NH Home
Some
Assembly Required
Published: Sunday, Aug. 1, 2004
Ann and Kevin Attar completed their new modular home
with beautiful landscaping.
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Say “modular” to most people and their first reaction will most
likely be one of two things: “Aren’t they the same as a mobile
home?” or “They’re just rickety cookie-cutter box houses.” But
skeptics take one look at Kevin and Ann Attar’s
6,500-square-foot home on Lake Winnipesaukee’s exclusive
Governor’s Island, where Gatsby-esque homes with manicured lawns
command envious views, and they fall silent. “We’re thrilled
with it,” says Kevin, who owned Surge Industries in Londonderry
until recently selling the company (he’s still with them, but
“semi-retired” now). “No one can believe it’s modular, even in
my own family. I defy anyone to come in and know that it’s
modular just by looking at it.” If that’s not enough to convince
you, try this: Bob Vila, top brass of home improvement, just
featured a modular home in the Berkshires on his show, “Home
Again.”
Dispelling Prefabricated Notions
Modular, or prefabricated, homes make up just about 20 percent
of the houses built in the U.S. — mostly in the Northeast, where
the climate isn’t favorable to year-round building. By contrast,
90 percent of Sweden’s homes are modular. Modular construction
is still in its relative infancy, having started in the early
’70s. Though some companies got their start by building mobile
homes (technically called “manufactured housing”), dispelling
the myth of the modular home as the double-wide trailer is one
of the biggest marketing challenges for the industry.
“I’ve been in this business since 1972,” says Paul Fournier, a
builder in Meredith who worked with the Attars on their house.
“It started as a way to produce low-income housing, but things
have changed tremendously since then,” he says. Now most of the
modular houses he works on are like the Attars’ — large-scale
modular mansions with quality fixtures and features. He says he
still gets tongue-in-cheek comments about modular homes, but
attitudes are changing. People magazine even called recently to
interview Fournier for a story on modular construction. Little
by little, a growing number of consumers — like the Attars — is
finding out that this type of home offers quality, cost savings,
and convenience. Heck, even George H. W. Bush had one built on
his property in Maine while he was president.
Building Inside a Building
From a platform overlooking the Epoch Homes factory in Pembroke,
sections (or modules) of home number 3622 are making their way
down the assembly line. Right now it’s just in the framework and
decking stage. Workers with nail guns buzz around, music blares
and hacksaws whir. Everyone is in constant motion.
Farther down the line, modules for other houses are covered in
white paper. Men on metal stilts are puttying the interior walls
with joint compound. And still farther, other workers are
spraying paint on the walls. It’s all happening in assembly-line
fashion. Picture Mardi Gras floats without all the glitz. In
about two-and-a-half weeks, house 3622 will have made its way
down this line and its pieces will be loaded on a truck to the
lot where it will be assembled and bolted together on the
foundation. Within a few weeks, the owners will move in.
Factory-built homes like this are constructed indoors in a
climate-controlled atmosphere, where they’re not exposed to the
elements for the six months to a year that a stick-built home
takes. After all, say modular proponents, you wouldn’t build a
car outside in a field, so why would you build your single
biggest investment under those conditions? “Your home is worth
10 times what your car is, it’s an appreciating asset, and
you’re never going to throw it away,” says Jack Donnelly of
Customized Structures Inc., a modular manufacturing company in
Claremont. “So many things that we do to modular homes make it
stronger, tighter and more energy efficient. It really makes
absolute sense to build it this way.”
And in New Hampshire, where the weather is undesirable for
building for a good chunk out of the year, factory-built homes
can be constructed year-round. There’s no down time for workers,
no seasonal layoffs. “Inside the factory it’s always 72 degrees.
You don’t have workers who are freezing up on a roof who might
not be inclined to do all of the fastening they should be doing
because they just want to get it done,” says Donnelly. “We’re
stick building, but we’re doing it under ideal conditions.”
He adds that very few components — whether in a stick-built
house or one that is built in a factory — are built from
scratch. “It’s not like 100 years ago where craftsmen built all
of the windows and doors by hand.” In fact, if you look at the
figures, he says, probably 80 percent of houses built in the
U.S. have some sort of premanufactured parts that go into them:
walls, trusses, cabinets, doors, or windows.
Dave Wrocklage at Epoch puts it this way: “With old homes, the
labor was cheap and the materials were expensive. Now the
opposite is true.”
Less Cost to the Consumer
Depending on the market area, going the modular route could save
the homeowner 5–10 percent to build a home, says Wrocklage. “The
site work is the site work and will be the same amount [whether
stick-built or modular construction],” he says. However, where
labor costs are more expensive, the savings will be more
significant when building modular. Plus, the process won’t be
delayed by weather or outside factors like a subcontractor who
doesn’t show up or materials gone missing from the job site.
Modular home manufacturers also have relationships with window,
flooring, and other companies who supply parts for houses, and
because of their high volume, they buy in bulk. So the cost to
the consumer is less. We’re not talking Cheapo Depot here,
either. We’re talking Pella windows, Kohler faucets, Corian
countertops, Merillat cabinets and more.
Another financial advantage for modular building is the length
of the construction loan, says Donnelly. “If you’re site
building, depending on the size and who is doing it, you could
spend anywhere from four months to a year stick building, and
all that time you’d be paying on the construction loan at a
higher rate of interest,” he says. “With modular, you have a
construction loan for a very short time — a month or six weeks.”
Quality Checkpoints
According to a study done by the University of Florida,
prefabricated homes are more energy efficient. Ironically, a lot
of this comes from the extra steps required to transport the
modules on the road so that they don’t crack during the moving
process. “We’re doubling up on lumber in a lot of places, that
makes the house a lot stronger, better, with less cracks and
imperfections,” says Wrocklage.
In addition, factory-built houses have built-in quality control
checkpoints. At every stage of the process, the house has to be
checked out by independent third-party inspectors representing
state and local authorities, and if any imperfections are found,
says Wrocklage, they have to be corrected before the house can
be moved to the next station. Wrocklage says, “We pre-empt the
local building inspectors. That means that the local building
inspector only has to worry about the work that is done
on-site.” And, he adds, you don’t run into the situation where a
builder of a stick-built home is running from house to house
with different crews.
Of all the persuasive arguments to build a modular home,
however, none perhaps is more dramatic than the day that house
is delivered to the lot. From a free marketing perspective,
nothing beats “set day.” Both Donnelly and Wrocklage admit they
can’t tell how many times they’ve heard the story of neighbors’
surprise at coming home from work to find an entire house crop
up where next door only the foundation stood that morning when
they left. “It really draws a crowd when we drive up with a
crane to put up the modular home,” says Donnelly. “Some people
have a cookout and watch it happen, and the new homeowner will
certainly have crowd of family gathered around.”
Wrocklage tells the story of how they put up a modular home next
door to one that was being stick built. “The workers next door
who were still framing that house just sat up on the roof and
watched us,” he says. “It must have been amazing for them to see
the house go up in one day.”
For the Attars, set day for their “8-box” home came at Christmas
this past year. “They did the lower level on Christmas Eve and
the upper level the day after Christmas,” Kevin says. Talk about
one heck of a Christmas present. “I was up there filming the
whole thing,” he adds.
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