23 ms·

Why hasn't prefab construction taken over?

180 points by jseliger 6y ago

OldHand2018 6y ago
As the article points out, the cost of the house is the same as the cost of a traditionally built house in the most expensive home construction area of the United States, and at the same time you are extremely limited in the geometries you can use. Does that answer the question?
- ThenAsNow 6y ago
  While this is fine as the high-level answer, the interesting question seems to be why the as-installed cost would be the same as typical wasteful North American "stick building"? I've spent some time thinking about better ways to build houses, spoken with like-minded architects, etc., and haven't gotten to the bottom of this question. Intuitively, it seems like there should be quite a bit of room to decrease costs by using engineered, pre-fabricated/panelized construction. There should be less waste, less manual labor, and less re-work. Yet the best case seems to be approximately the same costs, though I would expect at improved quality or improved first-time quality. Another system for engineered building, though based on wood, is Blueprint Robotics: http://www.blueprint-robotics.com/ http://www.blueprint-robotics.com/ I actually started my personal line of inquiry favoring steel construction as well, though some research convinced me that using a home as a carbon sink through wood construction from sustainably-managed forests made significant sense. For something like an airtight, well-insulated (Net Zero or better) home using wood-based sheathing, the coefficient of thermal expansion compatibility with wood structure also makes sense. That being said, it appears the Bone structure folks have their own solutions to prevent thermal shorts between the exterior and the steel structure, as they have apparently used their system for Net Zero and Passivhaus construction.
  - athenot 6y ago
    Have you looked into log homes? That may fit your criteria: lot of wood needed (so great carbon sink), good insulation, simple design (1 wall for support, vapor barrier, insulation , siding and inside panelling).
    - ThenAsNow 6y ago
      I honestly have not, but the aesthetics of log homes don't really appeal to me. I hadn't thought of the potential performance benefits though.
    - bluGill 6y ago
      logs are poor insulation. The definition of R1 is a 1 inch board. normal 4 inch walls are r13, the log is 4.
      - postalrat 6y ago
        4 inches is a stick, not a log.
        bluGill 6y ago
        Still, a 12 inch log is R12...
  - bluGill 6y ago
    standard stick built has a lot of things already factory done. most lumber is a standard length/width, and the entire print is built around those sizes. 2x4s come factory cut to 92 5/8 long, which (after adding the other lumber needed for a wall) leaves a finished 8 foot wall ready for 2, 4 foot wide sheets of drywall. What labor is done on site in a typical stick built construction project is mostly the same manual labor that needs to be done in a factory. Which isn't surprising: construction sites are just mobile factories for buildings. When you have to make something with lot of empty space is makes sense to ship the factory to the final location. Shipping is a factor too: a stick built house arrives on one flatbed truck. A similar prefab house needs 3, and special permits to get it down the road (which includes checking for lower hanging power lines).
    - ThenAsNow 6y ago
      I believe the premise of many of these panelization/pre-fab companies is that manual labor is minimized within the factory through automation and also reduced on-site. There is also the waste reduction aspect. Definitely does seem that the devil is in the details on how much automation actually gets used, and to what degree the panels are finished vs. needing on-site tradeswork. Maybe in engineered production it is not far from a wash between less spent on on-site labor and waste vs. more spent on up-front engineering. Like we often see with automation and rigor, I suppose the up-front costs really only get amortized over multiple units produced. The Blueprint Robotics company I mentioned as an example apparently now focuses on multi-unit dwellings. Quality and repeatability, usually things that (IMO, sadly) are not highly valued in the North American market, are almost certainly improved through engineered production, but I suppose if you don't value those things, you can also keep labor costs down. Anyway, it would be nice to see some typical and aggregate quantification of these things to really understand.
  - markvdb 6y ago
    You might want to have a look at straw panel construction. There's several across the EU. https://ecococon.eu/ https://ecococon.eu/ is the major one. Not affiliated with them. I built the walls of our summer house out of jumbo straw bales straight from the farm.
FullyFunctional 6y ago
I really like the concept and would take that any day over the California homes built with toothpicks and cart board by a random crew (I'm sitting on one right now and there aren't two straight lines). The bone system even looks like something I might be able to put together myself (besides stuff like foundation, pluming, and electrical).
- bluGill 6y ago
  I know it is in to make fun of "toothpick and card board" construction, but modern engineering has found them very strong when used correctly. What you intuitively think is better often isn't.
  - lotsofpulp 6y ago
    I assume anyone making fun of 2x4 and drywall construction has no experience in construction or land development. The complaints all have to do with cheap materials, and/or shoddy construction if walls aren't straight. But done right with good insulation and quality materials, I would take it over any other type. It's nice and easy to modify and repair also. Unfortunately most of the money people use to buy goes into the price of the land, leaving little extra for a quality build.
    - xyzzyz 6y ago
      The complaints all have to do with cheap materials, and/or shoddy construction if walls aren't straight. That's right. The parent was complaining about homes built from sticks and cardboard, and indeed, one can actually use foil-faced cardboard for sheathing the shear walls (one product name is ThermoPly, there are others). You attach these to walls you build 24" O, slap 3/8" drywall inside, put vinyl siding, make absolutely no effort whatsoever to air-seal anything, save on gluing subfloor to joists (nobody will mind the squeaking), and the list can go on and on. House built like that will be utter garbage, will be expensive and uncomfortable to live in, and if it doesn't collapse due to water-damage induced rot, it's only because of high robustness of wood-frame construction. However, you don't have to build this way! You can build a solid, sturdy, well-insulated, well-ventilated, soundproof, rigid and long-lasting house using wood-frame construction. It will just cost more. The great thing about wood-frame construction is that you can actually make these kind of decisions, and you can pick and choose parts which you care about, and the ones the quality of which you can give up on. Moreover, it's pretty easy to upgrade things later on, easy to fix if something breaks, and easy to build additions to. I grew up in a country where lumber was too expensive to use it for construction, so everything was made from concrete (typically using CMUs). I used to think that this is a way to go, but over time I really became converted to American-style wood frame construction.
jeffbee 6y ago
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 months in site prep, and they've been detailing and finishing the building for more than a year since the press release, so it doesn't seem like the method of construction was a very important factor.
- modeless 6y ago
  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.
  - xnx 6y ago
    This. I want homes as well designed, engineered and built as iPhones, or at least automobiles.
    - yazaddaruvala 6y ago
      FWIW, I have a hunch that in 10 years TSLA will start building homes and AAPL will likely start building condo buildings.
  - stephencanon 6y ago
    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.
    - modeless 6y ago
      True, I don't see a point to prefab unless it involves a lot more than the framing. But it seems totally possible to do prefab installation of most of the ventilation, plumbing, electrical, etc.
mjh2539 6y ago
Because housing never was, and never will be, a commodity...at least not for people who can afford it, which is most of us in the 1st world.
- Joker_vD 6y ago
  But there is also the 2nd world, you know? Say, here's an example from Czechia: [0]. Here is an example from (East) Germany: [1]. And from the USSR, too: [2], [3]. Not the prettiest, not the roomiest, but... cheap, somewhat cheap, and therefore, pretty abundant. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panel%C3%A1k https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panel%C3%A1k [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plattenbau https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plattenbau [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khrushchyovka https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khrushchyovka [3] https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9F%D0%B0%D0%BD%D0%B5%D0%BB%D1%8C%D0%BD%D0%BE%D0%B5_%D0%B4%D0%BE%D0%BC%D0%BE%D1%81%D1%82%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%B5%D0%BD%D0%B8%D0%B5 https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9F%D0%B0%D0%BD%D0%B5%D0%BB...
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
hun-nemethpeter 6y ago
I prefer the Fastbrick Robotics ( https://www.fbr.com.au/ https://www.fbr.com.au/ ) company's approach where they just creating building robots. Here is a short video on the robot in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HYsWbDA0xlc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HYsWbDA0xlc
- michaelt 6y ago
  It's neat, but where's the mortar between the bricks?
harryf 6y ago
Depends where you are. Prefab houses in Germany have become quite normal. This article for 2018 says 20% of new houses in Germany are prefabricated. Meanwhile the Swiss are developing robots that build houses... https://youtu.be/fxxcEw98Njo https://youtu.be/fxxcEw98Njo
caseysoftware 6y ago
Or in other terms: "Why haven't Content Management Systems made web development cheaper?"
- outside1234 6y ago
  Not sure that is the right question - because they have. Sites like nytimes.com etc. are essentially prefab websites where all of the work is on the system to automate the building and distribution articles - the articles themselves are not bespoke HTML / CSS.
  - earthboundkid 6y ago
    I see your point, but the NYT has a whole team ("interactives") whose job is to do bespoke HTML / CSS for articles that they want to make a bigger splash.
- solarmist 6y ago
  Close, but how about “Why didn’t CMS make web development cheaper in the 2000s?” I’d say we’re out of the prototype stages, but we’re still working out the kinks and business models with prefab construction. It’s just very early days for it actually being a business because anything physical evolves at least 10x slower than software.
pkaye 6y ago
I found this prefab house approach shown on This Old House feels much better. Still made of wood but made in modular pieces in the factory that can be quickly installed in the field. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jqXmNeT1uKs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jqXmNeT1uKs
- redfalcon6 6y ago
  I have one of these houses. Just built it and moved in. Save time and increase quality. Dried in with insulated walls / windows in 4 days! Price is still an issue. Part of the reason is that we pay no penalty for crappy energy hog homes. You can build with prefab panels and get airtight really quickly. So all the extra $$$ goes into better build and overhead for the factory.
  - throw0101a 6y ago
    > Part of the reason is that we pay no penalty for crappy energy hog homes. You pay higher heating and cooling costs over the lifetime of the building. It's just the penalty is a 'death of a thousand cuts' that may be less noticeable than a proverbial broadsword to the face of paying for some extra insulation and proper house wrap upfront. Just improving airtightness and mandating blower door tests in building codes would probably go a long way towards more efficient homes. Once you're more airtight you then of course have to ventilate right: HRV/ERV for refreshing of the air and stand alone dehumidification units.
recursivedoubts 6y ago
It once had, at least in the western united states. And people now pay a lot of money for those prefab houses: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sears_Modern_Homes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sears_Modern_Homes
- oh_sigh 6y ago
  Those are kit homes, not prefab homes.
  - recursivedoubts 6y ago
    The article is in the Wikipedia category "Prefabricated Homes" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Prefabricated_houses https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Prefabricated_houses This article, from a builder, indicates that Sears homes are considered prefabricated by some people in the industry: https://www.protohomes.com/blog/prefab-vs-modular-manufactured-systems-built/ https://www.protohomes.com/blog/prefab-vs-modular-manufactur... What is your differentiation between kit homes and prefabricated homes?
    - oh_sigh 6y ago
      I saw that wikipedia listed them as prefab, but I think it is incorrect. Kit home: Everything you need to build a house is in this box. Just add labor. Sort of like buying a lego kit that you know has all the pieces to build a Millenium Falcon out of. Pre-fab: Important/time-consuming elements are constructed off-site and transported in a (nearly) ready to assemble state to the site. Sort of like having the Lego factory assemble the 7 major parts of the Millenium Falcon, and sending those to you so you can just connect them to each other to have the final product. As I understand it, the Sears homes were kit homes by those definitions, not prefab. E.g. you would receive a bunch of 2x4s in a railroad car, not a ready-built wall you could just raise into place. Kit homes can also be pre-fab homes, but I don't think the terms are interchangeable and not all kit homes are pre-fab.
      - recursivedoubts 6y ago
falcolas 6y ago
This article seems to be missing some critical information - does this proposed system help with anything but the framing? Because framing a house, even a two story house, only takes an experienced crew a couple of days. And in the neighborhoods springing up around here, they are using pre-fab framed walls (still using wooden studs (which are cheap and plentiful), but they arrive on site as whole walls). Before framing, there's site prep, foundation pours (probably some early HVAC and plumbing as well), floor joists, and floor sheeting. After framing, there's sheeting (the outside), roofing, putting in windows/doors, waterproofing (can be avoided with some more expensive sheeting options), and siding (which includes caulking the edges of the siding, and around any wall penetration). Then there's insulating the outer walls, framing the interior walls, plumbing, electrical, HVAC, electrical, carpeting/flooring, drywall, trim, paint, landscaping... and probably a dozen other things I don't know about. Optimizing only the framing - something that's already been pretty well optimized - isn't going to change prices much. What's really needed is a way to be ship entire finished walls. (Seriously, look up some videos about "Larry Haun" and watch him and his brother frame an entire floor in under a day, using mostly hand tools).
- bluGill 6y ago
  Back when I did houses we figured it was 100 days to build a house. As you say framing was 3-4 days of that.
- dejv 6y ago
  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.
  - floatingatoll 6y ago
    From what company?
    - 6y ago
pfhorge 6y ago
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. The companies building these modules tend to sell mostly from their own catalog of floorplans and modules, so they don't have a strong incentive to hire skilled architects for the relatively small amount of custom work that comes in (I fell into this category). I'm led to believe that they hire draftsmen instead of architects. They built one of the modules a foot too long, so it hangs over the edge of the foundation. They also messed up the roof line, so some guttering and geometry had to be changed for the garage that was stick-built onsite. They did all of the drywall wraps around the windows incorrectly. Every single door was hung incorrectly, some with chunks taken out from bad routing. The vinyl plank flooring has bubbles because they didn't float it correctly. They omitted electrical features that were on their own drawings. They ordered a few wrong windows, so they charged me anyway and just laid them on the floor when they shipped the module. It'll all be fine at the end of the day, but the parts that were built onsite are all so much better. No cheaper, mind you, but faster and with much less drama. Maybe there are some parts of the industry that do a lot better, but I kind of wish I'd listened to my dad when he said "the pioneers take the arrows".
- potiuper 6y ago
  Why not sue for breach of contract / design?
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - LanceH 6y ago
    I imagine it's because he would be largely up against a company and litigators skilled at meeting the letter of the contract if not the spirit. "Winning" would likely see him get a minimum level of corrections done to the house, which could be accomplished for less than the cost of a lawsuit.
deltron3030 6y ago
Urbanization. It might change with a switch to mobile homes and neo-nomadic lifestyles, flexible villages driven by your friends and preferences list. Everybody thinks that megacities are the future, but maybe they're not.
Dork1234 6y ago
10 years ago I purchased a Maronda homes in a yet to be developed housing addition. I was able to watch a lot of homes be built using there construction method of pre-built walls/floors/roof lifted via crane. It does seem like a great idea, speeding up onsite building, and preventing the wood from being left in the elements. These benefits appear to come at a cost. a) The largest benefit seems to come when building a similar building each time, any changes make it hard for the crew to assemble. b) The site has to be cleared of trees and rather open to allow access of the crane. I have since moved to a hot housing market in New England, and see many lots leveled and replaced with new homes. All of them are stick built on site, and this doesn't appear to be an issue. The number of days for an experienced crew to stick build a house is short, and many of these homes are very custom. The site/house is normally optimized to get the largest sale value, not the easiest built. The other interesting this is it is generally impossible, or not cost effective to use a crane to lift parts on many of these lots. Even if having pre-built sections is a cost savings, it would be such a small difference it wouldn't be worth it with the possible risk of quality of the pre-built items and/or timing of construction. Home building is a complicated process and many companies seem to be providing solutions without looking at a total solution.
JoeAltmaier 6y ago
Used to be the lumber had to be cut from local trees on-site, and nails made by the blacksmith. Our current stick-built construction IS pre-fab by an older reckoning. I guess its a matter of how much is too far? Windows come as a unit. So do some doors. Certainly the appliances do. Nobody has to get a tinker in to make the toaster. Even so, sometimes there are hitches. I think we have to iron out the order-to-fit issues (wrong dimensions, wrong fuel, mismatch color or design) when done by rushed workpeople on a schedule. Fix that, and you could go much further without trepidation. For now, my house was stick-built from a drawing (not an architect) and mostly correctly. The issues came when changes were made on-the-fly, not from the initial planning.
- ryanmarsh 6y ago
  Exactly. Without changing buyer preferences we’re unlikely to see great leaps in optimization of the build process, because it’s already been done. Everything in a new American home is standardized. Building a production home today is like building a Rails / Bootstrap app. 90% of the work has been done for you, you just have to assemble the pieces to suit a narrow set of choices (before you get truly custom) and this serves the needs of most buyers at a price that (outside of places toxic to new buildings) is very acceptable. The availability of labor changes with the times. Prefab houses are like low/no-code solutions. They’re great for starting out and temporary problems, some far out last their design and that’s ok. The rest of the industry is about solving the changing tastes and needs of its customers with a standardized and VERY EASY to work with set of tools, and that’s ok too. Nobody except Bob Villa is hanging bespoke doors.
acomjean 6y ago
When I grew up (1970s) I had 2 friends had very very similar houses in a town outside boston. They were similar to my dentist too, who had his office attached to his house. They all lived miles apart. They were a 60's prefab house called a "deck" house. My dad ended up buying one later with a large addition once my parents split. They were pretty good, except the roofs which weren't great for snow (pitch) and lacked insulation. I helped replace one of those roofs and the lack of pitch made it easier to work on. (friends father was a civil engineer). Pretty well made, considering, and the open layouts were pretty great. prefab is around, just a niche. A check of google, "deck" company still exist as a branch of a larger prefab house company: https://www.deckhouse.com/brand/deck-house/ https://www.deckhouse.com/brand/deck-house/ photos of one: http://modernmass.com/concord-deck-house/ http://modernmass.com/concord-deck-house/
oneplane 6y ago
Sounds like an American problem with an American 'solution' (solve the wrong 'problem') and then everyone is surprised that nothing got better. Certain type of prefab help, i.e. things that would normally stall a project, or things that are generally the same. For example, a new house I just bought uses some prefab concrete plates where the amount of variation is limited. On-site, some minor changes were made and it sped up a lot of the foundation, walls and floors. Other elements, like entire frames with windows and doors etc. are 'prefab' as well when you think about it. We have had those for years, but it didn't always be modular like that. The real 'custom' stuff so far is the roof, which is a well-known pattern and construction method, but the final size and shape depends on the house. Same goes for details in your walls like where the doors and windows go. If you optimise 'too much' for some of the construction elements you stand to lose more than you gain (i.e. now you have to keep a larger stock of prefab stuff due to the amount of variations -- or people might end up with a choice biased towards something that is easy rather than what they actually want). It's also easy to think that a complete module could be prefab and the design re-used over and over, but that only makes sense if all houses are the same and all land is the same (Which is not the case). Then you end up with prefab stuff that doesn't fit and you have to either live in a crappy not-really-fitting-well house or do a lot of (more expensive) local changes at installation time. Having some re-usable modules is the way to go if you want to optimise; especially when you think about things that are similar in a lot of cases (be it by choice or by building laws). We're already doing a lot of that, and optimising it further (be it selection or scale) would probably gain you more: You can design with ready to use components where applicable, you can build with known-good components, methods and time scales where applicable and as the one buying the house you still get to make whatever choices you want without the risk of simply getting a 'badly modified prefab'.
caturopath 6y ago
Interesting question, useless article.
xster 6y ago
Depends where you are. The company that built pre-fab parts for the 10-day 1,000 bed hospital in China is building a Huoshenshan equivalent hospital in Korea too. 11% of global CO2 emissions are from construction. Using pre-fab steel modules are not only more recyclable but the building process emits about 50% less CO2 as well. Building in earthquake resistance is much easier than steel-reinforced concrete. So it's not just an optimization on on-site time. Unfortunately no translated captions in https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1mK411p7X4 https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1mK411p7X4 but the wall-to-wall robot in the factory gives you an idea of what the future looks like.
- v77 6y ago
  You should look up some of the new structural wood techniques being used.
  - xster 6y ago
    Don't leave me hanging man. Gimme some starting points.
irrational 6y ago
All of the pictures are of very modern houses. I'd be fine with that, but my wife wouldn't. She prefers more of the Victorian/Queen Anne style of architecture. I wonder if there is a way they could design this system so that the innards are all the same but then you can put different shells around the innards so the home could look modern, craftsman, victorian, etc. Sort of like how you could have 10 cakes that are identical on the inside, but dramatically different on the outside from the frosting. I've often compared HTML, CSS, JS to a house. HTML is the foundation, studs, joists, rafters, sheeting, subflooring, etc. JS is the wiring, plumbing, HVAC, etc. CSS is the paint, tiling, carpet, millwork, and other decorative elements. Maybe the prefab system can be the HTML and JS and then decorative elements can be layered on top to make it look like very different designs.
- heimatau 6y ago
  There is one company in the USA that is trying this but China and Germany seem to be leading in pre-fab.
- notahacker 6y ago
  The innards have to be different for styles from different eras unless you're really making only a token attempt at styling, because the proportions used in different eras were different. But in the UK at least you can buy traditional styled homes in kit form from a framing/panelling manufacturer https://www.potton.co.uk/our-show-homes https://www.potton.co.uk/our-show-homes
- person8645 6y ago
  Architect here. This gets much more difficult if you dive into the deeper problems that architecture attempts to address. Victorian/Queen Anne homes are based around smaller, more numerous, and more specific rooms. The exterior appearance flows from the way that people lived in that time, with the HVAC and construction materials and methods available to them. Ornate hand detailing on the high-quality surviving examples looks right because of the scale and use of the spaces within, as well as the market of hand carpenters. Applying a kit of modern materials to diverse spatial problems won't really yield good designs. There's a reason that modern architecture developed around the international style when concrete, steel, glass, and mechanical HVAC all developed and became cost effective at the same time as open-floor plan living and the decreasing number of household staff. All of these factors go hand in hand and a robust solution would have to touch on these deeper considerations. Not to say it's impossible, but trying to put out there that architectural design is more than skin deep. To use your analogy, you can use React to build what used to be a mid-90s static styled HTML site, but you probably wouldn't.
helipad 6y ago
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 got in the trucks and drove back to Germany. So I think the key takeaway of this article is that it's hard to drive from Germany to California.
- WrtCdEvrydy 6y ago
  I wonder if there is a business there... get US-based crews that are capable of being prefab builds. Buy your prefab, crew shows up.
  - jessaustin 6y ago
    A lot of carports and similar simple metal structures are built this way. My dad ordered a shelter for his pickup camper. He already had a concrete foundation where we'd torn down a different building. The crew showed up in two pickups pulling little trailers, and they were done in a few hours.
LatteLazy 6y ago
The articles intro seems weird to me: if you go out to tender for a job like building a house, why wouldn't the quotes that come back varry that much? I've gotten software vendor quotes with highest figure way more than 2x lowest figure. The same for quotes for a new boiler for my residence. Did no one tell the subject of the article this or is the founding story really just bs for people who've never gotten quotes for things!?
stonogo 6y ago
An article about prefab residential construction without mentioning Sears houses[1] has failed the literature-review stage of the background work. Flatly stated, prefab has always been about cost control, and people regard housing as an investment, and nobody is interested in "investing cheap." 1 - http://www.searsarchives.com/homes/1908-1914.htm http://www.searsarchives.com/homes/1908-1914.htm
carabiner 6y ago
> It can be built almost months faster than traditional construction "almost months" so, 7 weeks?
syedkarim 6y ago
My current house is a prefab, modular home. It was trailered up from Indiana. A crane put the pieces together in a day (two halves on the first floor and four dormers on the second floor). The cost of the crane was about $5000. The cost of the 1500 square-foot cape cod was about $130,000. The entire project was around $330,000, but the property was raw land in an unincorporated area, which means there are certain line items that really jack up the bottom line. We didn't save that much by going with a prefab home. We also didn't save much time, because we got stuck waiting for a sub-contractor and inspector during the finishing process. If I'm not saving money or time, well, what's the point? It's a decent-quality house; as good as anything built on site. But nothing special. One of the main reasons to go down the pre-fab path at this price range is because there are relatively few custom home builders who will bother with homes that don't cost at least $500,000. Their margins are about 20%, but regardless of the size of the house, they are completing only three or four a year. They need higher top line projects, otherwise the don't see much bottom line.
turtlebits 6y ago
In my limited experience, there is only so much you can prefab, and those parts are the easy ones, ie framing, wall panels. Unless you have a complex wall assembly, it’s probably not worth it.
usrusr 6y ago
Location location location. When a large fraction of total cost is for the plot, major savings in the construction process aren't very appealing. Particularly when it's on a mortgage and the numbers are an order of magnitude beyond all other purchases with our without the construction compromise.
Ericson2314 6y ago
Honestly I wish construction was less efficient, if only to guide us back to proper land use and dense developments. Factory-churned suburbia is the last thing we need.
clairity 6y ago
the title is grossly inaccurate. this is an advertorial for the bone structure company's pre-cut metal framing system, not about why prefab hasn't taken over. it's central reasoning that prefab is advantageous because there's not enough construction labor is also misleading. in most places, construction labor much prefers bigger jobs and repeat clients, rather than the harder to deal with idiosyncratic, one-off homebuilder, leaving them with a perception of shortage (even the beginning anecdote mentions getting multiple bids on a project, which wouldn't happen amidst a shortage). bone structure pre-cuts the steel framing for each project because it's not nearly as easy to deal with on-site as wood framing. it's also not cheaper, because wood framing is relatively available everywhere, flexible, reconfigurable on the fly, and easy to manipulate, unlike steel framing. and as others have noted, framing is a small fraction of home construction, and these walls must be put together on site, so it's an overreach to even consider this prefab. it's just pre-cut. that said, it'd be great to see more prefab systems, even just embellished boxes, to accelerate housing construction in tight markets, and ones like LA where homelessness is an already widespread and growing problem.
Mvandenbergh 6y ago
So the question: Why hasn't prefab construction taken over? Answer: It has, just not all the way. Modern American construction makes extensive use of prefabricated roof trusses, for large developments it is common to see parts of the framing prefabbed. The drywall interior fixing systems are designed to substantially reduce the amount of on-site work required. Modern plumbing fixtures can often be snapped together or joined with glues/expoxies rather than needing to be soldered. Domestic electrical can come as pre-wired conduit and you better believe that large developments are selecting those sizes carefully to reduce on-site work. Windows and doors arrive as single units which just need to be fitted, again a lot of attention is paid to ease of fitting since they are selling to series building professionals for whom labour time is money. Kitchen cabinetry is supplied fully prefabbed. Modern flooring is also based on easy-to-assemble systems. Compare the effort required to put in laminate vs old-school parquet, hardwood boards, or marble. Of course if you just put a whole ground floor together in a few modules in a factory, you will save even more labour time. The question is whether the greater transport costs and reduction in flexibility* will make it worth it in the end. (*) If your factory isn't mass producing the same product over and over, you're going to lose a lot of the productivity gains from factory production.
moltar 6y ago
I’ve been to two Bone Structure presentations. And visited two build project sites. This technology is indeed cutting edge and promising. I do dream of owning a BS home one day. It’s an engineering marvel. But the reason it hasn’t taken over is simply because it’s still more expensive than traditional builds. At least in Canada where wood is cheap and buildings don’t need such high earthquake protections. Cool time lapse of a build: https://youtu.be/vOC_V76v9j0 https://youtu.be/vOC_V76v9j0
ClumsyPilot 6y ago
"There was no standard building approach, and the ultimate cost to build his house would depend primarily on however his builder chose to embark on the project. " This sounds exactly like software development
- georgeoliver 6y ago
  Anyone who has built a house off an architect's "plans" would probably feel right at home following a software design spec I'm sure.
protomyth 6y ago
Well, so far? Not enough cost savings and lack ability to buy it in a reasonable manner. If you are a pre-fab shop, target some of the more rural reservations in the US. The housing situation generally sucks.
Animats 6y ago
It has, but not for residential.[1] Much of rural America is built from Butler prefab metal buildings. The classic ones are boring but useful. They have some new products which look like kits for building strip malls. [1] https://www.butlermfg.com/building-gallery/ https://www.butlermfg.com/building-gallery/
poulsbohemian 6y ago
Real estate agent here... in my market there are a number of mid-century homes that have the very square look of a manufactured home. Even looking vaguely like a manufactured home is enough to keep people away from them. My own observations are that newer pre-fab / manufactured can be very well built. We have a lot of people coming here looking for rural retreats - truth is, if you are way off the grid, a manufactured home may be a very good option for you as it may be difficult to convince a builder to work on your custom build project if it's going to be a long commute for them. So what I'm saying is - there's a mental block for people in accepting these houses that has noting to do with reality and everything to do with perception.
- Townley 6y ago
  If you don’t mind sharing (I imagine it only increases business) what market is this that has plentiful, cookie cutter houses being declined? As someone in a big city, daydreaming about picking the family up to a bigger living arrangement, hearing that there are perfectly-serviceable houses being ignored sounds like a great opportunity
  - poulsbohemian 6y ago
    Hello Townley - I sell in Washington state, but plan to be licensed in Oregon before the start of 2021... looking at your profile, it looks like you have been primarily centered in large cities... you might be surprised at the cost of homes and quality of life in small town, rural America. Where I live is a ~35 minute flight to Seattle, has several hospitals, everything within a fifteen minute drive, four mild seasons, and an average house price of $300K. It's also wine country. Main thing our market lacks is people with capital willing to update and reinvest in older homes and/or build out non-cookie cutter new homes. Depending on what you are looking for in life, I suspect there are lots of places in the world that could work for you.
deleted 6y ago
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noisy_boy 6y ago
Meanwhile Singapore will be building world's tallest prefab skyscraper: https://edition.cnn.com/style/article/singapore-worlds-tallest-prefab-skyscraper-intl-hnk/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/style/article/singapore-worlds-talle...
briancp 6y ago
Background: structural engineer, have worked with prefab construction in various capacities The short answer to this question is "because we haven't figured out how to make it less expensive than regular site built construction". The longer answer: prefab, or modular, construction has made inroads in various construction niches. Parking garages are nearly all prefabricated concrete for instance. Light framed buildings (either wood or cold formed steel) frequently have their structure panelized off site. Hotels (especially in places where the cold weather means a short construction season) are sometimes built using prefab modules. It's also super common to have prefabricated lower-level components - wood trusses, bar joists, hollowcore panels, etc. But any higher degree of prefabrication tends to be more expensive than conventional, not less. They mostly get used when their perceived benefits outweigh their costs. (If you look at a panelizer like Entekra's benefits page, they don't list "cheaper" anywhere). Two major exceptions to this are parking garages and HUD homes, which (among other reasons) are heavily optimized for a particular form factor. Regarding Bone Structure, it's an interesting system, and I love seeing people tackle this problem space. But I rate the chances of a custom fabricated steel structure ever being less expensive than conventional wood framing as "very near zero". This seems limited to the high end custom home market, and their marketing material seems to indicate that as well.
- jaclaz 6y ago
  Only to somehow confirm anecdotally what you said but in another area of constructions. I have been working in and around the construction industry for the last 35+ years in Italy and in the '90's the firm I was working for had a department for pre-fabricated (concrete) buildings (more like condos or office buildings than "single" homes), which was led by an engineer that was - really - a technical genius and - besides him - we did have exceptionally good staff, both the technicians and the workers. In the arc of more than ten years we tried everything and the contrary of it and after several , generally successful or mostly successful, built projects (with only a few minor issues in a few of them) we came to these conclusions: 1)you can make cheaper pre-fabricated buildings only if the level of finiture and overall result is cheaper or feels cheaper or looks cheaper 2) you can make pre-fabricated buildings that are as beautiful, functional and what not as "built-on-site" but that will cost the same (or more) as the corresponding built-on-site ones 3) the one and only difference was time, with pre-fab buildings we could build in 6-8 months time buildings that would have otherwise taken 18 months or more (this worked very well for rebuilding after an earthquake) In the years since I was involved in several more similar to the US timber based projects for single homes or anyway one/two storeys structures, and "components" (like pre-fabricated bathrooms "cells" for industrial buildings and hotels) and my experience did not change the overall opinion much. For anything that is "modular" or very, very "standard" (i.e. homes from catalog) there may be some space for fair competition (slightly lower cost for same or similar "quality" of end results), but when you start to include in it: 1) the local building codes (and possible needed deviations from the "standard") 2) the customers' changes/preferences 3) the architects/designers (with all due respect for the category) "whims" It invariably ends up costing the same or more (money) and almost the same (time).
presentation 6y ago
I live in Japan, prefab homes here are extremely common [1] - there's an Asahi Kasei prefab 3-story apartment building going up next door to where I live, and from the old house's demolition to the new building's completion, the notification I received in the mail says it'll be about 6 months from start to finish. [1] https://www.curbed.com/2017/10/25/16534122/prefab-homes-manufacturing-japan-vs-us https://www.curbed.com/2017/10/25/16534122/prefab-homes-manu...
- ardy42 6y ago
  > I live in Japan, prefab homes here are extremely common [1] Could that have anything to do with how the Japanese dislike "old" homes, and tend to demolish an existing home when buying a lot in order to build a new one for the new owner?
  - presentation 6y ago
    I'd expect that's a big part of it! The particular article I linked to points out that (creating the need for a lot more houses to get built). Also there's a shortage of skilled craftsmen in part due to the aging population, coupled with a mature robotics industry. Other costs like permitting is way way cheaper and quicker in Japan than the USA (like other posters have mentioned, building in a city like SF can take decades and millions just to get past that hurdle, and people can stop your project by saying that they don't like how it looks - which is an invalid complaint here), so the overall cost of building a home shifts toward the actual cost of the home and land, not legal fees.
jojobas 6y ago
Prefab construction dominates certain areas where many identical concrete houses are built in big series (i.e. cheap Soviet and Russian development projects). There's not much benefit in doing custom wood framing in a factory, a nailgun is a nailgun.
lucioperca 6y ago
But what about the grey energy of these buildings? This claim of zero net energy homes seems dubious when one does not factor in the embedded energy of the building with all this metal. You can go a long way of heating your wooden house till this building will break even in terms of total energy consumed including building materials and shipping.

180 points by jseliger 6y ago

OldHand2018 6y ago

As the article points out, the cost of the house is the same as the cost of a traditionally built house in the most expensive home construction area of the United States, and at the same time you are extremely limited in the geometries you can use. Does that answer the question?

ThenAsNow 6y ago
While this is fine as the high-level answer, the interesting question seems to be why the as-installed cost would be the same as typical wasteful North American "stick building"? I've spent some time thinking about better ways to build houses, spoken with like-minded architects, etc., and haven't gotten to the bottom of this question. Intuitively, it seems like there should be quite a bit of room to decrease costs by using engineered, pre-fabricated/panelized construction. There should be less waste, less manual labor, and less re-work. Yet the best case seems to be approximately the same costs, though I would expect at improved quality or improved first-time quality. Another system for engineered building, though based on wood, is Blueprint Robotics: http://www.blueprint-robotics.com/ http://www.blueprint-robotics.com/ I actually started my personal line of inquiry favoring steel construction as well, though some research convinced me that using a home as a carbon sink through wood construction from sustainably-managed forests made significant sense. For something like an airtight, well-insulated (Net Zero or better) home using wood-based sheathing, the coefficient of thermal expansion compatibility with wood structure also makes sense. That being said, it appears the Bone structure folks have their own solutions to prevent thermal shorts between the exterior and the steel structure, as they have apparently used their system for Net Zero and Passivhaus construction.
- athenot 6y ago
  Have you looked into log homes? That may fit your criteria: lot of wood needed (so great carbon sink), good insulation, simple design (1 wall for support, vapor barrier, insulation , siding and inside panelling).
  - ThenAsNow 6y ago
    I honestly have not, but the aesthetics of log homes don't really appeal to me. I hadn't thought of the potential performance benefits though.
  - bluGill 6y ago
    logs are poor insulation. The definition of R1 is a 1 inch board. normal 4 inch walls are r13, the log is 4.
    - postalrat 6y ago
      4 inches is a stick, not a log.
      - bluGill 6y ago
        Still, a 12 inch log is R12...
- bluGill 6y ago
  standard stick built has a lot of things already factory done. most lumber is a standard length/width, and the entire print is built around those sizes. 2x4s come factory cut to 92 5/8 long, which (after adding the other lumber needed for a wall) leaves a finished 8 foot wall ready for 2, 4 foot wide sheets of drywall. What labor is done on site in a typical stick built construction project is mostly the same manual labor that needs to be done in a factory. Which isn't surprising: construction sites are just mobile factories for buildings. When you have to make something with lot of empty space is makes sense to ship the factory to the final location. Shipping is a factor too: a stick built house arrives on one flatbed truck. A similar prefab house needs 3, and special permits to get it down the road (which includes checking for lower hanging power lines).
  - ThenAsNow 6y ago
    I believe the premise of many of these panelization/pre-fab companies is that manual labor is minimized within the factory through automation and also reduced on-site. There is also the waste reduction aspect. Definitely does seem that the devil is in the details on how much automation actually gets used, and to what degree the panels are finished vs. needing on-site tradeswork. Maybe in engineered production it is not far from a wash between less spent on on-site labor and waste vs. more spent on up-front engineering. Like we often see with automation and rigor, I suppose the up-front costs really only get amortized over multiple units produced. The Blueprint Robotics company I mentioned as an example apparently now focuses on multi-unit dwellings. Quality and repeatability, usually things that (IMO, sadly) are not highly valued in the North American market, are almost certainly improved through engineered production, but I suppose if you don't value those things, you can also keep labor costs down. Anyway, it would be nice to see some typical and aggregate quantification of these things to really understand.
- markvdb 6y ago
  You might want to have a look at straw panel construction. There's several across the EU. https://ecococon.eu/ https://ecococon.eu/ is the major one. Not affiliated with them. I built the walls of our summer house out of jumbo straw bales straight from the farm.

FullyFunctional 6y ago

I really like the concept and would take that any day over the California homes built with toothpicks and cart board by a random crew (I'm sitting on one right now and there aren't two straight lines). The bone system even looks like something I might be able to put together myself (besides stuff like foundation, pluming, and electrical).

bluGill 6y ago
I know it is in to make fun of "toothpick and card board" construction, but modern engineering has found them very strong when used correctly. What you intuitively think is better often isn't.
- lotsofpulp 6y ago
  I assume anyone making fun of 2x4 and drywall construction has no experience in construction or land development. The complaints all have to do with cheap materials, and/or shoddy construction if walls aren't straight. But done right with good insulation and quality materials, I would take it over any other type. It's nice and easy to modify and repair also. Unfortunately most of the money people use to buy goes into the price of the land, leaving little extra for a quality build.
  - xyzzyz 6y ago
    The complaints all have to do with cheap materials, and/or shoddy construction if walls aren't straight. That's right. The parent was complaining about homes built from sticks and cardboard, and indeed, one can actually use foil-faced cardboard for sheathing the shear walls (one product name is ThermoPly, there are others). You attach these to walls you build 24" O, slap 3/8" drywall inside, put vinyl siding, make absolutely no effort whatsoever to air-seal anything, save on gluing subfloor to joists (nobody will mind the squeaking), and the list can go on and on. House built like that will be utter garbage, will be expensive and uncomfortable to live in, and if it doesn't collapse due to water-damage induced rot, it's only because of high robustness of wood-frame construction. However, you don't have to build this way! You can build a solid, sturdy, well-insulated, well-ventilated, soundproof, rigid and long-lasting house using wood-frame construction. It will just cost more. The great thing about wood-frame construction is that you can actually make these kind of decisions, and you can pick and choose parts which you care about, and the ones the quality of which you can give up on. Moreover, it's pretty easy to upgrade things later on, easy to fix if something breaks, and easy to build additions to. I grew up in a country where lumber was too expensive to use it for construction, so everything was made from concrete (typically using CMUs). I used to think that this is a way to go, but over time I really became converted to American-style wood frame construction.

jeffbee 6y ago

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 months in site prep, and they've been detailing and finishing the building for more than a year since the press release, so it doesn't seem like the method of construction was a very important factor.

modeless 6y ago
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.
- xnx 6y ago
  This. I want homes as well designed, engineered and built as iPhones, or at least automobiles.
  - yazaddaruvala 6y ago
    FWIW, I have a hunch that in 10 years TSLA will start building homes and AAPL will likely start building condo buildings.
- stephencanon 6y ago
  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.
  - modeless 6y ago
    True, I don't see a point to prefab unless it involves a lot more than the framing. But it seems totally possible to do prefab installation of most of the ventilation, plumbing, electrical, etc.

mjh2539 6y ago

Because housing never was, and never will be, a commodity...at least not for people who can afford it, which is most of us in the 1st world.

Joker_vD 6y ago
But there is also the 2nd world, you know? Say, here's an example from Czechia: [0]. Here is an example from (East) Germany: [1]. And from the USSR, too: [2], [3]. Not the prettiest, not the roomiest, but... cheap, somewhat cheap, and therefore, pretty abundant. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panel%C3%A1k https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panel%C3%A1k [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plattenbau https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plattenbau [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khrushchyovka https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khrushchyovka [3] https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9F%D0%B0%D0%BD%D0%B5%D0%BB%D1%8C%D0%BD%D0%BE%D0%B5_%D0%B4%D0%BE%D0%BC%D0%BE%D1%81%D1%82%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%B5%D0%BD%D0%B8%D0%B5 https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9F%D0%B0%D0%BD%D0%B5%D0%BB...
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

hun-nemethpeter 6y ago

I prefer the Fastbrick Robotics ( https://www.fbr.com.au/ https://www.fbr.com.au/ ) company's approach where they just creating building robots. Here is a short video on the robot in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HYsWbDA0xlc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HYsWbDA0xlc

michaelt 6y ago
It's neat, but where's the mortar between the bricks?

harryf 6y ago

Depends where you are. Prefab houses in Germany have become quite normal. This article for 2018 says 20% of new houses in Germany are prefabricated. Meanwhile the Swiss are developing robots that build houses... https://youtu.be/fxxcEw98Njo https://youtu.be/fxxcEw98Njo

caseysoftware 6y ago

Or in other terms: "Why haven't Content Management Systems made web development cheaper?"

outside1234 6y ago
Not sure that is the right question - because they have. Sites like nytimes.com etc. are essentially prefab websites where all of the work is on the system to automate the building and distribution articles - the articles themselves are not bespoke HTML / CSS.
- earthboundkid 6y ago
  I see your point, but the NYT has a whole team ("interactives") whose job is to do bespoke HTML / CSS for articles that they want to make a bigger splash.
solarmist 6y ago
Close, but how about “Why didn’t CMS make web development cheaper in the 2000s?” I’d say we’re out of the prototype stages, but we’re still working out the kinks and business models with prefab construction. It’s just very early days for it actually being a business because anything physical evolves at least 10x slower than software.

pkaye 6y ago

I found this prefab house approach shown on This Old House feels much better. Still made of wood but made in modular pieces in the factory that can be quickly installed in the field. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jqXmNeT1uKs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jqXmNeT1uKs

redfalcon6 6y ago
I have one of these houses. Just built it and moved in. Save time and increase quality. Dried in with insulated walls / windows in 4 days! Price is still an issue. Part of the reason is that we pay no penalty for crappy energy hog homes. You can build with prefab panels and get airtight really quickly. So all the extra $$$ goes into better build and overhead for the factory.
- throw0101a 6y ago
  > Part of the reason is that we pay no penalty for crappy energy hog homes. You pay higher heating and cooling costs over the lifetime of the building. It's just the penalty is a 'death of a thousand cuts' that may be less noticeable than a proverbial broadsword to the face of paying for some extra insulation and proper house wrap upfront. Just improving airtightness and mandating blower door tests in building codes would probably go a long way towards more efficient homes. Once you're more airtight you then of course have to ventilate right: HRV/ERV for refreshing of the air and stand alone dehumidification units.

recursivedoubts 6y ago

It once had, at least in the western united states. And people now pay a lot of money for those prefab houses: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sears_Modern_Homes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sears_Modern_Homes

oh_sigh 6y ago
Those are kit homes, not prefab homes.
- recursivedoubts 6y ago
  The article is in the Wikipedia category "Prefabricated Homes" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Prefabricated_houses https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Prefabricated_houses This article, from a builder, indicates that Sears homes are considered prefabricated by some people in the industry: https://www.protohomes.com/blog/prefab-vs-modular-manufactured-systems-built/ https://www.protohomes.com/blog/prefab-vs-modular-manufactur... What is your differentiation between kit homes and prefabricated homes?
  - oh_sigh 6y ago
    I saw that wikipedia listed them as prefab, but I think it is incorrect. Kit home: Everything you need to build a house is in this box. Just add labor. Sort of like buying a lego kit that you know has all the pieces to build a Millenium Falcon out of. Pre-fab: Important/time-consuming elements are constructed off-site and transported in a (nearly) ready to assemble state to the site. Sort of like having the Lego factory assemble the 7 major parts of the Millenium Falcon, and sending those to you so you can just connect them to each other to have the final product. As I understand it, the Sears homes were kit homes by those definitions, not prefab. E.g. you would receive a bunch of 2x4s in a railroad car, not a ready-built wall you could just raise into place. Kit homes can also be pre-fab homes, but I don't think the terms are interchangeable and not all kit homes are pre-fab.
    - recursivedoubts 6y ago

falcolas 6y ago

This article seems to be missing some critical information - does this proposed system help with anything but the framing? Because framing a house, even a two story house, only takes an experienced crew a couple of days. And in the neighborhoods springing up around here, they are using pre-fab framed walls (still using wooden studs (which are cheap and plentiful), but they arrive on site as whole walls). Before framing, there's site prep, foundation pours (probably some early HVAC and plumbing as well), floor joists, and floor sheeting. After framing, there's sheeting (the outside), roofing, putting in windows/doors, waterproofing (can be avoided with some more expensive sheeting options), and siding (which includes caulking the edges of the siding, and around any wall penetration). Then there's insulating the outer walls, framing the interior walls, plumbing, electrical, HVAC, electrical, carpeting/flooring, drywall, trim, paint, landscaping... and probably a dozen other things I don't know about. Optimizing only the framing - something that's already been pretty well optimized - isn't going to change prices much. What's really needed is a way to be ship entire finished walls. (Seriously, look up some videos about "Larry Haun" and watch him and his brother frame an entire floor in under a day, using mostly hand tools).

bluGill 6y ago
Back when I did houses we figured it was 100 days to build a house. As you say framing was 3-4 days of that.
dejv 6y ago
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.
- floatingatoll 6y ago
  From what company?
  - 6y ago

pfhorge 6y ago

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. The companies building these modules tend to sell mostly from their own catalog of floorplans and modules, so they don't have a strong incentive to hire skilled architects for the relatively small amount of custom work that comes in (I fell into this category). I'm led to believe that they hire draftsmen instead of architects. They built one of the modules a foot too long, so it hangs over the edge of the foundation. They also messed up the roof line, so some guttering and geometry had to be changed for the garage that was stick-built onsite. They did all of the drywall wraps around the windows incorrectly. Every single door was hung incorrectly, some with chunks taken out from bad routing. The vinyl plank flooring has bubbles because they didn't float it correctly. They omitted electrical features that were on their own drawings. They ordered a few wrong windows, so they charged me anyway and just laid them on the floor when they shipped the module. It'll all be fine at the end of the day, but the parts that were built onsite are all so much better. No cheaper, mind you, but faster and with much less drama. Maybe there are some parts of the industry that do a lot better, but I kind of wish I'd listened to my dad when he said "the pioneers take the arrows".

potiuper 6y ago
Why not sue for breach of contract / design?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- LanceH 6y ago
  I imagine it's because he would be largely up against a company and litigators skilled at meeting the letter of the contract if not the spirit. "Winning" would likely see him get a minimum level of corrections done to the house, which could be accomplished for less than the cost of a lawsuit.

deltron3030 6y ago

Urbanization. It might change with a switch to mobile homes and neo-nomadic lifestyles, flexible villages driven by your friends and preferences list. Everybody thinks that megacities are the future, but maybe they're not.

Dork1234 6y ago

10 years ago I purchased a Maronda homes in a yet to be developed housing addition. I was able to watch a lot of homes be built using there construction method of pre-built walls/floors/roof lifted via crane. It does seem like a great idea, speeding up onsite building, and preventing the wood from being left in the elements. These benefits appear to come at a cost. a) The largest benefit seems to come when building a similar building each time, any changes make it hard for the crew to assemble. b) The site has to be cleared of trees and rather open to allow access of the crane. I have since moved to a hot housing market in New England, and see many lots leveled and replaced with new homes. All of them are stick built on site, and this doesn't appear to be an issue. The number of days for an experienced crew to stick build a house is short, and many of these homes are very custom. The site/house is normally optimized to get the largest sale value, not the easiest built. The other interesting this is it is generally impossible, or not cost effective to use a crane to lift parts on many of these lots. Even if having pre-built sections is a cost savings, it would be such a small difference it wouldn't be worth it with the possible risk of quality of the pre-built items and/or timing of construction. Home building is a complicated process and many companies seem to be providing solutions without looking at a total solution.

JoeAltmaier 6y ago

Used to be the lumber had to be cut from local trees on-site, and nails made by the blacksmith. Our current stick-built construction IS pre-fab by an older reckoning. I guess its a matter of how much is too far? Windows come as a unit. So do some doors. Certainly the appliances do. Nobody has to get a tinker in to make the toaster. Even so, sometimes there are hitches. I think we have to iron out the order-to-fit issues (wrong dimensions, wrong fuel, mismatch color or design) when done by rushed workpeople on a schedule. Fix that, and you could go much further without trepidation. For now, my house was stick-built from a drawing (not an architect) and mostly correctly. The issues came when changes were made on-the-fly, not from the initial planning.

ryanmarsh 6y ago
Exactly. Without changing buyer preferences we’re unlikely to see great leaps in optimization of the build process, because it’s already been done. Everything in a new American home is standardized. Building a production home today is like building a Rails / Bootstrap app. 90% of the work has been done for you, you just have to assemble the pieces to suit a narrow set of choices (before you get truly custom) and this serves the needs of most buyers at a price that (outside of places toxic to new buildings) is very acceptable. The availability of labor changes with the times. Prefab houses are like low/no-code solutions. They’re great for starting out and temporary problems, some far out last their design and that’s ok. The rest of the industry is about solving the changing tastes and needs of its customers with a standardized and VERY EASY to work with set of tools, and that’s ok too. Nobody except Bob Villa is hanging bespoke doors.

acomjean 6y ago

When I grew up (1970s) I had 2 friends had very very similar houses in a town outside boston. They were similar to my dentist too, who had his office attached to his house. They all lived miles apart. They were a 60's prefab house called a "deck" house. My dad ended up buying one later with a large addition once my parents split. They were pretty good, except the roofs which weren't great for snow (pitch) and lacked insulation. I helped replace one of those roofs and the lack of pitch made it easier to work on. (friends father was a civil engineer). Pretty well made, considering, and the open layouts were pretty great. prefab is around, just a niche. A check of google, "deck" company still exist as a branch of a larger prefab house company: https://www.deckhouse.com/brand/deck-house/ https://www.deckhouse.com/brand/deck-house/ photos of one: http://modernmass.com/concord-deck-house/ http://modernmass.com/concord-deck-house/

oneplane 6y ago

Sounds like an American problem with an American 'solution' (solve the wrong 'problem') and then everyone is surprised that nothing got better. Certain type of prefab help, i.e. things that would normally stall a project, or things that are generally the same. For example, a new house I just bought uses some prefab concrete plates where the amount of variation is limited. On-site, some minor changes were made and it sped up a lot of the foundation, walls and floors. Other elements, like entire frames with windows and doors etc. are 'prefab' as well when you think about it. We have had those for years, but it didn't always be modular like that. The real 'custom' stuff so far is the roof, which is a well-known pattern and construction method, but the final size and shape depends on the house. Same goes for details in your walls like where the doors and windows go. If you optimise 'too much' for some of the construction elements you stand to lose more than you gain (i.e. now you have to keep a larger stock of prefab stuff due to the amount of variations -- or people might end up with a choice biased towards something that is easy rather than what they actually want). It's also easy to think that a complete module could be prefab and the design re-used over and over, but that only makes sense if all houses are the same and all land is the same (Which is not the case). Then you end up with prefab stuff that doesn't fit and you have to either live in a crappy not-really-fitting-well house or do a lot of (more expensive) local changes at installation time. Having some re-usable modules is the way to go if you want to optimise; especially when you think about things that are similar in a lot of cases (be it by choice or by building laws). We're already doing a lot of that, and optimising it further (be it selection or scale) would probably gain you more: You can design with ready to use components where applicable, you can build with known-good components, methods and time scales where applicable and as the one buying the house you still get to make whatever choices you want without the risk of simply getting a 'badly modified prefab'.

caturopath 6y ago

Interesting question, useless article.

xster 6y ago

Depends where you are. The company that built pre-fab parts for the 10-day 1,000 bed hospital in China is building a Huoshenshan equivalent hospital in Korea too. 11% of global CO2 emissions are from construction. Using pre-fab steel modules are not only more recyclable but the building process emits about 50% less CO2 as well. Building in earthquake resistance is much easier than steel-reinforced concrete. So it's not just an optimization on on-site time. Unfortunately no translated captions in https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1mK411p7X4 https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1mK411p7X4 but the wall-to-wall robot in the factory gives you an idea of what the future looks like.

v77 6y ago
You should look up some of the new structural wood techniques being used.
- xster 6y ago
  Don't leave me hanging man. Gimme some starting points.

irrational 6y ago

All of the pictures are of very modern houses. I'd be fine with that, but my wife wouldn't. She prefers more of the Victorian/Queen Anne style of architecture. I wonder if there is a way they could design this system so that the innards are all the same but then you can put different shells around the innards so the home could look modern, craftsman, victorian, etc. Sort of like how you could have 10 cakes that are identical on the inside, but dramatically different on the outside from the frosting. I've often compared HTML, CSS, JS to a house. HTML is the foundation, studs, joists, rafters, sheeting, subflooring, etc. JS is the wiring, plumbing, HVAC, etc. CSS is the paint, tiling, carpet, millwork, and other decorative elements. Maybe the prefab system can be the HTML and JS and then decorative elements can be layered on top to make it look like very different designs.

heimatau 6y ago
There is one company in the USA that is trying this but China and Germany seem to be leading in pre-fab.
notahacker 6y ago
The innards have to be different for styles from different eras unless you're really making only a token attempt at styling, because the proportions used in different eras were different. But in the UK at least you can buy traditional styled homes in kit form from a framing/panelling manufacturer https://www.potton.co.uk/our-show-homes https://www.potton.co.uk/our-show-homes
person8645 6y ago
Architect here. This gets much more difficult if you dive into the deeper problems that architecture attempts to address. Victorian/Queen Anne homes are based around smaller, more numerous, and more specific rooms. The exterior appearance flows from the way that people lived in that time, with the HVAC and construction materials and methods available to them. Ornate hand detailing on the high-quality surviving examples looks right because of the scale and use of the spaces within, as well as the market of hand carpenters. Applying a kit of modern materials to diverse spatial problems won't really yield good designs. There's a reason that modern architecture developed around the international style when concrete, steel, glass, and mechanical HVAC all developed and became cost effective at the same time as open-floor plan living and the decreasing number of household staff. All of these factors go hand in hand and a robust solution would have to touch on these deeper considerations. Not to say it's impossible, but trying to put out there that architectural design is more than skin deep. To use your analogy, you can use React to build what used to be a mid-90s static styled HTML site, but you probably wouldn't.

helipad 6y ago

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 got in the trucks and drove back to Germany. So I think the key takeaway of this article is that it's hard to drive from Germany to California.

WrtCdEvrydy 6y ago
I wonder if there is a business there... get US-based crews that are capable of being prefab builds. Buy your prefab, crew shows up.
- jessaustin 6y ago
  A lot of carports and similar simple metal structures are built this way. My dad ordered a shelter for his pickup camper. He already had a concrete foundation where we'd torn down a different building. The crew showed up in two pickups pulling little trailers, and they were done in a few hours.

LatteLazy 6y ago

The articles intro seems weird to me: if you go out to tender for a job like building a house, why wouldn't the quotes that come back varry that much? I've gotten software vendor quotes with highest figure way more than 2x lowest figure. The same for quotes for a new boiler for my residence. Did no one tell the subject of the article this or is the founding story really just bs for people who've never gotten quotes for things!?

stonogo 6y ago

An article about prefab residential construction without mentioning Sears houses[1] has failed the literature-review stage of the background work. Flatly stated, prefab has always been about cost control, and people regard housing as an investment, and nobody is interested in "investing cheap." 1 - http://www.searsarchives.com/homes/1908-1914.htm http://www.searsarchives.com/homes/1908-1914.htm

carabiner 6y ago

> It can be built almost months faster than traditional construction "almost months" so, 7 weeks?

syedkarim 6y ago

My current house is a prefab, modular home. It was trailered up from Indiana. A crane put the pieces together in a day (two halves on the first floor and four dormers on the second floor). The cost of the crane was about $5000. The cost of the 1500 square-foot cape cod was about $130,000. The entire project was around $330,000, but the property was raw land in an unincorporated area, which means there are certain line items that really jack up the bottom line. We didn't save that much by going with a prefab home. We also didn't save much time, because we got stuck waiting for a sub-contractor and inspector during the finishing process. If I'm not saving money or time, well, what's the point? It's a decent-quality house; as good as anything built on site. But nothing special. One of the main reasons to go down the pre-fab path at this price range is because there are relatively few custom home builders who will bother with homes that don't cost at least $500,000. Their margins are about 20%, but regardless of the size of the house, they are completing only three or four a year. They need higher top line projects, otherwise the don't see much bottom line.

turtlebits 6y ago

In my limited experience, there is only so much you can prefab, and those parts are the easy ones, ie framing, wall panels. Unless you have a complex wall assembly, it’s probably not worth it.

usrusr 6y ago

Location location location. When a large fraction of total cost is for the plot, major savings in the construction process aren't very appealing. Particularly when it's on a mortgage and the numbers are an order of magnitude beyond all other purchases with our without the construction compromise.

Ericson2314 6y ago

Honestly I wish construction was less efficient, if only to guide us back to proper land use and dense developments. Factory-churned suburbia is the last thing we need.

clairity 6y ago

the title is grossly inaccurate. this is an advertorial for the bone structure company's pre-cut metal framing system, not about why prefab hasn't taken over. it's central reasoning that prefab is advantageous because there's not enough construction labor is also misleading. in most places, construction labor much prefers bigger jobs and repeat clients, rather than the harder to deal with idiosyncratic, one-off homebuilder, leaving them with a perception of shortage (even the beginning anecdote mentions getting multiple bids on a project, which wouldn't happen amidst a shortage). bone structure pre-cuts the steel framing for each project because it's not nearly as easy to deal with on-site as wood framing. it's also not cheaper, because wood framing is relatively available everywhere, flexible, reconfigurable on the fly, and easy to manipulate, unlike steel framing. and as others have noted, framing is a small fraction of home construction, and these walls must be put together on site, so it's an overreach to even consider this prefab. it's just pre-cut. that said, it'd be great to see more prefab systems, even just embellished boxes, to accelerate housing construction in tight markets, and ones like LA where homelessness is an already widespread and growing problem.

Mvandenbergh 6y ago

So the question: Why hasn't prefab construction taken over? Answer: It has, just not all the way. Modern American construction makes extensive use of prefabricated roof trusses, for large developments it is common to see parts of the framing prefabbed. The drywall interior fixing systems are designed to substantially reduce the amount of on-site work required. Modern plumbing fixtures can often be snapped together or joined with glues/expoxies rather than needing to be soldered. Domestic electrical can come as pre-wired conduit and you better believe that large developments are selecting those sizes carefully to reduce on-site work. Windows and doors arrive as single units which just need to be fitted, again a lot of attention is paid to ease of fitting since they are selling to series building professionals for whom labour time is money. Kitchen cabinetry is supplied fully prefabbed. Modern flooring is also based on easy-to-assemble systems. Compare the effort required to put in laminate vs old-school parquet, hardwood boards, or marble. Of course if you just put a whole ground floor together in a few modules in a factory, you will save even more labour time. The question is whether the greater transport costs and reduction in flexibility* will make it worth it in the end. (*) If your factory isn't mass producing the same product over and over, you're going to lose a lot of the productivity gains from factory production.

moltar 6y ago

I’ve been to two Bone Structure presentations. And visited two build project sites. This technology is indeed cutting edge and promising. I do dream of owning a BS home one day. It’s an engineering marvel. But the reason it hasn’t taken over is simply because it’s still more expensive than traditional builds. At least in Canada where wood is cheap and buildings don’t need such high earthquake protections. Cool time lapse of a build: https://youtu.be/vOC_V76v9j0 https://youtu.be/vOC_V76v9j0

ClumsyPilot 6y ago

"There was no standard building approach, and the ultimate cost to build his house would depend primarily on however his builder chose to embark on the project. " This sounds exactly like software development

georgeoliver 6y ago
Anyone who has built a house off an architect's "plans" would probably feel right at home following a software design spec I'm sure.

protomyth 6y ago

Well, so far? Not enough cost savings and lack ability to buy it in a reasonable manner. If you are a pre-fab shop, target some of the more rural reservations in the US. The housing situation generally sucks.

Animats 6y ago

It has, but not for residential.[1] Much of rural America is built from Butler prefab metal buildings. The classic ones are boring but useful. They have some new products which look like kits for building strip malls. [1] https://www.butlermfg.com/building-gallery/ https://www.butlermfg.com/building-gallery/

poulsbohemian 6y ago

Real estate agent here... in my market there are a number of mid-century homes that have the very square look of a manufactured home. Even looking vaguely like a manufactured home is enough to keep people away from them. My own observations are that newer pre-fab / manufactured can be very well built. We have a lot of people coming here looking for rural retreats - truth is, if you are way off the grid, a manufactured home may be a very good option for you as it may be difficult to convince a builder to work on your custom build project if it's going to be a long commute for them. So what I'm saying is - there's a mental block for people in accepting these houses that has noting to do with reality and everything to do with perception.

Townley 6y ago
If you don’t mind sharing (I imagine it only increases business) what market is this that has plentiful, cookie cutter houses being declined? As someone in a big city, daydreaming about picking the family up to a bigger living arrangement, hearing that there are perfectly-serviceable houses being ignored sounds like a great opportunity
- poulsbohemian 6y ago
  Hello Townley - I sell in Washington state, but plan to be licensed in Oregon before the start of 2021... looking at your profile, it looks like you have been primarily centered in large cities... you might be surprised at the cost of homes and quality of life in small town, rural America. Where I live is a ~35 minute flight to Seattle, has several hospitals, everything within a fifteen minute drive, four mild seasons, and an average house price of $300K. It's also wine country. Main thing our market lacks is people with capital willing to update and reinvest in older homes and/or build out non-cookie cutter new homes. Depending on what you are looking for in life, I suspect there are lots of places in the world that could work for you.

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noisy_boy 6y ago

Meanwhile Singapore will be building world's tallest prefab skyscraper: https://edition.cnn.com/style/article/singapore-worlds-tallest-prefab-skyscraper-intl-hnk/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/style/article/singapore-worlds-talle...

briancp 6y ago

Background: structural engineer, have worked with prefab construction in various capacities The short answer to this question is "because we haven't figured out how to make it less expensive than regular site built construction". The longer answer: prefab, or modular, construction has made inroads in various construction niches. Parking garages are nearly all prefabricated concrete for instance. Light framed buildings (either wood or cold formed steel) frequently have their structure panelized off site. Hotels (especially in places where the cold weather means a short construction season) are sometimes built using prefab modules. It's also super common to have prefabricated lower-level components - wood trusses, bar joists, hollowcore panels, etc. But any higher degree of prefabrication tends to be more expensive than conventional, not less. They mostly get used when their perceived benefits outweigh their costs. (If you look at a panelizer like Entekra's benefits page, they don't list "cheaper" anywhere). Two major exceptions to this are parking garages and HUD homes, which (among other reasons) are heavily optimized for a particular form factor. Regarding Bone Structure, it's an interesting system, and I love seeing people tackle this problem space. But I rate the chances of a custom fabricated steel structure ever being less expensive than conventional wood framing as "very near zero". This seems limited to the high end custom home market, and their marketing material seems to indicate that as well.

jaclaz 6y ago
Only to somehow confirm anecdotally what you said but in another area of constructions. I have been working in and around the construction industry for the last 35+ years in Italy and in the '90's the firm I was working for had a department for pre-fabricated (concrete) buildings (more like condos or office buildings than "single" homes), which was led by an engineer that was - really - a technical genius and - besides him - we did have exceptionally good staff, both the technicians and the workers. In the arc of more than ten years we tried everything and the contrary of it and after several , generally successful or mostly successful, built projects (with only a few minor issues in a few of them) we came to these conclusions: 1)you can make cheaper pre-fabricated buildings only if the level of finiture and overall result is cheaper or feels cheaper or looks cheaper 2) you can make pre-fabricated buildings that are as beautiful, functional and what not as "built-on-site" but that will cost the same (or more) as the corresponding built-on-site ones 3) the one and only difference was time, with pre-fab buildings we could build in 6-8 months time buildings that would have otherwise taken 18 months or more (this worked very well for rebuilding after an earthquake) In the years since I was involved in several more similar to the US timber based projects for single homes or anyway one/two storeys structures, and "components" (like pre-fabricated bathrooms "cells" for industrial buildings and hotels) and my experience did not change the overall opinion much. For anything that is "modular" or very, very "standard" (i.e. homes from catalog) there may be some space for fair competition (slightly lower cost for same or similar "quality" of end results), but when you start to include in it: 1) the local building codes (and possible needed deviations from the "standard") 2) the customers' changes/preferences 3) the architects/designers (with all due respect for the category) "whims" It invariably ends up costing the same or more (money) and almost the same (time).

presentation 6y ago

I live in Japan, prefab homes here are extremely common [1] - there's an Asahi Kasei prefab 3-story apartment building going up next door to where I live, and from the old house's demolition to the new building's completion, the notification I received in the mail says it'll be about 6 months from start to finish. [1] https://www.curbed.com/2017/10/25/16534122/prefab-homes-manufacturing-japan-vs-us https://www.curbed.com/2017/10/25/16534122/prefab-homes-manu...

ardy42 6y ago
> I live in Japan, prefab homes here are extremely common [1] Could that have anything to do with how the Japanese dislike "old" homes, and tend to demolish an existing home when buying a lot in order to build a new one for the new owner?
- presentation 6y ago
  I'd expect that's a big part of it! The particular article I linked to points out that (creating the need for a lot more houses to get built). Also there's a shortage of skilled craftsmen in part due to the aging population, coupled with a mature robotics industry. Other costs like permitting is way way cheaper and quicker in Japan than the USA (like other posters have mentioned, building in a city like SF can take decades and millions just to get past that hurdle, and people can stop your project by saying that they don't like how it looks - which is an invalid complaint here), so the overall cost of building a home shifts toward the actual cost of the home and land, not legal fees.

jojobas 6y ago

Prefab construction dominates certain areas where many identical concrete houses are built in big series (i.e. cheap Soviet and Russian development projects). There's not much benefit in doing custom wood framing in a factory, a nailgun is a nailgun.

lucioperca 6y ago

But what about the grey energy of these buildings? This claim of zero net energy homes seems dubious when one does not factor in the embedded energy of the building with all this metal. You can go a long way of heating your wooden house till this building will break even in terms of total energy consumed including building materials and shipping.