There are many options for prefab today. We investigated many when we started Project Rivercamp about 18 months ago. Res4, Rocio Romero, Michelle Kaufman, and many other modern designers are designing beautiful modern prefabricated houses that ship on trucks to the customer's site and are off loaded and fastened to the foundation. It is a very efficient way to build a house, and the quality of the construction should be higher than a site built house, because of the controlled conditions under which it is built. Sounds great, but the major problem with these houses is that they end up costing the same or end up being more expensive than stick built houses. That is the reason why prefab has not caught on in the U.S., and the reason that Michelle Kaufman recently had to close up shop and go out of business.

Enter the i-house. It is made by Clayton Homes, which claims to be the country's largest homebuilder. They are a 40+ year old company that up until now has focused on producing and selling low end modular homes to people who otherwise would not be able to afford to buy a house. Their production methods have to be efficient, because they compete in the low priced, low profit margin end of the market. These guys know how to build an efficient, high quality, low priced home. That's what they do. In fact, they claim that their typical home produces only one trash can of waste, which is unbelievably efficient use of materials.

Warren Buffett bought the company a few years ago, and tasked their designers with making an environmentally friendly, affordable, modern looking house to appeal to an emerging green market. The i-house was introduced earlier this year at the Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting. It has gotten considerable press, and it caught our eye as well.

We recently traveled to Knoxville, Kentucky to look at the i-house. We liked it, and are considering buying one for our farm in Virginia.

The house consists of two separate buildings; the main unit, which has the master bedroom, a full bath, living room and kitchen. This is the smaller, one bedroom unit. A two bedroom i-house is also available, which is what people have been ordering. The other building is the "flex" unit, which is another bedroom or studio and full bath. They also make a flex II which has 2 bedrooms and a full bath. The one we would consider is the two bedroom main house and the two bedroom flex unit.

Here is the floor planof the i-house II and the flex II. 

The roof of the flex unit is a deck, which I think is fabulous. For our location, it would have a great view of the river!

The back of the flex unit.

The front of the flex unit

the front side of the main house

Inside the living room. This is the smaller unit, and the living room is tight. The two bedroom unit has a much bigger living/dining area.

The front entrance.

A major shortcoming of the smaller model is that there is nowhere to put a dining table. There is the kitchen counter and this other counter table that they put in, and that's it for dining options. This would not work for most people, even in a weekend house, and I think it's also why they haven't sold any of the one bedroom units. If you have a guest over for dinner, you're all eating on the sofa!

We learned that in order to see the bigger two bedroom unit, you have to drive to the factory, which is about an hour's drive from Knoxville, in Bean Station, Tennessee. We made an appointment to see the factory, and we got to see up close how they build the i-house.

This is a just completed i-house II, which they were preparing to ship. It turns out that this one was on its way to Fredericksburg, Virginia to be used as a display. We plan on visiting it again in Fredericksburg when it's open.

Here is an i-house on the assembly line. It's pretty incredible that it only takes them a week to build an i-house from start to finish.

The master bedroom end of the work in progress. The pictures are dark because it was a Saturday and the factory was closed. If you want to visit the plant, make an appointment. You can't just show up and expect to be shown around.

This is the living room, which is significantly larger than the smaller unit. It's still tight though, and I think it is a limitation of this house. There's just not much room. It necessitates an indoor/outdoor lifestyle, which is great for a weekend home in the country, but I think it has limited use for a year round house.

This house was a bit cluttered because the IKEA furniture was still being assembled. This one is shipping furnished, which is not a bad option for someone who doesn't want to be bothered with assembling all that stuff...

Flex unit under construction.

The construction is very good quality. The exterior walls are 2x6's and the interior walls are 2x4, which is consistent with the quality of a traditional stick built house. Most low end manufactured homes have 2x4 exterior walls and 2x3 interior walls, which is considered flimsy, but does keep costs down. What's more with the i-house, the joints and studs are fastened with construction adhesive, in addition to being nailed together, which is higher quality than traditional site built construction. The insulation is R30 in the floor and roof and R21 in the walls, which is excellent. 

Overall, we were impressed with the quality of the construction, the layout, and certainly the cost of these houses. It really would be a great option for someone looking for a relatively affordable weekend home, provided that they have land to put it on. I like the look and feel of the house. It doesn't feel cramped at all, which was a concern of mine. I also think it would look great out in the middle of the woods, which is where we would locate ours. In an era where everyone is scaling back their expectations of what is necessary, I think that this home has great potential.

Here's a link to the i-house web site, where you can build your own i-house.

As always, comments are welcome. What do you think of this house? How do you feel about prefab? Do you think the i-house will catch on? Will Clayton Homes fulfill the promise of prefab? 

I've waded back in to this project, and have been busy with more research on how to get our house built during my two year sabbatical from work. I've got six months left, and then it's back to work. 

I have found this prefab house, which is made by Clayton Homes. They are a 40 year old company that produces low end manufactured housing. Warren Buffett bought the company a few years ago with the idea that Clayton could produce cost efficient, green housing.

I like the modern look of the house. It has been referred to as a house that IKEA would build if they were to do such a thing. There have been quite a few articles written about this house, a preview article here, and another review in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. The house seems to have good potential, and so far, I've not been able to find a reason to eliminate it as a possibility. 

The price is certainly right. It costs about one third that the custom house we designed last year, though it's really not fair to compare the two houses, as they are completely different concepts.

It all comes down to how this thing feels. We are going to Knoxville TN to look at the model soon. If it feels right, we just may do it. If it doesn't, at least I'll be able to cross it off the list. 

More to follow, soon. I'd be interested in any comments on this house, both positive and negative. 

Here's the exterior of the smaller floorplan. We are looking at the bigger one, with two bedrooms in the main house, and the two bedroom flex unit.

This is the living/dining/kitchen of the bigger floorplan. It can be customized with a fireplace, which would go where the tv is in this picture.

We have spent considerable effort to contain the cost of this project. 

We have to stretched our initial budget to a level that was at the very limit of what we were comfortable with. I've spent the past 3 months trying to find ways to cut costs and economize on both the design and the finish details. I've been very careful to select fixtures that are of good quality and cost efficient. There was not much else left to cut without dramatically altering the project. 

We have looked at every line item and squeezed it as much as possible, and it left us at the limit of what we wanted to spend on this house, with very little margin for error. 

Our financing for the project was in place, the permits were ready to be pulled, and we were set to start digging the foundation.

Then I got the email...

I received an updated pricing summary from our builder last Friday. It seems that there was an error in our builder's spreadsheet, and it was not calculating the costs properly. 

None of the site work was getting rolled up into the total. The excavation, the septic drainfield, the well, etc. were all left out of the total.

The pricing summary was off by about $100,000. I'll repeat that, ONE HUNDRED THOUSAND DOLLARS... 

Given the major effort that we had put into bringing down costs, and trying to squeeze out $500 here and $1000 there, this was a deal breaker. 

project rivercamp is on hold indefinitely.

This house will hopefully be built someday, but it will not be built in its current form for the current price. We will examine our options in the coming months.

Stay tuned...

I haven't done an update in a while. There has been too much going on with the election, the financial meltdown, the boys' soccer and other world changing issues. However, good progress is being made with the house. 

Here's where we are right now:

Looking at finishes and deciding what this house is really going to look like. This is detail work, some of it fun, and some of it mundane, but all of it is very important. I've been spending my mornings looking at kitchen and bathroom fixtures, cabinets, flooring samples, windows, and counter top options. Much of this has been decided and there is much left to do. I'm trying to spend as little money as possible on things like fixtures, while still getting good quality and a look that we like.

Here's a rendering of the kitchen. The counter tops will be slate, quarried just outside of Charlottesville. Slate is a great material for many reasons. It looks great, it's very durable, and best of all, it's inexpensive compared to granite and other stone options. We will get LEED credit for using a locally sourced stone. This quarry is also very old. I think it's cool that this quarry has supplied virtually all of the slate roofs of Virginia since the 1700's, including the many historically notable Virginia estates like Monticello, Montpelier, Mount Vernon, etc. 

Here is the current look of the front facade. I include this because it shows the 3 kitchen windows ganged up to the right of the entrance, which is a new configuration.

We are also working on the fireplace. LEED is very concerned with indoor air quality. Fireplaces give off quite a bit of particulate, and therefore negatively impact the indoor air. Sure, it smells great, it gives off good heat, and it's romantic, but LEED doesn't like it because wood smoke is considered pollution which doesn't belong in one's house.

In order to get LEED credits for a house that has a fireplace, it should be a sealed unit that burns gas or alcohol. That does not work for us. Our house will be on a property of 90 acres, mostly forest, and trees are constantly falling down, which provide us with lots of firewood. Besides, we like real wood fires!

The solution is to use an EPA certified wood burning fireplace insert. This will allow the wood fire to give off heat and light to the living room, while keeping the smoke and particulate moving up the chimney. There are several cool looking options available, the key will be to find one we like that works with the budget and LEED.

Here's a rendering of the fireplace, which is located in the living room.

Overall, we have made quite a bit of progress in the last 3 weeks. We should get our permits the week of Nov 24th, and should be able to break ground on or about December 1. This is great news, though significantly different than our mid-July target. 

I'm also realizing that my 2 year sabbatical from work is almost halfway over, and we still have not broken ground on this house. We need to get this done, so I can get back to work!!!

As always, feedback and comments are welcome. 

The original budget was set, somewhat arbitrarily, to be roughly what we thought we could sell our current house on our property adjacent to North Lock Farm. We liked the idea of building a "budget neutral" house. We thought it would be an elegant solution, an even exchange of value: build the new house, sell the old house, pay off the construction loan, and we all go on our merry way.

When the pricing first came back, it was 100% over the budget of what we wanted to spend for the house. Yep, just about twice the original budget. 

We went back to the drawing board with Andrew Cocke, of Here Design, and redesigned the house completely. We worked with Gretchen, who had many good ideas of how to reduce the costs. We brought down the size significantly to save on the cost of materials. We looked at the siting of the house, and moved it to better fit within the existing gradelines of the site, which would reduce the amount of excavation and earth-moving for the foundation. We also reduced the amount of terraced surfaces, which will reduce the amount of concrete and materials for retaining walls, etc.

We made all of these changes, while keeping the original minimum requirements of the house, such as the number of bedrooms, the river location, natural materials to blend in with the landscape, and LEED Platinum certification. These are goals that we're not willing to sacrifice, and we'd rather not build the house until we can achieve these goals with a budget that works.

This significant amount of work did result in significant cost savings. It brought the estimate down a full 30%, which is terrific. Gretchen and Andrew did a great job of finding areas to change to reduce the cost of construction. That's the good news. The remaining challenge is to squeeze the remaining 20% out of the project cost, while still not sacrificing the original purpose of the building.

We are looking more closely at the windows to find ways to bring those costs down. We expect to cut costs by changing some of the operable windows to inoperable, and by paring down the size of some of the windows, such as in the guest bedrooms. (Sorry, guests, you will have to do with less view, but I don't think you'll notice...) We are also looking at making the basement a bit smaller to further reduce the cost of excavation and site work. Beyond that, there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of other changes to make without changing the overall scope of the project.

Our hope is that this round of changes will bring the costs down enough that we can proceed without further delay. We still hope to break ground this Fall. 

It will continue to develop; windows will be added, moved, removed, reconfigured and rejiggered. The size of the rooms may push and pull a bit, and the exterior will evolve. 

The value in these renderings to me is to see the overall idea of the house, and figure out what we like about it and what we think needs more work. 

Our builder is still pricing up this design as rendered, and what she comes back with may call for further modifications, but hopefully not. This design meets all of the requirements that we laid out with our architect at the beginning of the project.

This is the Southwest facade. The end of the house on the right will sit on the ridge and overlook the river. There is a wrap-around deck that surrounds 3 sides of the house. The stairs on the left will lead down the "mossy trail" along the ridge, which eventually leads to the river. The porch on the second floor is off of the master bedroom. The second floor of this end of the house has louvers covering it, both over the siding and the windows. This will filter the strong southern sunlight without obstructing the view. The louvers will be wood, which will weather to a silvery grey, and will help camouflage the house from the river. The house should blend right in, and be almost invisible to passing canoes and kayaks.

This is the Southeast facade. We're still working on the layout of the first floor windows here, but it shows the louvers on the far end of the house, and the diagonal louvers that connect the second floor to first floor stairwell.

I won't elaborate on the diagonal louvers now, it will take another post, but they are highly engineered, innovative, and may be impossible to build...

The two pictures below are great examples of passive solar energy in the design of Rivercamp:

This picture is the top of the stairs to the second floor, viewed from the guest bedrooms. This shows the sun at its position on the Winter Solstice. You can see that the sun is streaming in the house to the floor of the hall.  This heat will be absorbed into the floor and retained in the room, which will reduce the energy needed to heat the space.

Now look at the same view on the Summer Solstice:

The sun is higher in the sky and the floor is shaded from the sun, which reduces the need for air conditioning. Pretty cool...

I'm still amazed that the software being used to design the house can model this stuff. And note that the railing around the stairway opening is not up to code, but I'm sure that will be fixed in the next version! ; )

The roof of the solar shed at the top of the picture will house the solar panels that will run the radiant floor heating and the hot water for the house. Otherwise it would be called a "barn," which will house the tractor, the Kawasaki Mule, the Bush Hog, the finish mower and the DR Brush Mower, and any other toys that need a home...