31–40 of 223 posts
Seems pretty expensive to make everything out of pure plywood. Does anyone have a sense of how cost compares to 2x4's plus drywall? I assume either construction method will need exterior cladding and insulation.
Isn't plywood cheaper than solid wood?
Hm I’d like a house where everything is as easy to assemble / repair / replace as IKEA furniture, and where you can run cables, and install builtins
Modern glulam buildings (or if you are in EU gablok could work) or masonry, pluggable plumbing and electrical (see Swedish prefabs, they use a pluggable electrical so you plug one wall into the other, wiring is embedded at factory), metal SIPs roofing. You can get pretty close to this with current materials.
That's pretty interesting and while I sincerely hope it works as advertised, what is the repair process when (not if) the connections inside the wall fail? As the owner of multiple homes, a part of me is very skeptical that those connections will last for decades untouched.
In the US, code does not allow for splices and connections inside walls, period. In a pre-fab, I would like to see all of the cabling run inside tubes so that I can fix/add/replace easily myself in many years down the road. This is prohibitively expensive for residential mains wiring but not terribly unusual for low-voltage stuff like coax and ethernet that the homeowner can do herself.
I’m gonna have to raise the alarm at this remark. There is no reasonable license that would permit enforcing this, that anyone should dare construct a structure bound by such license on their property.
I am all for the idea of an open building system, but get real.
Seems pretty expensive to make everything out of pure plywood. Does anyone have a sense of how cost compares to 2x4's plus drywall? I assume either construction method will need exterior cladding and insulation.
My rough estimate is around $4.75/sf for a high performance wall (drywall+2x6+osb+exterior foam ~ R31). They show £230/m2, so this product would be almost 7x more expensive.
> However, any modifications you make must be re-shared under the same licence. By everyone, for everyone. I’m gonna have to raise the alarm at this remark. There is no reasonable license that would permit enforcing this, that anyone should dare construct a structure bound by such license on their property. I am all for the idea of an open building system, but get real.
They aren't telling you what you can and can't do with the house itself.
Seems pretty expensive to make everything out of pure plywood. Does anyone have a sense of how cost compares to 2x4's plus drywall? I assume either construction method will need exterior cladding and insulation.
My rough estimate is around $4.75/sf for a high performance wall (drywall+2x6+osb+exterior foam ~ R31). They show £230/m2, so this product would be almost 7x more expensive.
For example, the material list for a 3 bedroom house is 130k. https://www.menards.com/main/building-materials/books-buildi...
Say the land is 130k in your region. You won't find 3b houses for less than 360k. If you're looking at not so cheap builders, it will be 500k.
I think there's a revolution coming in the way we build houses, it must be - because costs are through the roof. It could be either in the form of prefabricated walls, like we have now trusses, or lego bricks like the OP, or something.
They need to sell on the longevity and robustness of these homes. If the houses are crap, this is going to be an incredibly wasteful project no matter how many environmentally friendly indicators they point to.
That said, Japan treats 1 storey dwellings as single-lifetime and have a different view on the ephemeral value of a house.
Starting with the tagline "Simple, beautiful zero-carbon building for everyone". WHAT? - Claiming that timber building products are carbon neutral is dubious, just talking about the timber alone, before any value added lifecycle. They should put some pictures of the Spruce forests their plywood comes from and let people decide for themselves. - Simple? Not really. They don't say much at all about what happens after you get walls and a roof. Who is going to plumb and wire, and how? How simple will it be to find a tradesperson who wants to actually figure out from scratch how to pull cable through your ikea home and put their license on the line? - Beautiful? Meh.. ask again in 30 years and see if people don't say it looks like it was built in 2023.
And then just all the stuff that doesn't matter. The problem of making a building isn't putting up walls and a roof. That's usually the part that goes the fastest. Who cares that it's 'precision engineered' (spoiler alert, if it's OSB, theres no precision) and that it has 3x more compressive strength than stick frame. When was the last time you thought to yourself 'I wish I could put a car on my roof'?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Modern glulam buildings (or if you are in EU gablok could work) or masonry, pluggable plumbing and electrical (see Swedish prefabs, they use a pluggable electrical so you plug one wall into the other, wiring is embedded at factory), metal SIPs roofing. You can get pretty close to this with current materials.
> pluggable plumbing and electrical That's pretty interesting and while I sincerely hope it works as advertised, what is the repair process when (not if) the connections inside the wall fail? As the owner of multiple homes, a part of me is very skeptical that those connections will last for decades untouched. In the US, code does not allow for splices and connections inside walls, period. In a pre-fab, I would like t…