It sounds like a headline from the future: the weekend before Thanksgiving, a bulldozer came for the first example of a printed home that was supposed to help the housing crisis in the city of Musc…
Pre-fabricated homes are not all mobile homes. I wrote this elsewhere, but a lot of those charming 100 year old homes on the east coast and midwest are pre-fabricated Sears catalog homes.
Is it correct to call those Sears houses “pre-fabricated?” The lumber was sawn to size if I understand right, but it still had to be stick-built on site. It’s not like it was built in pieces in a factory, trucked to the site and assembled.
Are IKEA dressers pre-fabricated? I would say that having plans, everything cut to size, and all the hardest parts done for you counts for a lot.
For Sears catalog homes, everything in the kit was measured, cut, numbered, and packaged in a factory, including electrical and heating, and the kits were advertised as easy and fast to build for people with no expert skills. Pre-fabrication is a spectrum, and all pre-fabs require some degree of construction on site.
No, IKEA dressers are categorically not pre-fabricated. Basis for my assertion: IKEA and other flat packed furniture arrives in a “some assembly required” state, compared to “normal” furniture which arrives from the factory fully assembled and ready to use. Nuts like me that have their own personal wood shop and build their own furniture from scratch are the exception, rather than the norm.
In the aviation world, there’s a category for Experimental - Amateur Built aircraft. There is a rule for certifying an aircraft in this category: The amateur builder must perform 51% of the fabrication and assembly of the aircraft. There’s this whole points system for figuring that up as well. There are kit manufacturers, but they can’t offer “We cut all the material to their final size, drilled all the holes etc. so all you have to do is rivet and bolt it together” because there’s no way to make that total up to 51%. They can give you enough sheet stock cut to rough size for you to fabricate wing and fuselage panels out of, provide an engine, etc. These airplanes are often informally referred to as “kit-built.”
I think “kit-built” lives somewhere between “from scratch” and “pre-fabricated.”
Look it up anywhere: everyone describes Sears catalog homes as pre-fabricated. So your categorical insistence is contradicted by actual usage. If that makes you uncomfortable for whatever reason, feel free to use whatever term you like, so long as, on actual matters of substance, we understand that we’re talking about homes where some significant portion of the construction is done off site.
Pre-fabricated homes are not all mobile homes. I wrote this elsewhere, but a lot of those charming 100 year old homes on the east coast and midwest are pre-fabricated Sears catalog homes.
Is it correct to call those Sears houses “pre-fabricated?” The lumber was sawn to size if I understand right, but it still had to be stick-built on site. It’s not like it was built in pieces in a factory, trucked to the site and assembled.
Are IKEA dressers pre-fabricated? I would say that having plans, everything cut to size, and all the hardest parts done for you counts for a lot.
For Sears catalog homes, everything in the kit was measured, cut, numbered, and packaged in a factory, including electrical and heating, and the kits were advertised as easy and fast to build for people with no expert skills. Pre-fabrication is a spectrum, and all pre-fabs require some degree of construction on site.
No, IKEA dressers are categorically not pre-fabricated. Basis for my assertion: IKEA and other flat packed furniture arrives in a “some assembly required” state, compared to “normal” furniture which arrives from the factory fully assembled and ready to use. Nuts like me that have their own personal wood shop and build their own furniture from scratch are the exception, rather than the norm.
In the aviation world, there’s a category for Experimental - Amateur Built aircraft. There is a rule for certifying an aircraft in this category: The amateur builder must perform 51% of the fabrication and assembly of the aircraft. There’s this whole points system for figuring that up as well. There are kit manufacturers, but they can’t offer “We cut all the material to their final size, drilled all the holes etc. so all you have to do is rivet and bolt it together” because there’s no way to make that total up to 51%. They can give you enough sheet stock cut to rough size for you to fabricate wing and fuselage panels out of, provide an engine, etc. These airplanes are often informally referred to as “kit-built.”
I think “kit-built” lives somewhere between “from scratch” and “pre-fabricated.”
Look it up anywhere: everyone describes Sears catalog homes as pre-fabricated. So your categorical insistence is contradicted by actual usage. If that makes you uncomfortable for whatever reason, feel free to use whatever term you like, so long as, on actual matters of substance, we understand that we’re talking about homes where some significant portion of the construction is done off site.