Introduction
You've decided to build a new home, but first you have to select which building system best suits your needs. Years ago, there was basically one way to have a home built and that was to have it "stick" built. There were other methods, but they were either costly or impractical. Today there are nearly a dozen ways to build your dream house, and with a few exceptions they all incorporate technological advances in order to deliver a product with higher quality at a lower overall cost to the consumer. Oddly enough, with all the advancements in technology, stick built construction is still the most common. Stick building still captures the majority of new construction. Modern, advanced building systems such as panelized, log, post & beam and modular system construction, made up the balance.
As the predominant building approach, stick built construction refers to the practice of building a home at the job site piece by piece or "stick-by-stick." Wood arrives from the lumber yard bundled like a box of toothpicks. Builders individually cut and place each stick, one by one, until the house is framed. Over the course of several months, the home is eventually completed. Except for the circular saw, builders use few technological advances during the construction of a stick built home. Intense manual labor, rather than technology, is used to build each stick built home. Before the industrial revolution, this was the same way virtually every product was produced.
Selecting a Building System
One of the first decisions to be made is what building system should be used. Some building systems such as log and geodesic, have a very distinctive exterior look. Most other building systems such as panelized, modular or stick built do not have their own style. These building systems take on the appearance of capes, bungalows, farm houses, ranches, colonials, or what ever style a builder wants. Once completed it is difficult to determine whether a house was built using a panelized, modular or stick built system. To get a better understanding of the major types of building systems available today, let's take a quick look at some of them.
Log Homes
Perhaps the oldest form of home construction is the log home. Log homes still use logs as the basic building block, but today logs are precision cut for an exacting fit. Imperfections have been milled away eliminating the use of mortar as a filler between logs. Each timber undergoes special treatment enabling the components to piece together rapidly. The timbers are pre-cut, channeled, and grooved providing builders with an easy to assemble structure. This makes log homes especially popular with the do-it-yourself crowd. Log homes offer a rustic backwoods home style, but costs and quality vary widely. Selling can also be a problem. You'll need to locate a buyer who wants a log style home. Today's log home provides a high quality, precision manufactured high-tech version of the original.
Post and Beam
Home buyers seeking a wide open floor plan find post and beam construction to be a popular alternative. Post and beam construction dates back thousands of years. However, it is most readily identified with barn construction methods used by the Amish and early settlers. They first harvested the available spruce and fir trees (most often old growth). Each log was then individually measured and hand cut. When ready, the local towns people gathered together for a barn raising. Modern post & beam construction still follows the same basic approach, but like log construction, post and beam methods have been extensively updated with modern technology.
Today, post and beam homes are first designed on sophisticated computer-aided-design (CAD) systems. Many manufacturer's utilize state of the art computer-aided-manufacturing (CAM) systems to cut, mortise and tenon each post and beam. The end result is a new home built to precise standards at a far lower cost than if the posts and beams were hand cut.
The latest technological advances in post and beam construction utilize "stress-skin" panels. Each stress-skin panel incorporates both the exterior plywood (or oriented strand board) and the interior drywall. Sandwiched between the two is an insulating foam glue that holds the plywood and drywall together. Using CAD/CAM systems, manufacturers design, fabricate and then cut each of the stress-skin panels. At the job site, builders install the prefabricated panels onto the completed post and beam shell. Delivered as a kit, the house assembles rapidly with minimal exposure to the weather. Overall, the approach to post and beam construction has changed little. What has changed is the use of technology to design and produce the posts, beams and panels. It is still an expensive process, and with the declining number of old growth trees where many of the beams come from, it will only continue to increase in cost.
Conventional Wood Frame Housing
Most of us live in a conventional wood frame house. We think of them as capes, cottages, colonials or farmhouses. For each the style is different, but each one was built using an integrated wood frame. Compared to post and beam, wood frame houses offer builders and home buyers with a less expensive building system. Unlike the wide open shell offered by a post and beam structure, a wood frame house relies on the exterior and usually one or more interior walls to support the structure. Instead of using widely spaced posts, a wood frame house is build using hundreds of pieces of small dimensional lumber (2x6, 2x4, studs, etc.). The cost of building materials is less, but the use of small dimensional lumber restricts the size of wood frame houses. The average room in new homes built today is around 14 feet by 16 feet, which is easily built with wood frame construction. Larger rooms can easily be 26 feet by 16 feet, or more. If larger rooms are desired, conventional wood frame builders (stick, panel or modular) incorporate the selected use of posts, beams or engineered units to increase the size of a room.
Code Compliance: Reality & Misconceptions
Although homes built using the modular building system have nothing in common with mobile homes, it is not uncommon for people to confuse the two. The key distinction between permanent residential construction and the portable housing industry (campers, trailers and mobile homes), is compliance with building codes. The portable trailer housing industry, which includes mobile homes, must comply with special federal guidelines. The mobile home industry is overseen by the Housing and Urban Development office (HUD) of the federal government. Commonly referred to as HUD Code Units, mobile homes are out of the jurisdiction of your state and local building regulators, and are considered by many to be inadequate for permanent housing.
In contrast, the permanent housing industry, made up of conventional wood frame construction (panelized, stick-built and modular), as well as post & beam and log homes, are all required to follow the strict state and local building codes in your area. In making a decision to build a new modular built home, your state and local building inspectors are an excellent source for referrals on the best modular builders in your area.
HUD-Code Mobile Homes = Semi-permanent Campers
Mobile homes consist of a special class of portable housing and have several differences compared to wood frame houses. First, mobile homes are designed to be inexpensive, self-contained, portable housing. From a construction stand-point, mobile homes are more closely related to campers than to traditional housing. And, as I noted above, mobile homes do not have to comply with local housing codes.
For many people, mobile homes represent a viable form of inexpensive housing for those unable or unwilling to purchase a permanent house. While inexpensive, mobile homes do provide an economical and practical form of housing. Mobile homes were never intended to replace traditional, foundation based housing, but it is not uncommon to see a mobile home placed on a permanent foundation. So before we take a closer look at the modular construction system, let's take a quick look at what makes up a mobile home.
To deliver a generally well built, and inexpensive mobile home, mobile home manufacturers employ construction materials rarely used in permanent housing. To the average home buyer, the methods, construction materials and code requirements more closely match those used for weekend campers than conventional wood frame housing. In fact, if you owned a big truck, you could use a mobile home as a week-end camper.
To begin with, the flooring frame, walls and roofing materials are usually all metal. Most often the exterior walls are thin with a sheet metal exterior. Interior wall construction follows the same methods used by weekend campers, utilizing paneling screwed to metal wall studs. Today, some of the more upscale mobile homes use real drywall in the living rooms. While still not a conventional home, the added drywall does make the mobile home fell more like a real house.
And of course, every mobile home comes equipped with permanently attached wheels to the steel floor frame. The integrated steel floor and wheels provides the home with its mobility. All in all, mobile home manufacturers do an excellent job of delivering a well made product, but compared to conventional housing, mobile homes do not measure up.
