The world's largest 3D printer is building cozy homes from wood

I feel the same way. Especially with a promo piece like this so short on details.

If you’ve watched a house, or any structure, go up, you know that building the basic structure happens remarkably quickly. This seems to replace framing, roofing and siding. Maybe drywall too?

But you still have all of the expensive/slow stuff like plumbing, electrical and finish carpentry that still has to be done.

Sheds and small storage buildings seem like they could be a good use of the technology. Dwelling units and production spaces need utilities, which complicates things. Sheds need a solid base, good walls, a roof (which might be 3D printed in stairstep fashion), and a door. There's a big gap in the market between the metal/resin DIY kits from big box retailers and the prefab sheds delivered by flatbed truck.

Reminds me a bit of the Shed-to-House projects or shipping container house projects that end up costing nearly as much as a site built home once all of the non-shell costs are added in.

That was a study done by an industry group and included all fees and taxes in a contrived scenario. Not just permitting fees.

So things like property tax during the build period, as well as sales tax and service tax charged by the builders contractors. The study assumed a 5 year build period and multiplied all yearly property taxes by that amount. It also tacked on things like the vacant home tax and speculation tax which are not applied to properties under construction. Many of the taxes and fees are also scaled to the square footage of the house. Lastly they also included things like sewer hookup fees, which is really not an unnecessary cost for a builder to pay.

Permit fees are too high, and maybe we should exempt a lot of them given the current crisis, but this study is aiming for a quick headline. If you dig into their analysis it is a worst case scenario for what a house would cost for a foreign speculator who left the house vacant before flipping it and didn’t qualify for any homebuyer tax exemptions.

A lot of those taxes and fees wouldn’t apply to a sandcastle is what I’m saying. The $250k figure is the number they quoted for a $900k 2-bed new-build condo in a transit corridor. Even in their own study the lower cost housing units were coming in at half that.

I’ve worked a lot in construction both prior to entering tech and as a side hustle while working for tech companies.

Every single one of these construction-tech products fail to address actual problems and bottlenecks in the construction process, ultimately creating just novelties dreamt up by someone who has never set foot on a job site.

The wood frame is one of the fastest parts of structure, I am able to frame 300-900sqft ADUs (accessory dwelling units) in 2-3 days with help or 3-4 days solo, which is 24-48 human hours. The lumber is ordered and delivered by truck, it requires no special equipment, only really needing a battery operated miter saw, nailer, impact driver, measuring tape, speed square, string lines, levels, hammer, and sunscreen.

What takes a long time is everything else:

* Foundation is 85% site prep, 10% coordination of materials/subcontractors/inspection, and 5% of actual work construction. Draining and grading is overlooked or under considered most often leading to settling/cracking or outright failure of the foundation system prematurely.

* Plumbing needs to be involved between every single step, beginning from after the site is graded to after wall coverings are up and fixtures are ready to be installed. DWV (drain waste vent) is critical to get right as shit only travels downhill.

* Electrical is time consuming, has expensive materials, and is getting saddled with even more requirements of diminishing returns. 200A main panels are the norm basically all new construction is 100% electric. You are running 10/3 wire (3 conductors of 10AWG + ground) at $1.30/ft for a clothes dryer, 6/3 at $5.50-6.50/ft for both your electric range hookup and EV charger, 8/3 at $3-4/ft for your HVAC, dedicated 12/2 circuits for each of your microwave, refrigerator, dish washer, garbage disposer, etc. all circuit breakers that service circuits in dwelling area must be arc fault protected (which means your breakers went from $10-20 each to $40-80 each). I won’t even go into solar and how much of everything must be solar ready.

* HVAC is straight forward for new homes, provided the unit/s is/are sized appropriately.

* Wall covering (usually drywall) takes a long time with many passes to affix, tape, and sand wallboard

* Vapor barriers on the outside require basic knowledge to get the install right - which is sadly not always present for the build

* Exterior cladding can take many forms from shiplap siding (cedar or composite), masonry board, a masonry product like stucco, vinyl, or just a tongue and groove primed siding board.

* Roofing is easy and fast but costly

* Final utility hookup is fraught with slowdowns and annoyances, requires certain inspections to be done (but not all) and unless you have someone’s desk phone at the utility to help you out, it’s a crappy process to navigate.

* Landscaping and other finish work takes a while

The elephant in the room, however, is always the going to be related to the red tape. Permitting accounts for a significant chunk of the cost where a new single family home might incur $90-$130K in just permit fees alone (in Sacramento where I’m located, which is on the medium/low end for California). The process is becoming so convoluted and draconian that you need literal consultants to tell you where to burn piles of cash that add comparatively little value to the overall project and just drive costs up unnecessarily. Having safe buildings is important and there is value in getting an third party check work for correctness, but something is wrong when my $85-$200K construction project doubles because it’s literally illegal not to pay this. Because this cost does not scale linearly with the size of the build, most developers build the largest sized home they can for the plot as that’s the best value relative to permitting costs. Affordable housing to-own is never going to be within reach with the way this is setup.