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Place navigation on the left of the screenYou could make your entire house out of shipping containers. It seems like a good idea to be able to order 3 bedroom units, one kitchen, one bathroom and miscellaneous other bits, which are then built off-site with all utilities incorporated and then delivered for final assembly.1
One of the major problems with housing in the UK is that we still make houses the way it has been done out of bricks and mortar with someone placing each brick one at a time. Almost everything else is mass produced, often by robot, but house making seems to be stuck in the 1800s. Here, the idea of a ‘prefab house’ has a pretty bad name – presumably a relic of remembering the post WW2 temporary housing (or more likely from freezing various bits of anatomy off in damp and leaky porta-kabin classrooms at school). Prefabs are considered the accommodation of last resort, though maybe not far down as their wheeled brethren – caravans. The Scandinavians live in much colder conditions than the UK in timber buildings, and besides, if we farmed timber it may might help to offset some of the other muck we dump into the environment on a daily basis.
Prefab certainly does not have to mean cheap and nasty – the Germans seem to have managed with the Huf Haus, except the wall units (rather than whole rooms) are pre-made in a controlled environment. The whole structure is delivered as panels and can be assembled to a water proof in seven days. In South Korea, LG are manufacturing whole houses pre-installed with solar power, broadband, fibre-optics etc (standard in my 2001-built house – plug sockets, phone line).
Now, the only problem will be finding a nice place to put one. Although if you don’t like the area you can always de-camp your house to an island of the coast of Fiji.
[Updated: more prefab zen at Boingboing].
- Extensions would be far easier too ↑
If my prof, the most conservative person in the world, has a prefab house, it can’t be such a big deal.
Prefabs are indeed very common in Germany now, our neighbour also has one – an admittedly shabby one, however. If I were to build a house, I would consider prefab because it is up faster, looks good and solid enough. In the end, I am sure, it is probably cheaper too.
Hmm.. not sure if you can get much more conservative that your average Brit
. I think two of the problems here are planning regulations (and finding land) as well as trying to get a mortgage for a building that only existing on paper.
Things are looking up though, there are certainly more sites and information than there were a couple of years ago. However, I think I might struggle to find somewhere to put the rather fetching 8,500 sqft prefab (with 4,200sqft of decking) I saw online yesterday
.
I hope you are letting a part of it.
It does look very good – but I wouldn’t be keen on cleaning all those windows… The house fits nicely into the landscape, something that seldom happens, but which I like to see.
Ah, yes, those planning regulations. A bit of a problem here as well. In Britain, do you get told what kind of trees you need to plant in your garden when you build a house? When my family built, the architect had to give us a list of trees we needed to have in the garden and where we could plant them (we aren’t done yet)! Burocracy. It doesn’t seem to leave you much creative space. We even get told what colour the roof must have to “fit into the neighbourhood”. However, the regulations did not say my parents could not paint the house this awful neon yellow…