. On a site four hundred kilometres away it is expensive. That check sits inside this rate and is not part of a welded cabin's cost.

So compare the two honestly. At the same 200 sq ft reference this build is Rs 1,900 per sq ft ex-GST. Meanwhile the cluster's welded value line publishes Rs 1,250 per sq ft at that reference and the hub range sits between the two. You are paying roughly half as much again for reach and for reuse. If neither matters on your project, buy the welded module and spend the difference on the fit-out.

Sibling rates are quoted with their basis stated: each is that page's own published figure at the same 200 sq ft reference, read from the live page on 24 August 2026. All are budgetary.

What the site has to be before the first panel lands

Level, reach and room to work

One thing decides whether an assembly goes well, and it is the base. A welded module lands on its own frame and bridges small errors in the ground, but a bolted building cannot. If the supports are out of level, the base cassette twists as the bolts pull up, the posts lean. The panels stop meeting their channels squarely. Doors then bind and gaskets stop sealing.

So the supports go in first, and they go in level. Plinths, pads or a slab all work, and the levels are checked across both diagonals before a single part is set down. This is site work, yours to do or ours to quote, but it is never assumed. Our assembly drawing carries the support positions for the size you order.

Access matters next, and it is easier here than for a welded unit. You need a route for a normal truck rather than a low-loader, somewhere to set the packs down within carrying distance. A clear working area around the footprint while the crew builds. Craneage is usually smaller too, because the heaviest single lift is a cassette rather than a finished office.

Weather is the last one. Panels and gaskets go together dry, and a crew can work through an ordinary day. But sealing a roof joint in heavy rain stores up a leak. So on an outdoor site it is worth planning build days around the monsoon.

Reading the six sizes: width buys rooms, length buys desks

The six sizes are not one layout stretched. Width changes what the building can hold, and length changes how many people fit along the walls. Read the ladder that way and the choice gets simple.

At 8 ft wide you get one working aisle and one line of desks, and that is all. The 10 x 8 squeezes four seats in by pushing desks onto three walls. That suits a gate office or a watch room where nobody stays long. The 20 x 8 does the opposite, giving three people a real desk run and keeping the opposite wall clear so a chair can move.

At 10 ft wide, two facing desk runs become possible. That is why the 20 x 10 seats five where the 20 x 8 seats three, and why the 30 x 10 reaches twelve. The 40 x 10 is the first size that can carry a wall inside it without killing the aisle. That is how the manager cabin appears.

At 20 ft wide the building stops being a corridor. Only the 40 x 20 has that width. That is why it holds a conference room, a manager cabin, a reception, a pantry, an island of six desks and two toilets. It is also why that size can only exist as a flat-pack, because no road vehicle carries a finished floor twenty feet across.

One warning on the largest size. The toilet end carries no window and no external door at all, and two high-level louvres serve the two cubicles instead. That is deliberate. If your site expects a door on that end, change the layout on the drawing, because it cannot be changed on site.

Taking it down and putting it up again

The commercial case for this build is usually reuse. A contractor who moves an office from one project to the next is buying an asset rather than a consumable. That only works if the building comes apart the way it went together. So the design keeps every bolt face, every channel and every service connection reachable after assembly.

Dismantling runs the assembly sequence backwards. Panels come out of their channels, posts release from their captive plates, and the cassettes go back onto the same lifting points they arrived on. The ceiling is chosen to keep roof fasteners and plug connections reachable, so nothing has to be cut to get at a fixing.

What gets replaced each time

Some things are consumables, and pretending otherwise causes leaks. Gaskets and sealants are inspected and replaced rather than reused by default. Bolts are checked and replaced where the coating or the thread has gone. Panel edges take the most damage in handling, and a damaged edge is a replaced panel rather than a repaired one.

Our warranty follows that logic instead of ignoring it. The quotation states the assembly cycles covered, the seal replacement expected, the bolt maintenance required and the relocation limits that apply. Damage from unlevel supports, missing components, wrong torque or worn seals put back in sits outside it, unless the installation was in our scope.

The handover pack and the checks that close the job

Handover is a document as much as a building. The pack carries the assembly sequence, the torque schedule, the component identification list and the replacement seal list. A crew that has never seen the building should be able to raise it from that pack. A visually complete delivery is not a finished job until the functional checks are done.

Those checks are specific. Bolt torque is verified, gasket continuity is inspected, the envelope gets a water test. The electrical installation is retested after erection rather than trusted from the factory. Each step exists because a bolted building is only as good as its last assembly. None of them can be done at our works on your behalf.

Power, air and water in a building that comes apart

Services are where a demountable building is easiest to get wrong, so this one is wired as a harness rather than as loose cable. Circuits run in protected containment with keyed connectors between cassettes, or into accessible junction boxes where a connector will not do. Keyed means the wrong plug does not fit the wrong socket, which matters when a different crew rebuilds it.

Earthing gets the same attention. Every removable structural section has to stay bonded once the building is up, so there is an earthing conductor and an external earth point. Earth continuity and residual current protection are tested again after every relocation. This is because a building that comes apart has to be proved safe each time it goes back together.

Lights, switches, sockets and the fan or air conditioning points sit inside replaceable panels or in service zones. So a later dismantle does not mean tearing out wiring. Ventilation is by opening schedule plus an exhaust fan. A split unit point is sized to the panel core and to the occupancy you tell us about.

Plumbing is optional and appears only where the layout includes it, which in this range means the 40 x 20. Where it is supplied, it uses flexible or unioned connections, isolation stays accessible, and the quick-connect points sit outside. Wet joints can then be leak tested after each assembly rather than buried.

What this product is not

One point of honesty about the name. This is a container office in form and in fit-out, sharing the cluster's proportions, roof line and corner detailing. It is not a converted freight container, and we do not present it as a certified one. The openings in the photographs match the general arrangement inside and out. A louvre serving a toilet is a service penetration rather than a window.

What the published price covers, and what it does not

The published figures are budgetary and they are for the cabin. They cover the structure, the envelope, the openings, the standard electrical fit-out and the finishes described in the specification tab. That is at the size and layout shown on that size's general arrangement.

They do not cover foundations or levelling, transport, unloading or craneage. Site assembly labour, site utilities and any project engineering or certification your client asks for all sit outside them. So do loose furniture and optional equipment. None of that is hidden in a footnote. This is because on this build the assembly line is large enough that a quotation pretending otherwise would be useless to you.

Rates fall as area rises, on a published band rule. The 200 sq ft reference is the base, and below it the rate rises, because a small building still needs a full set of cassettes. That is why the 80 sq ft size carries the highest figure in the ladder. Above the reference the rate falls step by step, and the 800 sq ft size carries the lowest.

The other three ways SAMAN builds a steel office

Three other SAMAN builds answer nearby problems, and if reach and reuse are not your constraints, one of them probably fits better than this page.

Your shell may have to be a genuine freight container, with the corrugated skin and the corner castings that come with it. In that case the shipping container office is a different specification and a different argument.

The office may be for a construction project, where the fit-out question is security, records and visitor access rather than transport. Start at the site office container instead. This is because that page is written around the project phases rather than around the transport problem.

You may want a bolted kit but a porta cabin rather than a container-form module. The knock-down porta cabin is the porta cabin version of the same idea. It comes at a porta cabin rate, with a porta cabin specification behind it.

When you are still weighing footprints rather than builds, the container offices range puts every approved size and rate side by side. Come back here once you know the parts have to travel separately.