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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

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?
  - dejv 6y ago
    It is local company from Czech republic called Freedomky. One example: https://www.dwell.com/home/freedomek-no.061-ce8de0e1 https://www.dwell.com/home/freedomek-no.061-ce8de0e1
    - atombender 6y ago
      That's beautiful. I hope your house comes out as well as that.
    - floatingatoll 6y ago
      I have one of those photos saved! I should have read the article more closely. Thank you :)
  - daniellarusso 6y ago
    http://www.freedomky.cz/ http://www.freedomky.cz/
- yardie 6y ago
  This looks similar to the modular homes that were popular in the US in the 60s and 70s. Sadly, they went out of style because they earned the reputation of being cheap and flimsily constructed. This was because of all sorts of financial shenanigans. At least in the US, banks are reluctant to back a mortgage to a home like this. Many of these modular homes are on leased land. Once the lease was up the house became worthless and had to be destroyed.
dcolkitt 6y ago
One big area where modular prefab can potentially make a difference is by reducing the need for skilled tradesmen, particularly electricians, plumbers and HVAC techs. In most growing American metros, a major constraining factor on housing supply is the lack of these skilled tradesmen. In contrast, drywall, painting, and landscaping tend to be lower-skilled and easier to draw from the general labor pool. You can have a high-productivity manufacturing center start with a pre-fab "core" built out of a modular shipping container, and pre-fab roof trusses. In parallel, you prep the site including any lot development and laying the concrete foundation. You then install the core and trusses on site, and can finish up the drywall and paining very quickly. The core contains all the complex plumbing, electrical work, HVAC and kitchen work. The finished house looks indistinguishable from regular construction, and you can stand up single family homes or duplexes in under two months.
- tw04 6y ago
  > One big area where modular prefab can potentially make a difference is by reducing the need for skilled tradesmen, particularly electricians, plumbers and HVAC techs. To what end? As a country we're already struggling to create enough middle-class jobs and you're suggesting we try to gut another whole sector. So that owners/executives of prefab factories can pocket the money? If you think it's going to reduce cost or benefit the consumer, you're crazy. I notice you downvoted without responding. I presume you've got a plan to recreate those jobs vs. just transferring wealth upwards and are keeping it a secret. It astounds me people on HN think that eliminating jobs without any thought to the social impact is somehow a righteous goal to strive for. Yet you can't even answer what the benefit is to society other than making some really rich dude a little bit richer at the expensive of hundreds of thousands of middle class jobs. And most likely an end product for consumers that's LOWER quality.
  - seibelj 6y ago
    This is the fallacy - The Fallacy - that is always made by those who don’t understand economics. Why did we build the car when it put all of the horse tradesmen out of business? Why do we use elevator buttons and put the doormen out of a job? Why did we create the Internet when perfectly good newspaper printers could pass information to us? You are making an age-old argument that we need to reduce productivity in order to save jobs. If you spent your whole life scrubbing a floor with a tooth brush when right next to you is a mop, just so you can ensure more of your time was spent washing, wouldn’t you feel like your life was wasted?
alkonaut 6y ago
If I order a catalog house from a manufacturer that does prefab it would probably either mean completely prefabbed wall panels, i.e. wall panels with a handful of layers (timber framing, OSB, plasterboard, wind/moisture barriers, lathing, external panel with a base paint), plus roof trusses. Or it could mean just the framing (wall panel timber frames and roof trusses). There would be passages for vents etc but you wouldn't see entire prefab "rooms", or even prefab walls with e.g. tiles or fittings like plumbing or electrical, like you see e.g. in large hotels or cruise ships.
notahacker 6y ago
Beyond walls, there's entire rooms, provided your client wants a lot of identical factory-finished rooms small enough to transport. Doesn't really work for your average private housing client who wants big open plan areas to add their own decoration to, but it's ideal for chain hotels and student/social apartments. That's where the construction speedup is more noticeable because the unit fitouts can take place in parallel to site prep and foundation works, and where you also get economies of scale and better QA from fitting lots of copies of the same bathroom on a production line.

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?
- dejv 6y ago
  It is local company from Czech republic called Freedomky. One example: https://www.dwell.com/home/freedomek-no.061-ce8de0e1 https://www.dwell.com/home/freedomek-no.061-ce8de0e1
  - atombender 6y ago
    That's beautiful. I hope your house comes out as well as that.
  - floatingatoll 6y ago
    I have one of those photos saved! I should have read the article more closely. Thank you :)
- daniellarusso 6y ago
  http://www.freedomky.cz/ http://www.freedomky.cz/
yardie 6y ago
This looks similar to the modular homes that were popular in the US in the 60s and 70s. Sadly, they went out of style because they earned the reputation of being cheap and flimsily constructed. This was because of all sorts of financial shenanigans. At least in the US, banks are reluctant to back a mortgage to a home like this. Many of these modular homes are on leased land. Once the lease was up the house became worthless and had to be destroyed.

dcolkitt 6y ago

One big area where modular prefab can potentially make a difference is by reducing the need for skilled tradesmen, particularly electricians, plumbers and HVAC techs. In most growing American metros, a major constraining factor on housing supply is the lack of these skilled tradesmen. In contrast, drywall, painting, and landscaping tend to be lower-skilled and easier to draw from the general labor pool. You can have a high-productivity manufacturing center start with a pre-fab "core" built out of a modular shipping container, and pre-fab roof trusses. In parallel, you prep the site including any lot development and laying the concrete foundation. You then install the core and trusses on site, and can finish up the drywall and paining very quickly. The core contains all the complex plumbing, electrical work, HVAC and kitchen work. The finished house looks indistinguishable from regular construction, and you can stand up single family homes or duplexes in under two months.

tw04 6y ago
> One big area where modular prefab can potentially make a difference is by reducing the need for skilled tradesmen, particularly electricians, plumbers and HVAC techs. To what end? As a country we're already struggling to create enough middle-class jobs and you're suggesting we try to gut another whole sector. So that owners/executives of prefab factories can pocket the money? If you think it's going to reduce cost or benefit the consumer, you're crazy. I notice you downvoted without responding. I presume you've got a plan to recreate those jobs vs. just transferring wealth upwards and are keeping it a secret. It astounds me people on HN think that eliminating jobs without any thought to the social impact is somehow a righteous goal to strive for. Yet you can't even answer what the benefit is to society other than making some really rich dude a little bit richer at the expensive of hundreds of thousands of middle class jobs. And most likely an end product for consumers that's LOWER quality.
- seibelj 6y ago
  This is the fallacy - The Fallacy - that is always made by those who don’t understand economics. Why did we build the car when it put all of the horse tradesmen out of business? Why do we use elevator buttons and put the doormen out of a job? Why did we create the Internet when perfectly good newspaper printers could pass information to us? You are making an age-old argument that we need to reduce productivity in order to save jobs. If you spent your whole life scrubbing a floor with a tooth brush when right next to you is a mop, just so you can ensure more of your time was spent washing, wouldn’t you feel like your life was wasted?

alkonaut 6y ago

If I order a catalog house from a manufacturer that does prefab it would probably either mean completely prefabbed wall panels, i.e. wall panels with a handful of layers (timber framing, OSB, plasterboard, wind/moisture barriers, lathing, external panel with a base paint), plus roof trusses. Or it could mean just the framing (wall panel timber frames and roof trusses). There would be passages for vents etc but you wouldn't see entire prefab "rooms", or even prefab walls with e.g. tiles or fittings like plumbing or electrical, like you see e.g. in large hotels or cruise ships.

notahacker 6y ago

Beyond walls, there's entire rooms, provided your client wants a lot of identical factory-finished rooms small enough to transport. Doesn't really work for your average private housing client who wants big open plan areas to add their own decoration to, but it's ideal for chain hotels and student/social apartments. That's where the construction speedup is more noticeable because the unit fitouts can take place in parallel to site prep and foundation works, and where you also get economies of scale and better QA from fitting lots of copies of the same bathroom on a production line.