81–90 of 244 posts
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Says the man who can afford to spend 3 years in court losing 15k :)
Anyone who takes on building a custom house can easily afford to spend 3 years in court losing 15k.
Oh and the 15k are only for legal costs. Don't forget rent for 3 years on top of that. And all the money that you'll still have to pay for the construction. And stress (medical bills are not cheap).
Prefab is the wrong optimization. It targets a minor improvement in a small part of the overall budget. Most of the time and money of construction in America is tied up in land prices, permitting, and regulation. Prefab solves zero of these issues. There is a building going up in Oakland right now where Factory_OS put out a press release that they had built it in ten days. But they spent 7 years getting approvals, 18…
I know of at least one prefab option where permitting and inspections are streamlined at the factory.
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The advantage to me seems like it should be in quality and consistency, not cost and speed. Building houses is fast enough, and as you say the cost of the land often dominates, but the quality of houses is appallingly bad compared to consumer items mass produced in factories.
The quality issues that you encounter in houses aren't the framing either, though. It's the roof sealing, ventilation, trim, plumbing, ... all things that prefab framing also doesn't address.
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I am currently in the process of buying prefab house and after visiting couple of local factories it seems like most of them is doing just framing and competing on price only. We are going with company that actually assemble full house inside and bring it to site fully equipped: electrical, plumbing etc.
What was the breakdown for prefab direct cost versus transportation cost (if you don't mind me being nosey)?
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We are buying house from company that is building them fully assembled: house is assembled indoor and include all electrical, plumbing, HVAC, insulation. Whole system is based on few types of modules that you can connect together and it scale from tiny house to standard house sizes and modules could be even stacked to get multiple floor levels.
From what company?
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You say it’s the wrong optimization but your argument seems to be that there are bigger problems. I tend to agree, particularly with pernicious stuff like single-unit zoning and such, but that doesn’t mean that prefab is “wrong” overall. I don’t see it as a cost optimization, I see it as a speed and consistency optimization. Do we know if long-term maintenance costs of prefab construction are lower?
Seems like it would be hard to reason about. Consistency is great but it means if you order assembled wall panels from a factory, your foundation has to be exact in dimensions and dead level, or it's not going to come together. On-site framers aren't really bothered by this. I think it trades one kind of complexity for another.
I built my current house recently, and our builder used a prefab factory in the region for some of the construction. I would _never_ do it again. The process has all the pitfalls of the waterfall software development model, but at the end you have to live in the failed project! It took months for the factory to do their pre-build engineering, and that's after they started the process using plans from my architect. Th…
Unless you have a complex wall assembly, it’s probably not worth it.
The article mentions labor being a huge problem. On a TV episode of Grand Designs (UK) a few years ago, the German company Huf Haus (www.huf-haus.com) sold a prefab home to a family. Their approach to labor? Ship that too. The whole crew arrived with the house components. They knew exactly how to assemble it on the concrete base the local crews had put in place. It went up ridiculously quickly, and once done, they go…
Buy your prefab, crew shows up.
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You say it’s the wrong optimization but your argument seems to be that there are bigger problems. I tend to agree, particularly with pernicious stuff like single-unit zoning and such, but that doesn’t mean that prefab is “wrong” overall. I don’t see it as a cost optimization, I see it as a speed and consistency optimization. Do we know if long-term maintenance costs of prefab construction are lower?
Seems like it would be hard to reason about. Consistency is great but it means if you order assembled wall panels from a factory, your foundation has to be exact in dimensions and dead level, or it's not going to come together. On-site framers aren't really bothered by this. I think it trades one kind of complexity for another.
The biggest challenge we faced, even with a skilled crew, was simply getting the pieces into some of these lots in the ADK. Between the tight winding roads and lot elevation, it was quite a battle.
Source: My family has been in the modular and manufactured housing business since the 60s.