Mayher Street– Day 3
Our factory partner doesn’t work on the weekends, but based on the photos we received Monday afternoon, it sure looks like they did. The drywall was all hung and the first coats of mud had been applied and sanded. For those less familiar with construction, this means their team installed ALL of the plumbing and electrical in the first three days of work. That is mind-boggling.
While PBS was hard at work building the house, we broke ground in Easthampton. Before the modular home components arrive, we need to have a foundation ready and utilities stubbed in the crawl space.
Break Neck Speed in the Living Room
Electrical Done.
Plumbing Done.
Drywall done.
Wow. At the end of day three, you can almost see the couch and coffee table in the living room (living room photo below).
When we received these images on day three, we asked if the factory had been running all weekend, but of course, it wasn’t so the team could spend time with their families. Our partner PBS has the advantage of having their electricians, plumbers, drywallers, and carpenters in the same building every day. That means having electrical and plumbing work completed in the morning and starting the drywall in the afternoon is routine, which is nearly impossible when building everything onsite with specialists managing jobs in many locations.
Apparently, drywall doesn’t dry fast enough on its own.
In the photo below, notice the torpedo heater cranking up the temperature in the home. This allows the team to apply and sand multiple coats of drywall mud on the same day. They also left the Rex Wrap over the windows and doors to trap the heat and prevent dust from escaping into the rest of the workshop.
In addition to the torpedo heaters, the factory uses industrial fans to speed up the drying & sanding cycles even more. This action helps each person on their team boost their productivity. Downtime is not only expensive, but it’s boring for the team members and as I’m sure you can relate, it can make a workday last forever.
Backdoor and spot for the couch
Below, you can see the opening for the back door, which is required by code to provide a second means of egress. This requirement is a bit unfortunate in such a small house as it takes up a lot of wall space where otherwise, a homeowner could put furniture.
The window on the left is also slightly higher off the floor than other windows to allow a couch to fit neatly under it. We reckon the future occupant will sit on the couch and look out that window at her grandchild playing the backyard between her home and her daughter’s home. This moment is one of the many moments that detached Accessory Dwelling Units (ADUs) make possible.
Home wrap and mini-split circuit
All the homes are sealed meticulously in weather resistance wrap. The wrap provides air sealing and an added layer of protection from the weather.
You can also see a circuit hanging from the right corner that will provide power to our mini-split system’s compressor.
What a factory
PBS’s space is enormous. The photo below is one of two plants of this size that are building modular components for residential home builders, real estate developers, hotels, and of course, Backyard ADUs. When Kevin and I first toured these spaces, we realized we had no choice but to include modular components in our construction process.
The alternative was charging customers more and forcing them to make more compromises on the features they wanted in their home. We also realized that a hybrid construction process that combines the factory’s team and our onsite carpenters is the future.
The hinged roof system
When partnering with a modular component factory, the only constraint in what you can build in the factory is what you can ship down the highway. This means to include a roof with a traditional New England pitch, the roof system needs to be hinged. PBS partners with a roof truss company to engineer hinged roof systems than can be quickly raised with a crane, secured in place, and then made watertight.
Below you can see the roof’s components. PBS hinges each face of the roof at its connection to the lower walls. The overhangs of each roof plane are also hinged and flipped over, so the home conforms to transportation width limits.
Theoretically speaking, if a homeowner wanted to move the house in the future, they could disassemble the roof and put it right back on a truck. It would probably cost about $10,000 to move a home to a new location and re-raise the roof.
Meanwhile, we broke ground on Mayher St.
While our factory partner was building the house, we broke ground where the house will be for the foreseeable future.
The first bucket of earth came when we removed a Japanese maple that, unfortunately, could not be saved. We consulted an arborist, and he said due to some disease and wounds on the trunk, it would be a 50/50 chance whether we could transplant it successfully on our own. It would have cost over $2,000 to have the pros come in and increase the likelihood of survival to 90%. We’ll likely replace it with a new tree!
Foundation hole done
At the end of day one, Mike Bartlett had the foundation hole excavated and had moved much of the excavated soil off-site. The digging conditions in this part of Easthampton are wonderful.
Regulation
MA requires that contractors block off holes of all sorts for public safety. This regulation is one that is often a burden to the contractor and, as a result, unfortunately an increased cost to the homeowner. As you saw in the previous photo, the foundation hole is hard to miss and then accidentally fall into.