We sell containers. We do not rent.
Van Blanc sells shipping containers outright. We do not rent, we do not lease, and we do not offer rent-to-own. Renting comes up on this page because buyers compare it against owning, and that comparison is worth reading, but purchase is the only arrangement we offer. Stocked units deliver from our Brantford yards in 1 to 3 days. Request a sale quote or call the yard at 519-754-6844.
Quick Answer: Van Blanc sells full-size storage containers and delivers them to Ajax in 1-3 days from our Brantford yards; we do not rent. A 20ft sea can on your driveway or job site holds roughly 33 cubic metres, far more than a moving pod, and it sits steps from your door. Buy outright, pick your unit at the yard, and keep it as long as the duty lasts.
On This Page
- A Town Named After a Warship Has Never Lacked Steel
- What Does Storage Container Rental in Ajax Actually Get You?
- Renovating in Ajax With Your House Still Full
- Containers on Ajax Job Sites, Docks, and Yards
- When Ajax Buyers Ask About a Self-Storage Locker
- Rent, Buy, or Rent-to-Own
- Sea Can, C-Can, or Storage Bin
- Which Grade Shows Up When You Rent?
- One Box, Four Ajax Lives
- Delivery Day: Brantford to Durham
- Ajax Storage FAQs
Reading Time: 12 minutes
A Town Named After a Warship Has Never Lacked Steel
Ajax is the only town in Canada named after a Royal Navy cruiser, and it leans into it: dozens of its streets carry the names of HMS Ajax crew members from the Battle of the River Plate. The town itself was born in 1941 around the Defence Industries Limited shell plant, a wartime operation that stamped out munitions on farmland east of Pickering. Steel work is the founding industry here. So it makes a certain sense that when an Ajax household or business runs out of room today, the practical answer is still a steel box: a full-size storage container, delivered to your property, bought once and kept for as long as the crunch lasts and after.
Storage demand in Ajax has a particular shape. This is a commuter town of over 125,000 people wedged between Lake Ontario and Highway 401, where houses turn over quickly, renovations run constantly, and the industrial parks along Salem and Harwood host serious logistics operations. The local storage market answers that demand with locker facilities clustered along Station Street and Westney Road, plus small moving pods you load at their schedule. Van Blanc answers it differently, and this page explains the difference.
What Does Storage Container Rental in Ajax Actually Get You?
What people search as a storage container rental is, from Van Blanc, a full-size steel shipping container you buy outright, the same 8-foot-wide box that crosses oceans, delivered to your Ajax property and left there for as long as you own it. Most Canadians call them sea cans or c-cans; contractors on Durham job sites tend to say c-can; the logistics people at the fulfillment centres log them as intermodal containers. Same box. We have supplied them across Ontario from Brantford since 1995, and Paul LeBlanc, who founded the company after four decades in Asian trade, still walks the rows most mornings.
| Unit | External size | Capacity | Typical Ajax use |
|---|---|---|---|
| 20ft sea can | 20′ x 8′ x 8’6″ (6.1m long) | ~33 m³ | Renovation storage, driveway staging, tool security |
| 40ft container | 40′ x 8′ x 8’6″ (12.2m long) | ~67 m³ | Whole-home contents, commercial inventory |
| 40ft high cube | 40′ x 8′ x 9’6″ | ~76 m³ | Racking, bulky equipment, overflow warehousing |
Every unit is wind and watertight at minimum: doors seal, roof sheds rain, rodents stay out. The container sits on your site, so your tools, furniture, or inventory stay behind your own lock, thirty steps from your back door instead of a drive down Westney Road. Delivery runs 1-3 days to Ajax from our 4 Brantford yards, and every quote comes with a real lead time, not a hopeful one.
Christian LeBlanc: “Durham calls come in two flavours. Somebody mid-renovation who needed storage yesterday, and a business that just watched its third monthly locker invoice go up. Both are surprised the container shows up in a couple of days. I grew up hearing my dad quote real lead times, and it turns out that habit is rare enough to be a selling point.”
Renovating in Ajax With Your House Still Full
Ajax is one of the busiest renovation markets east of Toronto. The housing stock runs from 1950s wartime-worker bungalows near the lake to 1990s subdivisions north of Rossland, the same way the Durham streets east of it do, and a large share of it is being opened up, refinished, or added onto at any given moment. The downtown core around Station Street is in the middle of a major revitalization push, which tends to pull private renovation money along with it.
A renovation is the single most common reason an Ajax homeowner buys a container from us. The pattern is always the same: the contractor needs two rooms empty by Monday, the garage is already full, and a locker across town means loading a truck twice. A 20ft sea can on the driveway swallows the contents of several rooms, keeps them dry through the job, and becomes the garden shed the day after the floors cure. You load it once, at your own pace, and nothing you own crosses town.
Driveway Placement, Done Right
Our tilt-deck truck needs roughly 60 feet of straight approach to set a 20ft container. Standard two-car driveways in most Ajax subdivisions handle this fine. Tell us what is overhead, wires, branches, eaves, when you book, and the driver plans the set before he leaves Brantford. Interlock owners: ask about protective cribbing when you call.
Most Ajax renovations run long and most driveways have a corner for the box afterward, which is why buying wins so often; the Ajax purchase guide covers grades and buying from the same yards, and selling the box on when it has finished its work is routine.
Containers on Ajax Job Sites, Docks, and Yards
The other half of Ajax container demand is commercial, and it tracks the town’s employer list. Ajax carries roughly 3,500 advanced-manufacturing jobs across aerospace, automotive, and automation shops, plus the Amazon fulfillment centre, Volkswagen Canada, Casino Ajax, and Ajax Pickering Hospital anchoring the service economy. Operations like these generate exactly the storage problems a container solves:
Where Containers Land in Ajax
- Site tool cribs: Framing and mechanical crews working the subdivisions north of Taunton buy 20-footers as lockable tool storage, moved site to site as phases close.
- Seasonal retail overflow: Businesses along Harwood and Bayly fill 40-footers from September to January for holiday inventory, then keep them empty and paid-for until the next season.
- Fit-out staging: When a plant or clinic renovates, furniture and equipment wait in containers in the parking lot instead of a rented warehouse bay across the 401.
- Event and facility storage: Rinks, clubs, and the waterfront event calendar all need somewhere for boards, barriers, and staging to live off-season.
Commercial buyers usually start with one unit and add a second when the first one fills. Our rentals page sets what a fleet operator charges beside what owning one of ours costs, if you want the full picture before calling.
Institutional Ajax buys too. Lakeridge Health’s Ajax Pickering site, the school boards, and the town’s own facilities crews all generate the same project-storage cycles as private industry, usually on procurement timelines that appreciate a supplier who quotes in writing, delivers on the stated day, and invoices without surprises. Thirty years of paperwork discipline turns out to be a selling point in that market as much as the steel is.
When Ajax Buyers Ask About a Self-Storage Locker
We sell containers, so take this section as the same straight talk you would get at the yard counter. Ajax has capable locker facilities, and three questions come up whenever a buyer weighs one against a container.
First: climate-sensitive contents. A steel container is weathertight, and with ventilation and desiccant it handles furniture and tools well, but it is not climate-controlled. Artwork, instruments, and delicate electronics belong in a heated indoor unit. Second: no place to put a container. If you are in a condo near the GO station or a townhouse with no usable driveway, a locker is your practical option, however much more loading work it costs you. Third: tiny volumes. If everything you need to store fits in a closet-sized space, ask about our 10ft units before you settle on a locker.
Everyone else, the household with a garage’s worth of contents, the contractor with tools worth guarding, the business with pallets, gets more space, more convenience, and their own lock by having the storage come to them. That is the split, and it is why we are comfortable naming the alternatives.
Rent, Buy, or Rent-to-Own in Ajax?
Three ways the market offers a container, one quick logic check, and one plain fact first: Van Blanc sells outright only.
The Sixty-Second Decision
- Rent from a yard that runs a rental fleet: a monthly bill until the box goes back, and nothing owned at the end. We do not rent.
- Buy when the need runs past a few months or the container has any second life: a renovation that becomes a shed, yard storage, a workshop. Walk the rows at the Brantford yard and pick your exact unit before paying.
- Rent-to-own exists elsewhere in the market; we do not offer it. A buyer who wants ownership without the up-front outlay arranges an equipment loan through their own bank or financer, and the bin is theirs from delivery day.
What moves an Ajax quote: container size, grade, the roughly 145-kilometre run from Brantford, and how deep the yard stock is that week. No posted price list, because posted numbers go stale and mislead. Tell us the size and your postal code and we will send back an all-in number, usually the same day. Faster still: call the Brantford yard at 519-754-6844 and describe the job; you will have your answer in one conversation.
Price Your Ajax Container
Container size plus your postal code gets a straight number with the Durham run built in. Driveway photos welcome; the placement gets planned before anything books.
Sea Can, C-Can, or Storage Bin: What Ajax Calls the Thing
A sea can is a steel intermodal shipping container repurposed for ground storage, and every buyer tribe in Durham has its own name for it. Homeowners who found us through a moving forum say storage container. The contractor crowd says c-can, shorthand their trade has used since the eighties. Anyone who grew up rural says sea can. Procurement software at the fulfillment centres logs the same unit as an ISO or intermodal container, coded under the ISO 6346 marking standard that governs every box in the global fleet. Paul just says bin, and after thirty years in the container industry and four decades in Asian trade before that, he has earned the right to the short word.
The names matter for one practical reason: searching the wrong one shows you the wrong market. Storage unit gets you locker facilities. Pod gets you the eight-foot moving cubes. If what you want is a full-size, deliverable, lockable steel container on your own property, every term above lands at the same place, and we answer to all of them.
Which Grade Shows Up When You Rent in Ajax?
Containers come in four grades, and a supplier worth calling explains all four even though only two usually make sense for storage. From the top of the market down:
New (one-trip) units made a single loaded ocean crossing and look close to showroom: original paint, clean doors, minor handling marks we point out in the yard. The industry calls them one-trip because they made exactly one voyage. You would buy one for a visible, branded, or converted installation, where the factory paint is part of the job. Cargo worthy (CW) units are used, re-certified for shipping, structurally inspected, with cosmetic wear. Wind and watertight (WWT) is the workhorse storage grade: honest surface rust and dents, doors that close and seal, a dry and rodent-proof interior. Most Ajax orders ship WWT or CW, and we tell you which is on the truck before it leaves; the top two rungs compared side by side is its own read. As-is units have structural questions, floor damage, frame issues, doors that fight back. We carry them for buyers who want donor units or cladding steel, and we never sell one as storage without saying so. Listing the grade we would not send you for storage is part of how you know the grades we do send are described straight.
One Box, Four Ajax Lives
A 20ft sea can leads a different life depending on whose property it lands on, and watching those lives repeat is how we learned what Durham actually needs:
On a court off Rossland, it spends four months as a renovation warehouse: living room, dining room, and half the basement stacked floor to ceiling while the main floor gets opened up. On a Salem Road industrial lot, it is a tool crib with a lockbox, dragged into the site rotation each phase, the site super holding the only keys. Behind a Bayly Street storefront, it runs September to January as seasonal inventory overflow, then sits empty and paid-for the week after the Boxing Day rush dies, waiting for next September. And down near the waterfront, a sailing club fills one with race marks, dock hardware, and safety gear the day the season ends, a steel locker that shrugs off a lakefront winter better than any wooden shed on the property.
Four owners, four jobs, one size. That range is why we stock the yard deep rather than specializing, and why the first question on the phone is always what are you storing, not what size do you want. Half the time the answer changes the size.
The end of the job is as engineered as the start. When the work wraps, the box either stays as the storage the property never had or sells on, and the owner keeps most of what was paid. Mid-project changes are just as routine: adding a 40 beside the 20 when the renovation scope grows, or a second unit when the first one fills, happens on Durham runs weekly. Nothing about the arrangement is designed to trap anyone in steel, which, after thirty years, turns out to be the feature people mention most when they come back for the next project.
Delivery Day: Brantford to Durham
Ajax sits about 145 kilometres from our yards, a straight run east on the 403 and 407 that our drivers make routinely. The Highway 412 link means we come down to the 401 corridor or up into the northern subdivisions without threading Kingston Road. Delivery lands in the standard 1-3 day window to every part of Durham Region.
The truck is a tilt-deck: it backs in, tilts, and slides the container onto your prepared spot, gravel, asphalt, or firm level ground. No crane call-out for a standard set. Our drivers place bins within centimetres of where you point, a habit Ajax customers notice because pod companies drop where the truck fits. And if you want to see the exact unit before it ships, come walk the rows at 90 Morton Avenue East. Buyers from across the GTA make the drive because picking your own bin beats trusting a photo. Worth the drive is not a slogan we invented; it is what the reviews keep saying. If your storage plan is portable across multiple sites, portable storage done with full-size containers covers the multi-move version of the service.
Ajax Storage Container FAQs
How fast can Van Blanc deliver a storage container to Ajax?
1-3 days to Ajax and the rest of Durham Region from our 4 Brantford yards. You get a real lead time on the quote, and the driver calls ahead on delivery day.
Will a 20ft container fit on an Ajax driveway?
On most detached and semi-detached driveways, yes: the container footprint is 20 feet by 8 feet, about one car length and a half. The truck needs roughly 60 feet of straight approach to set it. Send us a photo of the driveway with your quote request and we will confirm before booking.
Is a container secure enough for tools and inventory?
The container is 14-gauge corten steel with a full-height lockable door; add a lockbox, which we supply, and the padlock itself is shielded from bolt cutters. It is behind your fence, under your cameras, with your lock. That is a stronger position than any shared-access facility corridor.
What does a storage container rental cost in Ajax?
Quotes depend on size, grade, delivery distance, and yard stock that week, so we price each one individually rather than posting stale numbers; every container is sold outright. Start an Ajax quote with your postal code and dates, or call 519-754-6844 for the fastest answer.
How long can I keep a container in Ajax?
For good; every container we deliver is bought outright, so a three-week renovation and a two-year inventory overflow both work without a term to run out. When you are done, keep it as the shed, or sell it on and ask us about buyback.
Does Van Blanc deliver containers to Ajax in winter?
Yes, we deliver year-round. Winter sets need a plowed approach and a cleared placement spot; the tilt-deck handles packed snow fine, but the driver cannot place safely onto an uncleared surface. January renovations are more common in Durham than most people expect, and the delivery calendar is usually less busy then too.
Can I move my rented container from Ajax to another site?
No. Van Blanc sells containers outright and does not rent, lease, or offer rent-to-own. Past a few months, buying a used wind-and-watertight box normally costs less than renting one, and you can sell it on or ask us about buyback when you are done.
Sources
- Town of Ajax. (2026). Economic Development Sectors. Ajax.ca. Ajax economic sectors page
- Town of Ajax. (2025). Community Profile. Ajax.ca. the Ajax community profile
- Transport Canada. (2025). Cargo Securement Standard 10, Containerized Cargo. Transport Canada’s site
- International Organization for Standardization. (2022). ISO 6346:2022, Freight containers, Coding, identification and marking. ISO 6346:2022 listing
Reach Van Blanc in Brantford
We have been supplying shipping containers across Ontario since 1995. Our warehouse is at 90 Morton Avenue E in Brantford, and we deliver right across the province with all-in quotes and real lead times.
Van Blanc Ent. Inc., 90 Morton Ave E Unit 1B, Brantford, ON N3R 7J7, +1 888-509-6658
Renovating, relocating, or just out of room in Ajax? Call the yard, describe the crunch, and we will have steel on your driveway inside the week.
