Harborside Blog

Modular Home, Not Mobile Home

Ten years ago my wife and I were looking to buy a home in Marblehead. We couldn’t find anything that we liked. At the time, my wife’s sister and her husband were building a new home in Andover. They were building a modular home. I knew very little about modular construction. To tell you the truth, I didn’t have a favorable opinion of assembly line constructed homes. My father and grandfather built traditional “stick-built” homes down on Long Island. I thought stick-built was the only way to go.

After coming up short in our search for a new home, I asked my Realtor, Heidi Magee, to investigate the vacant lots in Marblehead available for sale. Back in 1998-1999, I recall that Heidi found 10-15 lots ranging in price from $100,000 to $900,000.  We were looking at the entry-level point in the market so there were probably 4 or 5 lots that we could consider. Ultimately, we purchased a 6,300 square foot lot on Glendale Road.

By the time we closed on the lot, my sister-in-law finished her modular home in Andover and we did a lot of research on modular construction. We made a decision to build a modular home. Our budget drove the decision. After purchasing the lot, we had a limited budget to complete the home. One of the key points that we learned about modular construction was it offered us the opportunity to stick close to our budget. Once you pay for the modular home, the only variable costs (generally) are flooring, paint and landscaping. With “stick-built” construction, cost over-runs are common. Crews show up late, crews don’t show up at all, lumber gets stolen, etc..

The other key benefit of modular construction is that you can finish the project more quickly. While we excavated and poured our foundation, the modular units were being constructed in the factory up in Concord, NH (Epoch Homes). We started excavating in August, poured the foundation in September and placed the home on the foundation in October. The home was finished in early December and we moved in before Christmas. (FYI – Once the home was “installed” on the foundation, the only work that remained was to tie in the electrical and plumbing, painting and flooring.) I am sure that there are some general contractors that can complete a stick-built home in 4 months but I would expect that it is uncommon.

The other two key benefits of modular construction are 1) quality of construction and 2) building inside protected from the elements. I preferred to have a crew build my house that had experience in building numerous other homes. The crew that framed my house and installed the drywall probably built 10 other homes the same month. Some carpenters that are on “stick-built” crews may work sporadically and have limited construction experience. Finally, I liked the idea that the lumber and other construction materials used to build my house were likely protected from the weather. On “stick-built” job sites, lumber, plywood, etc… is delivered to the job site and left exposed to rain, snow and sun until the materials are installed.

Overall, my wife and I were happy with the end product. We were able to design the house we wanted and finished the project on budget. While our next home may be stick-built, I would recommend that you consider modular construction if you are building a new home or adding on to an existing home.

There was a good article in Inman News today about modular construction – Modular Going Mainstream?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 14th, 2010 at 4:52 pm and is filed under Construction. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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