So Many Advantages to Modular Houses

For more than 100 years, modular homes have been promoted by designers and entrepreneurs for their efficiency, speed and affordability. However, modular homes have remained a niche market, and many homeowners still do not entirely understand modular housing.

A modular house is constructed in sections in a factory, transported on flatbed trucks and joined together at the building site.

The aesthetics of modular homes are varied and essentially unlimited. Stylistically, modular houses run the gamut from traditional to contemporary. By current standards, the majority are modest in size; more than half of them have less than 2,500 square feet of living space, however they can be as large as you want them to be.

Home builders gravitated to modular construction because they have done their research and found that it is the best way to build a new house that is unusually energy-efficient and easy to maintain.

There are additional reasons to build a prefab house. One of the most important will surprise homeowners who are not familiar with the construction process. A factory built house minimizes waste; most site-built houses fill up a dumpster several times over. Factories, where the same house parts are assembled over and over, can predict what they will need so that waste is minimized.

A second plus with a modular house is its speed of construction. While a site-built house takes about four to 15 months to complete, a modular home generally takes weeks. Because most of the work is done in a factory, there are no weather delays and no damage to exposed framing when it is deluged in a summer thunderstorm. Perhaps most importantly for owners, speeding up the construction process reduces the amount of stress as their home is built.

Modular homes are built with higher quality control than site-built ones. In many factories now, the workers use sophisticated, computer-aided machinery that makes more accurate cuts so that the framing pieces fit together more easily; this in turn makes all the subsequent steps in the construction sequence, including the installation of interior and exterior materials and windows, faster and easier. And, modular homes can be custom-built.

For more information on Modular Construction, contact Avalon Building Systems.

Excerpts -Washington Post