Traffic slowed down and bikers stopped riding on Waverley Street near El Verano Avenue in Palo Alto midday Tuesday while a construction crew replaced an outdated residence with a new four-bedroom, three-bath home built in a warehouse 404 miles away.
By Melissa McKenzie
Traffic slowed down and bikers stopped riding on Waverley Street near El Verano Avenue in Palo Alto midday Tuesday while a construction crew replaced an outdated residence with a new four-bedroom, three-bath home built in a warehouse 404 miles away in Rialto, California, before being shipped and installed at its permanent location at 3322 Waverley.
The 2,371-square-foot, custom-designed home a collaboration between tobylongdesign in Oakland and Plant Prefab in Rialto was delivered in six modules and assembled onsite within 8 hours.
While images of trailer parks with shoddy construction and design may come to mind when people hear the word "prefabricated," today's pre-built homes are anything but.
Prefabs are required by law to adhere to the same stringent requirements as conventionally-built homes, and many home builders are using state-of-the art design and construction methods.
One only needs to look at the Waverely home to see how far prefab has come. The home was designed with tall ceilings in the stairwell and living room, large windows and sliding-glass walls to maintain natural light throughout. It has energy-efficient insulation, wood siding over a rain screen, stucco walls and a dramatic steel staircase.
The home is made of recycled glass fiber with drywall made from partially recycled materials, and the paints and stains are all no-VOC (volatile organic compounds).
All of its plumbing, electrical wiring, fixtures, lights and the home's radiant floor-heating system were completed at Plant Prefab's warehouse prior to transport.
"Prefabrication is a more predictable way to build," said tobylongdesign's CEO Toby Long. "The building is designed and specified completely before the construction process starts, which is not how conventional projects go. Prefab also can be faster than conventional building. We overlap the building and the site work with construction. It can happen simultaneously."
The Waverley home only took a matter of months from the moment the homeowners decided to build to move-in day. Most conventional home builds can take more than a year to complete, Long added.
Following Tuesday's installation, construction crews are scheduled to continue to work on the home "stitching" it together by completing the structural and mechanical connections.
"Screws and straps and bolts will be installed," Long said. "We screw together the rims of the modules with big long screws. There are straps, which are precast into the concrete foundation, and those are nailed into the framing and then we have bolts, and in this house we have some steel."
Once the home is stitched, landscape crews will complete the yard, and the owners should be able to move into the home by the end of June, according to Plant Prefab CEO and founder Steve Glenn.
The Waverley Street home, according to Glenn, cost "north of $400 per square foot."
Long, who has spent most of his career designing in the prefab space, stresses that while prefabricated homes are not the answer to all construction woes, prefabrication is a more efficient way to build. Prefab construction eliminates much of the guesswork that often happens throughout traditional construction-site builds and doesn't require a large skilled labor force since the home doesn't need more than a day's intensive labor followed by a month or so of adjustments, he said. Prefabrication also allows construction to continue during inclement weather, saving builders time and customers money. Although each home is customizable, there are some limitations; for example, Long said a roof too large to complete in a warehouse may need to be completed at the job site.
Long also surmises that there's a growing interest from consumers and sees prefabricated buildings as not only part of the future of construction, but as part of the present.
"It's a here-and-now moment (for prefab homes)," Long said. "I've been working on this for a long time. It's rewarding to see our interests continuing to grow. I think that prefab is going to become part of our mainstream construction language."
Melissa McKenzie is a freelance writer for the Weekly. She can be emailed at [email protected]
