America's Large Homebuilders Shift the Cost of Shoddy Construction to Buyers

I've learned my lesson about cheap builds with 13 foot ceilings and gigantic rooms. I am over the scale of it all because the acoustics are so goddamned awful you can hardly sleep. Not one of these houses will ever have interior insulation or god forbid actual Rockwool installed anywhere, so the rooms resonate at frequencies that are impossible to mitigate. 13' ceilings have an axial room mode of ~43hz. Good luck mitigating that. Oftentimes the master bedroom has a dimension even larger than this. Your audio system might be tuned to avoid these ranges but traffic noise and the way the hvac system rumbles in your crawl space is much harder to. Pushing into infrasonic is only a viable option when you have an entire stadium at your disposal. This in between realm is awful. The inside of a Walmart feels better acoustically than many of the new homes built around it.

I am looking forward to having 9 foot ceilings and thick-ass brick all the way around again. I'll lose about a thousand sqft of living space and have to deal with all kinds of legacy issues, but at least it's built better.

Realistically the only way to get a properly built house in the United States is to have a reputable custom home builder do the job, invest heavily in things like engineering up front to minimize geotechnical issues or structural issues that might arise later due to poor homesite choice or architect artistic overreach. That, or buy a well-built home that's already there from before we went fully into production building, which is really just houses made from around 1970 to 1995, before 1970 we were slapping up badly made houses to deal with the postwar boom and after 1995 we went fully into the corporate enshittification hellscape that we currently exist in.

Never, ever, skip an inspection, even on a brand new house, in fact that goes double for a brand new house.

Traditionally this state near the capital city has had a lot of double brick builds, more so than other parts of the world - due to a combination of the "right" soils and a long standing still expanding massive brick company (Midland Brick).

The greatest growth in "alternative" building has been in the factory built modular home area - not just dumpy dongars and demountable shipping container like homes, but multi part slide together modules that together make up a large "pre built home" - say, four large oversize truck loads each with a complete foundation (thick concrete floor) framed, walled, roofed, plumbed and wired chunk o'house that gets lowered slid and jacked in place, then all parts are pulled into together to make a seamless appearing whole.

It's a day to land, a second day to hook up to septic + water + power and drop verandahs and shading in place attached to the home.

That approach has seen a rapid increase in build time as the chunk parts are all created in large warehouse spaces with overhead crane rigs and racks of supply chain parts allowing multiple home builds to be interwoven in a pipeline that concentrates tradesmen and allows (say) an electrician to pull and plate several partial homes in a day or two.

The build quality (so far, from several I've seen) has been consistently up to code with a significant time and money cost saving to owner over other build methods.

Thanks for that, needed a deep guttural laugh.