7 ms·

It's kind of hard for me to tell whether the house is nicer than mine when there's so little detail in the article on the actual house. Look, i'm more than sup

• vacri 11y ago
  Same here - annoying to see the same 'corner angle' photography tricks that real estate agents use to hide shortcomings.
• mathgladiator 11y ago
  I want to know too; having somewhat recently bought a house, and I've started to upgrade it. I can see $20,000 going really fast for simple things.
  • morganvachon 11y ago
    Indeed, I bought a "handyman's delight" (i.e. money pit) for $43k just outside Atlanta during the recession in 2009, and to get it to roughly the same condition as my neighbor's house, I'd have to spend another $40k. It's mostly cosmetic work that it needs, but there are some structural and functional issues that need to be addressed as well. We're still debating whether we should hold onto it and fix it up (it currently appraises for $80k with the few improvements we've done, mostly due to the location) or just sell it for what we owe and buy a better house.
    • Someone1234 11y ago
      Might be worth talking to a realtor, or even going to look at a few houses for sale close by. Certain improvements can be literally profitable when you sell the house (e.g. $2K in painting nets you $10K in additional sale price). If you go look at the comparable homes in the area (similar square footage, no. of bathrooms & bedrooms, etc) and they're nicer but selling for $120K+ than your home can likely be made to turn a huge profit by fixing it up before you sell it. Just make sure you only fix/improve things which a buyer would care about, and not get bogged down in your own niche requirements.
    • rco8786 11y ago
      My father has been in the Atlanta metro real estate market for 2 decades. Is an appraiser, agent, and licensed inspector. I'd be happy to pass his info if you're interested in a professional opinion.
  • st3v3r 11y ago
    This is starting from scratch, though. You have existing stuff that you have to work within.
    • mathgladiator 11y ago
      Even from scratch, I considered building my own house. The cheapestimated possibly is to use cargo containers, but that requires a ton of welding and cutting. I'm curious how the designs here save on so much material. Also, having picked up wood working, I can say that wood isn't cheap.
• bsbechtel 11y ago
  Agreed. I don't see anything particularly innovative or unique about this house. Manufactured homes cost roughly the same, and are roughly the same size and quality. There's not a whole lot of info really detailing what is so different or great about this home.
  • viperscape 11y ago
    Manufactured homes in the US are typically high quality now because of the national safety standards it must meet for each state, in addition to holding up to things like high winds, heavy rains, tremors.
    • bsbechtel 11y ago
      I didn't say it wasn't high quality, just that it's not necessarily innovative or new.
• jleahy 11y ago
  Plus they explicitly said that it's going to cost more than $20,000...
  • AnimalMuppet 11y ago
    It's more than $20,000 if you have someone build it for you. If you build it yourself, it's $14,000 (plus your time and labor). One thing they didn't mention: land cost.
• marincounty 11y ago
  They left out current building codes. I have a general contractor's licence. To build anything involves so many rules/codes it's rediculious. Every year the building department in your town/city usually includes the latest codes, and prohibits so many things. It all sounds great until you are paying someone to build something. The various building code manuals take up at least two feet of space on my shelf. Where I live, I couldn't build a cabin with wood stove. It would need a electric plug every 6'. I couldn't even use logs to build it without approved man made insulation. And forget the wood stove. They are illegial.
  • toomanybeersies 11y ago
    You really have to wonder how necessary some of these codes are. Houses already last 60 or 70 years, which is plenty, by the time they're at a point where they need rebuilding they're hopelessly outdated. I was helping my father with building a house over Christmas, some of the regulations are ridiculous, we had to build a massive retaining wall with 200 mm posts going 1.5 m down, just because the earth it was retaining could theoretically have a car drive down it at some point. You have to seal the concrete ledge that bricks sit on with bitumen. It used to be that you had to seal it 50% of the width, but they've just changed it so that it has to be the full width of the ledge. How much difference does it really make? You can no longer use nails for fastening down corrugated iron roofs, you have to use special screws. People have been nailing corrugated iron roofs down for literally hundreds of years without issue.
    • imgabe 11y ago
      Codes are largely reactionary. Sometime, somewhere, doing a certain thing caused a problem and somebody got injured or killed. Maybe the corrugated roof that got nailed down blew off under certain conditions and the investigation revealed that it wouldn't have happened if they used certain screws instead of nails. Hence, the code gets updated to require those screws. It's mostly driven by the insurance industry. They don't want to pay out claims, so they write the codes to make the buildings as robust as possible.
      • 11y ago
• Loughla 11y ago
  Or what's the difference between this and a manufactured trailer? Those are very cheap and mobile, even. It seems like just new marketing for old, low-income housing. I wish someone would address that, at the root, this move to micro-housing is focused always on cost, and lack of available funds for young working people.
  • sageabilly 11y ago
    Lifespan of a mobile home is estimated at 30-55 years depending on area and on how much upkeep the owner does. There's also a huge stigma around living in a mobile home, and serious logistics involved in hauling the mobile home to its final destination as it has to be delivered in one or two pieces on a long flatbed trailer.
    • derekp7 11y ago
      I've also seen something years ago where a house is made from components that come from a manufacturing facility -- each one can be hauled in on a flatbed. But when they are all assembled, the result really looks and functions like a regular house.
      • JoblessWonder 11y ago
        They are starting to do this with commercial buildings. They pre-fab the apartments off-site and then "place" then in the building shell. Not sure how popular it will be but it is something people are considering.
      • chiph 11y ago
        Those are modular homes. And they can be just as well-built as traditional "stick-built" homes. The base pricing on them is really attractive, but the cost (and value) is in all the options. Part of what makes them attractive is that the assembly on your lot goes really quickly, so the chance of exposure to damaging weather (and thieves/vandals) goes way down compared to traditional homes.
    • kedean 11y ago
• Shivetya 11y ago
  The numbers are seemingly tossed about without all those pieces you need to add it up. It reads more feel good we got an investment to sell you than actual talk from a home builder. The costs completely ignores the costs of land and ongoing taxes as well. Besides issues with neighbors they are likely going to need to get all new zoning as this price point won't support larger lots. I am all for good priced construction, groups like Habitat for Humanity would benefit too, but to ignore known savings and counter with "jobs" and such without quantifying it all comes across as a late night infomercial
• rubidium 11y ago
  Here's what looks like more info from the designers. It's a really cool program. Each year they come up with a house design and BUILD it for <$20K. http://www.ruralstudio.org/projects/20k-v8-daves-house http://www.ruralstudio.org/projects/20k-v8-daves-house search the projects tab to see all of them back to 2005
  • strgrd 11y ago
    Where can I buy one though?
    • zanny 11y ago
      At least in the US, zoning and construction ordinances are incredible barriers to innovation and are part of the reason why the real estate market is out of control. These were systems put in place decades ago, often due to class warfare to keep the "riff-raff" out of desirable neighborhoods, that punish innovation and progress towards sustainable and affordable housing. I cannot help but feel like a lot of the problems in the over-regulation of construction and real estate is due to public ignorance and apathy. If people cared more about how well built their homes were, we would not have needed tremendous government regulation to force builders to build safe houses. My father works construction and between the UCC being dozens of chapters long and every municipality having its own grandfathered in or exceptional bullshit make breaking ground a minefield of bureaucratic nightmare. In hindsight, I wish we could have produced third party unaffiliated review boards for new construction so that builders could get their blueprints and finish products certified. We could have had an industry of competitive certification processes directed towards homebuilding, and the most trustworthy and reliable certifications would have gained name recognition builders would desire for well built property. Then we could avoid this entire trainwreck of bureaucracy, but understandably volunteer certification doesn't help the poverty stricken when being offered a "cannot be beat" deal on a derelict unsafe house, which is the root problem in all this. It is just generally a mess and as someone coming from a software background who has a father in construction to hear all the disasters from, wish there were a more obvious solution other than "try deregulating and hope you don't get the poor killed or screwed over in the process".