EAST ORLEANS — Dee Overton stood with arms folded, seemingly relaxed, as a crane plucked a box containing her front hallway, dining room and library off a flatbed trailer and lowered it onto a foundation.
It was the second of 11 elongated modules that would be stacked like building blocks and bolted together to form her 4,600-square-foot vacation home. australian prefab homes
Within two days this month, a virtually empty house lot was transformed into an expanded Cape with a large tower-shaped addition with a water view.
"This was a paper project up to this point. You don't see anything real and then all of a sudden, there's a house," Overton said.
Until recently, "manufactured" housing suffered from the perception that it was cheaply made. But on the Cape, where land is expensive, modular homes are more likely to be custom in order to get the most square footage for the money and to save time.
That is not to say there haven't been problems. Regulations governing modular homes were revamped by the state in 1997 after the Cape Cod Times investigated complaints by the owners of nine Nantucket modular homes about leaking windows and walls, poor construction and building code violations. The Times also uncovered a lax and haphazard in-state and out-of-state inspection process.
A lot of those problems, Don Shulman, the owner of Realty Development Associates of Sagamore and Norton, said, were the result of a lack of quality control when modules were being put together.
The state now requires that each project has a certified on-site construction supervisor. The company building the modules must also hire an independent third-party inspection company to keep watch over factory lines and sign off on each component. They certify that the plans meet building codes and send them to a Massachusetts state inspector who must examine them and approve them.
Local building inspectors never see the electrical and plumbing inside modular home walls, but the plans are far more detailed than those of an average home. The Overton house, for instance, had 360 pages of schematics while the standard house plan has six.
Brewster building inspector Victor Staley said he's most concerned with ensuring that the building crews assembling the modular home on the site follow the factory instructions explicitly.
There are other issues not confined to modular homes. Firefighters worry that the proliferation of adhesives and compound wood products held together with flammable resins makes new buildings more dangerous.
After a horrific fire in Achusnet in 2010, the state Office of Public Safety investigated firefighters' complaints. Earlier this year, the state revised building codes to require metal fasteners instead of adhesives on ceilings. The state also instructed builders to put fire blocks in the large open spaces created when modules are stacked.
It may have only taken the factory a week or so to make the modules for the Overton home in East Orleans, but it took years of planning and nearly 400 pages of plans. Even with the end in sight, the job still had its demands. With the kitchen already installed and visible through the open wall of one module, rain meant trouble.
"Here you are, in the middle of a battlefield," Jacques Lapointe, owner of Pleasant Bay Homes of East Harwich, and developer for the Overton project, said at the site. With a camera strapped around his neck, he looked like any other spectator on the job site, marveling at the dexterity of the crane operator and the construction crew as they swung the big boxes into place.
Lapointe hoped to get at least half the boxes in place and wrapped in protective plastic before the forecasted torrential rains the next day. And then there was the matter of timing the arrival of the next six trailer loads, still out on the highways between the Pennsylvania plant that built these modules and the East Orleans building site.
But this wasn't Lapointe's first modular home, he's built nearly 200 on the Cape since he began in 1999, and he wasn't sweating it. Yet.
People choose modular construction for a number of reasons, Shulman said. He recently built one in Wareham that was located in a coastal flood zone and had to be placed on top of 14-foot pilings. It was easier to use a crane and place completed sections on the pilings than to have carpenters working on ladders at heights over 40 feet, he said. For the Overtons, time was the enemy. The law that allowed them to build a five-bedroom house on their 28,000-square-foot lot expires in July. After that, Orleans septic regulations will allow only a two-bedroom home.
The fact it was 15 to 25 percent cheaper than traditional construction certainly helped.
"There are no cost overruns. If the price of materials changes, it is not passed along to the consumer," said Shulman. He credits the Internet with educating people as to the quality difference between modular and other manufactured homes.
"We have found our product (is comparable to) the high end (traditional) builder," Shulman said. His company is the largest full service modular home builders in southeastern Massachusetts, he said.
The Overtons were won over when they walked through a neighbor's modular home and couldn't tell that it wasn't a traditionally build home.
While some complain that modular homes take jobs away from local builders, Richard Bryant, the president of the Home Builders and Remodelers Association of Cape Cod said his organization is not opposed to them.
"Any home start is a good one as far as we're concerned," Bryant said, particularly if the contractor employs local tradesmen.
Henry DiGiacomo, chief executive officer of the Cape and Islands Association of Realtors, said modern modular homes are now known for their energy efficiency and quality.
girder in steel structure "If I were buying a new home, I would not view (modular construction) as a detriment but as a benefit," he said.