A lot of apartments and houses were built in the area where I used to live in Japan (and will, again, when we can travel again). So I got to see the progress ev

A lot of apartments and houses were built in the area where I used to live in Japan (and will, again, when we can travel again). So I got to see the progress every morning when I walked the dog. As far as I could tell nearly all the new houses and apartments got their bathrooms as a "unit bath", there would be a truck parked nearby and the bath transported as a unit directly from the truck and brought inside. Talking about prefab, it's supposed to go faster (and that's normally the case), and time is money (more or less so, depending on where you live), but in Japan I once saw a two-story eight-apartment building being raised and completed in less than 7 weeks. Not prefab, not completely anyway - they obviously used modules where the could. But you could still see walls etc. being built the "normal" way. It was built on what used to be a field, I walked past it every morning when walking the dog. First they put up the (now mandatory I believe) steel framing, then they continued building it piece-by-piece. Floors, wall, roof, solar panels on the roof, doors, windows, plumbing, air conditioners/heating, painted tarmac parking area outside (with two allotted spaces for each apartment), a little roofed area to park bicycles, garbage bin area (again roofed), and cleanup. Less than seven weeks. It's the most astonishing thing I've ever seen when it comes to building not being fully prefab (the exception was the baths - they were installed as units). During the same period a slightly larger apartment building was set up in my home country, near my home there, it took nearly two years and when they were finished it still looked shabby and unfinished outside - no tarmac, no grass, leftover stuff everywhere. Took forever to get that cleaned up. So, why did it go so extremely fast in Japan? Logistics. Everything arrived on site exactly when it should. Nothing stopped. When stuff for the roof arrived there was already a conveyor belt set up to transport it up to where it was needed. Nobody had to wait for someone else to finish what they were doing. Nothing stopped. They worked Saturdays too, but they didn't work evenings. It was just all incredibly efficient. The someone who worked out the logistics for that project.. I've never seen anything like it.