About Modular:

Modular houses are built out of boxes, called modules, which are constructed off site, transported to a building lot, and assembled into a finished home. All of the materials - from framing, roofing, and plumbing to cabinetry, interior finish, and electrical - are identical to what you would find in a conventional "stick-built" home. The most striking thing about a modular home is not anything you can see, nor how it is made, but where it is made: in a modern factory designed to build good-quality modular homes.

  

Factory Advantage:

The modular factory system combines engineering know-how and factory-production methods to design and build more efficiently and with greater quality control. When done well, the efficiency results in lower costs and the quality control results in a better product. The idea of building homes, especially the components that make up a home, in a factory is not a recent phenomenon. Prefabricated houses have been built in the United States since the 1890s. Americans began buying houses out of mail-order catalogs as soon as it was possible to ship the materials cross-country by railroad. Sears sold about 100,000 mail-order homes from 1908 to 1940. The use of production-line techniques again picked up after World War II and made a sizable contribution to reducing the housing shortage that developed after the war.

Even stick-built houses today use a growing number of mass-produced, factory-built components, including pre-hung windows and doors, roof trusses, interior moldings, drywall, and kitchen and bath cabinets. More and more aspects of home construction are being completed in factories because the factory environment helps to organize the construction process. By using automatic assembly equipment and repetitive assembly-line techniques, factories assemble component parts more efficiently and with greater consistency in product quality. This is true whether the components are assembled to make a window or an entire house.

Virtually all of the best products in the world, from computers and appliances to automobiles and planes, are manufactured in factories. That is why both consumers and industry professionals in Japan and Scandinavia consider the modular method of home building superior to site-built construction. This makes it ironic that the country that has led the world in the design and mass production of manufactured goods, the United States, took until the 1980s to embrace prefabricated houses. Today, there is still a bit of a romantic notion that building custom home floor plans on site piece-by-piece is somehow superior. This belief lingers even though consumers would reject new appliances and automobiles that were built in someone's backyard, with the materials exposed to the weather and with no one watching over the assembly.

Yet the romance with custom stick construction is starting to lose some of its bloom. Many stick builders have converted to modular houses, driven in part by the severe shortage of skilled construction workers. This shortage is being caused by older, experienced workers retiring or choosing less physically demanding work and by younger people choosing other careers. In an ABC News study of 10,000 high-school students that rated their interest in potential careers, the construction trades ranked 251st, right behind cowboy. In addition, those that are entering the trades are doing so with little formal training or mentoring. The problem is particularly severe in some trades, such as carpentry, where few companies have apprenticeship programs. A study by the National Association of Home Builders, which is made up primarily of stick builders, found that two of three builders are now forced to hire workers with skill levels below those expected for their jobs.

This labor shortage has eroded craftsmanship, driven up prices, and caused delays, shoddy construction, and unhappy homeowners. Frustrated by these problems, custom stick builders have turned to modular homes as a way to introduce some control into the building process. Modular manufacturers have, in turn, enticed them by presenting new house plans that meet the needs of builders' style-conscious customers.

Consumers in search of a custom-built home are also giving modular home designs a more favorable look. Sometimes they turn to modular houses because they cannot get a stick builder to respond in a timely fashion. More frequently, superior quality, faster completion time, and better prices are the primary inducements, along with greater energy efficiency, extended warranties, and flexible design options. Customers who want high-quality finishes as well as high-quality construction increasingly understand that they can get both with a modular home.

Our Building Process

Click each step for more details
 
Step 1: Land/Lot Development
Step 2: Forms/Procedures/Permits
Step 3: Foundation and Sitework
Step 4: Site Preparation
Step 5: Modular Home Set
Step 6: Exterior Finishing
Step 7: Interior Electrical
Step 8: Plumbing Connections
Step 9: HVAC
Step 10: Interior Finishing
Step 11: Exterior Final Finish
Step 12: Closing

 

A brief summary of Chapter 1 "Why Build Modular?" in The Modular Home, by Andrew Gianino, President of The Home Store

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