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New
Technologies Are Changing The Way Manufactured Homes Are Built
As
you gaze upon Brenda and Jack Rogers elegant home-with its tile
floors, Corian counter and bullnosed corners-you can hardly believe
what they are telling you: This is a manufactured home.
The couples 2,400 square foot home sits at the entrance to a mobile
home park in La Verne, Calif.
"It's amazing to us how far mobile homes have come," says
Brenda, who saw their home being built in a nearby factory. "No
more paneled walls. No more unstable floors."
Indeed, with its thick walls--fiber cement siding on the outside,
drywall on the inside--combined with the dozens of permanent jacks
holding the frame level and steady, the home feels every bit as
substantial as an old-fashioned "stick-built" home on
a foundation.
Brenda and Jack are living in one of the cutting-edge innovations
now flourishing in the building industry. Gone forever are the days
of tracts of site-built wood homes with wood framing, wood windows,
wood siding and wood roofs.
A combination of declining wood quality, shortages of skilled construction
labor and the necessity for energy efficiency is creating massive
changes in the way we build our homes.
There's also a desire among homeowners for a low-maintenance house:
Scraping and painting wood windows every couple of years is definitely
not part of the American Dream.
These days, the hottest new building trends are manufactured homes,
"panelized" buildings created with engineered wood, steel
framing, insulating concrete forms and new types of siding. These
new techniques can reduce costs, improve quality and stability and
speed up the home-building process, all of which appeals to homeowners
and builders alike.
Anyone considering buying a new home or simply remodeling an old
one--and that includes just about all of us--will soon come face
to face with these new building technologies. Here are some of the
most interesting:
We
may know them as mobile homes, but most of them will never move
from their original site. So the preferred and more accurate term
is "manufactured homes." (And please, one real estate
agent pleads, "Don't call them trailers.")
The growing popularity of these homes is amazing: 30 percent of
all new homes sold nationally come from factories, according to
Florida Manufactured Home Magazine.
Several factors set manufactured homes apart from their traditionally
built counterparts. First, they are built in factories, often with
stringent quality controls, and in a fraction of the time it takes
to construct a site built home. Jack and Brenda's home, for instance,
was built in 10 days in the factory, then trucked to the site in
three large slices. Once there, only a week passed before the couple
was able to move in.
Contrast this with a site-built home that requires not only tons
of materials delivered from disparate sources, but the labors of
dozens of skilled tradespeople who often juggle several projects
at once. Anyone who has built a home knows well the feeling of waiting
for the electrician so the drywallers can proceed. In factory-built
homes, this scenario is nearly nonexistent.
All this adds up to a major advantage for manufactured homes - affordability.
Factory-built homes can cost 20 percent to 50 percent less than
conventional homes.
What's more, manufactured homes are not just ideal for communities
where each lot is leased. According to the U.S. Census, more than
65 percent of them were assembled on private property.
The latest innovations in manufactured homes include high-pitched
roofs, cathedral ceilings and second stories.
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