Developers are manufacturing prefabricated apartment buildings • Hacker News Board

Re: Developers are manufacturing prefabricated apartment buildings

#111

Post by castratikron » Thu, Jun 07, 2018, 10:14 PM UTC

Joeri wrote: post #6

I’ve always found it odd that house construction is so bespoke. All that pouring and sawing and drilling and slathering of raw materials to do one-off designs for houses that are then filled with standardized ikea furniture which fits the custom room shape poorly. Manual labor is too costly for such a bespoke approach. Either we make carpenter and bricklayer robots to do the bespoke work cheaply, or we build homes fr…

Bricklaying robots have been a thing for a few years now.

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/540916/robots-lay-three-t...

Re: Developers are manufacturing prefabricated apartment buildings

#112

Post by yrb » Thu, Jun 07, 2018, 10:15 PM UTC

maerF0x0 wrote: post #84

molszanski wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, they build 30 story building faster then most single family homes take to do the foundation.

My suspicion is that its under the following constraints: 1) Site is cleared, maybe foundation complete (which means excavation done etc) 2) All prefab pieces are done 3) No restrictions of number of people on site (besides physical realities) #3 is no small case. I've often noticed that construction companies in the west have very few people on site. Certainly not 50 people per floor, for example. IMO this is due to…

I would say the biggest factor is that it is a very repetitive rectangular box.

Overall design and how it is detailed is the dominant factor in time it takes to build things.

Do I have lots of joints that have to be perfect or can they be rough cut and covered with trim?

Do things assembly easily without having to fiddle due to having the correct tolerances?

Cuts and joins are what take the most time. The less cuts and joins you have the cheaper and faster things will be. Also cuts and joins that have to be done to high tolerances take a lot longer.

Re: Developers are manufacturing prefabricated apartment buildings

#113

Post by astura » Thu, Jun 07, 2018, 10:20 PM UTC

planteen wrote: post #86

Jarb wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My architecture wife said houses today are designed (in the US) to last at least 50 years. However I seriously have my doubts that a house could make it that long without some major renovations/overhauls along the way, given that they're essentially built as plywood sheets, stapled to wood planks, protected by plastic siding, and covered with a tar sheet roof down here where I live. I wish the developers invested mor…

What city do you live in? I live in Denver. Houses last way longer than 50 years here. Old houses here are quite desirable due to many of these neighborhoods proximity to downtown. The last two houses I rented were from the 1929 and 1943. They were in great shape. They were not the "old house" on the block either, both neighborhoods dated to that era. Of course they have had several roofs in that time, but roofs don'…

Even the highest quality roof only lasts ~30 years at the most.

I have asphalt roll roofing which is cheap but needs to be replaced every 5-8 years.

Re: Developers are manufacturing prefabricated apartment buildings

#114

Post by pauldprice » Thu, Jun 07, 2018, 10:20 PM UTC

tomatotomato37 wrote: post #15

I wonder how hard it would be for mobile home manufactors to support the modular stacking of units. It would look redneck as hell, but could probably go up even faster then wooden prefabs that still needs a building finished around it

It's already being done, and doesn't look redneck at all: http://indiedwell.com/

Re: Developers are manufacturing prefabricated apartment buildings

#115

Post by devonkim » Thu, Jun 07, 2018, 10:24 PM UTC

johan_larson wrote: post #99

Joeri wrote: post #6

I’ve always found it odd that house construction is so bespoke. All that pouring and sawing and drilling and slathering of raw materials to do one-off designs for houses that are then filled with standardized ikea furniture which fits the custom room shape poorly. Manual labor is too costly for such a bespoke approach. Either we make carpenter and bricklayer robots to do the bespoke work cheaply, or we build homes fr…

Factory-made homes do exist, but they acquired a bad reputation somewhere along the line, and tend to get used only in limited applications, such as summer cottages. What is gaining ground, apparently, is prefabricating components of houses, which are then assembled on site rather than doing everything on site from plain lumber. Stairs, for example, are often made from kits.

A house I owned was built in two halves, transported, and joined together down the middle (a “marriage wall” results). The primary issues I hit weren’t the house - it was insuring the thing and properly classifying it. Some insurance companies called it manufactured and raised the rates significantly outright refused to insure, others call it stick built because of the set of standards were sufficient to note that this is not a mobile home. The other issues were around the fireplace being classified as an insert (non-masonry) which evidently also makes the house uninsurable to some companies in North Carolina.

Basically on paper, a lot of these off-site manufactured and local assembled homes sound like double wides and lower income housing options and the gains get erased in insurance premiums because you get lumped in with high risk owners despite buying a $500k+ custom home basically.

Re: Developers are manufacturing prefabricated apartment buildings

#116

Post by bradknowles » Thu, Jun 07, 2018, 10:24 PM UTC

joe_the_user wrote: post #78

megaman22 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not super expensive or time-consuming to throw up a standard, American stick-built house. Once you have a foundation poured, you can do all the framing, sheathe it, roof it, and have it ready for finish work in a week with a handful of people. What takes forever and a day is the signoffs, and waiting for all the deliveries and third-parties to show up and do their piece. And then all the fiddly stuff inside...

Sure but if you have a prefabricated wall, floor and ceiling solution, that solution could contain all "fiddly bits" pre-installed in an arrangement that was pre-approved and so should theoretically be much faster. Especially, you need wires and pipes and these require significant time and labor even with no zoning requirements.

Try doing that with Legos.

Build all the plumbing into those walls.

Build all the wiring into those walls.

Build all the windows and doors and other openings into those walls.

Then try to put those walls together in a way that connects all the plumbing and all the wiring.

Now, let's look at the real world, at least here in the US.

Yes, there is a national electrical code that covers many parts that aspect, but lots of other codes vary on a city by city or even neighborhood by neighborhood basis. And your HOA can have some of their own codes that you're also required to honor.

How can you have a single central location that can build all those prefab walls according to all those different codes, and have them all pre-approved?

Re: Developers are manufacturing prefabricated apartment buildings

#117

Post by whatsstolat » Thu, Jun 07, 2018, 10:36 PM UTC

gondo wrote: post #66

personally, I don't consider those USA wooden houses to be a real house. there is a company in UAE doing this for quite some time from concrete: http://www.gulfprecast.ae/

A real house provides safe shelter for its occupants. Being made of wood don't matter

Re: Developers are manufacturing prefabricated apartment buildings

#118

Post by kasey_junk » Thu, Jun 07, 2018, 10:47 PM UTC

derefr wrote: post #104

beat wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are lots of copy-paste condo farms here in the Minnesota suburbs. You can easily wander into a neighborhood full of a few hundred physically identical duplexes. Ugly as sin, but they're cheap housing. edit: I'll go farther than this. My own house is over 100 years old, in a "bungalow neighborhood" of Minneapolis. Most of the houses were built over a period of a few decades, with more or less the same design. Th…

Sure, but that's not quite what I was getting at. Maybe I wasn't clear enough. The sort of copy-paste condos you see all in one place are still a single development project by a single property developer . They're all signed off on as one job-lot, and then the materials are allocated to build all of them, a pool of workers are hired and reused between all the projects (where they might be working on condo #14 one day…

That is precisely what “modular” homes are.

There is a stigma to owning them in lots of places though.

Re: Developers are manufacturing prefabricated apartment buildings

#119

Post by njoro » Thu, Jun 07, 2018, 10:49 PM UTC

bobthepanda wrote: post #108

tomjakubowski wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are the state zoning laws? As far as I know, the state constitution leaves zoning as an issue for the cities/counties to handle. Is that your beef or are there laws on the books I'm ignorant of?

The issue is that regional concerns (there is not enough housing in the region) do not mesh well with local control. Every locality thinks that everyone else should relieve the burden of housing because they are already "crowded" and new residents mean more money needed for services, which is a hard ask in a place like CA where raising local taxes is fiendishly difficult. If all the localities in a region, or even mo…

Personally I wouldn't mind the Bay Area looking like Shenzhen, but I don't understand why people think that anything is going to change. Housing and education are prime assets in the new information based society and economy. People aren't going to share that anymore than natural resources, stocks, bitcoins or domains. Regardless of the larger consequences.

Re: Developers are manufacturing prefabricated apartment buildings

#120

Post by walrus01 » Thu, Jun 07, 2018, 10:52 PM UTC

Too much particleboard, chipboard, oriented strand board, MDF board and cheap shit that is used as an alternative to real plywood. I've seen what happens to those particleboard nightmares when construction is temporarily paused in a wet climate, for unforeseen reasons, and it gets rained on before the roof and cladding are on.