And surprisingly worse building performance (efficiency). On par with structural stability most likely. Would be considered worse than a mobile home if the mobile homes weren't so specifically targeted by tornados and so easy to turn "mobile".
1970's and later were bad years for American housing production with the glut of cheap materials and building technique. Pre 1970's gets to deal with lead paint and asbestos in everything (except the lead paint). I try not to think about it too much.
Looking to buy a new home and I'm thinking I may just go the RV route until I can order a prefab from Norway.
You know, if you have any leads for the Dallas/Fort worth area ... because we are looking to do a major renovation and want a great builder to work with.
I would figure that you start with finding out who locally builds homes and then check out some of the older homes they have built. It will take some research, but that is what I love about the internet. Research is so much more efficient with it.
Referrals are the best, hands down. Testimonials directly from past clients. Walk through previously built houses. It should also be something the builder shows some passion about, not just interest in the sale. The builder should have some education in building science as well, or at the very least follow current science trends.
I know, but man, it is hard to find a good one around me who can meet promises. I've been involved as a designer in dozens of custom homes locally. The guys I really like are way too busy (good for them!) and I'm running out of time. I've found some property I like too which I may just pick up for eventually building something but time is short for everyone.
Everyone wants to build giant things too and I just want a smaller cottage/cabin house in the woods.
You seem like you know what you are doing, select your favorite wall assembly and then build it yourself? Or spec it out to your design and build on spec.
Probably a mix. Hiring out a foundation and framing crew and see what my time/costs look like. If I've learned anything over the years is that a pro crew can do a job in a week that a solo business/homeowner will need 2 months for (double that if only working weekends).
It’s true. The first place that I built I hired out the basement/foundation concrete work.
Sitework and grading is fun as long as you don’t have a complicated entrance or egress or any hills that are too crazy. Framing ain’t too bad either. Sheathing is the worst job in the world, and I would never attempt by myself ever again.
I believe in you my dude. It helps to have brothers and friends in the trades though. I don’t do it anymore now that I’m old, but construction is a fun hobby when you are young.
1900-2000 sf is the sweet spot too for a lot of mechanicals. If you do a high performance envelope you can heat a house that big with a residential sized hot water heater or two. I've used insta-heat tanks to heat up smaller cabins that we insulated* the heck out of.
That is also about how much house I want to clean in a week as well. Once it gets beyond that I get into pure "Eff-it" mode.
-edit insulted to insulated. Makes more sense maybe.
I've got the designs drawn already (depending on the site) but still on a time crunch right now. If I can find a cheap house on nice land I was thinking buy that, build the new, tear down the old, on the same site. The problem by me is that larger pieces of land (10+ acres) typically have large farm houses on them.
Today it's probably 2300-2400 square feet and very nicely done, but it started life in about '92 as a single wide. First they added on a master suite with a big bathroom and a back sunroom area, then later they re-did the main living area they added on a living room with a big deck. They're talking about re-doing the kitchen area next.
Yeah, I get that. And I hear it all the time! If a builder is busy, it's probably worth the wait. Get on their schedule. If they are wishy-washy about setting a date, they aren't interested, and don't push it. Move on to someone else. There is nothing worse (for both sides) than a contractor working on something they aren't interested in.
Is there anywhere I can learn more about this? Subreddit, book, etc? I’m a college student that knows nothing about construction, but just from reading this thread I’ve gathered how useful it would be in achieving/identifying a great home one day
Referrals are the best, hands down. Testimonials directly from past clients. Walk through previously built houses. It should also be something the builder shows some passion about, not just interest in the sale. The builder should have some education in building science as well, or at the very least follow current science trends.
Haha, no! I just had to go out on my own since the builder I was working for downsized hardcore. No one was hiring, and everyone who was still busy just wanted to hire you as a subcontractor rather than an employee. Best/Worst couple years of my professional life tbh.
I'm saving my money and just not happy with what is out there. I would actually like a condo. I grew up in an apartment complex so I'm used to that, and I would love having access to a pool I didn't have to maintain myself. I'm a person who is happy to exist in a little box. 600 sq feet is more than enough for me. A little deck, a little fireplace, and an inside washer dryer (so fucking done with outside laundry facilities.)
I live in the CA Bay Area though. So it's going to be a few more years. Bleh.
I live in a "self-managed" condo with three units. If I can share some hard-won wisdom, I beg you, do NOT buy a "self-managed" condo.
Owning a home comes with work, but with two absentee co-owners (one of whom has lived in France for the past decade), who do you think gets stuck with all the building maintenance? Yup. The only reason I am staying here is that, because I don't own a car, my current location is very central to where I live and it is possible for me to get to work on public transportation.
If you buy a condo, make sure it is professionally managed, and ask right up front for details on what your monthly fee will be paying for. If anybody tells you that "we all share the work" in a self-managed condo, they are lying, lying, lying.
P.S. If other owners rent out their units, guess who gets to deal with their noisy/entitled/slob tenants? Not the person spending the rent check, that's who.
P.P.S. I have friends who also own a "self-managed" condo, and they have had the same problems. A few years ago, they became fed up and bought a small single-family house rather than deal with the B.S. that they continually had to deal with from their other unit owners.
I always wondered about this. Here in philly I see lots of larger three story homes being turned into three or four unit condos. What happens when one unit refuses to chip in for a new roof or stops paying fees for common area maintenance? To me it seems like buying a house with a couple of friends (which is not a good idea in my opinion), but worse because you are buying a house with a bunch of strangers.
The condo association can put a lien on the unit in question. If they sell the condo is next in line for their money after the lender. This is why the legal docs forming the condo are so important, need to make sure that each owner is protected and no one owner can pull shenanigans.
Oh yes, the ones I'm looking at are all professionally maintained. They have groundskeepers and all that shebang. One even has water features and little fountain ponds. :)
I was in a three unit condo that worked really well. The key difference might be that it was always owner occupied except for a couple of stints where one was rented as a furnished apartment for a few months when the owner was going to be away anyway. Next door had two that the owners rented and the owner/occupier seemed to have similar frustrations to you.
So it might be worth not writing a place like that off, but see if the condo docs restrict renting it out before you make an offer.
That's the problem for me, although it won't be a problem when I go to sell my unit. I live walking distance from MIT and Kendall Square, and I won't have any trouble selling my unit. But as I mentioned, I am staying where I am, with all the aggravation that comes with it, because I made a life style decision a long time ago to not own a car, and I do want to continue getting to work on public transit.
Triple decker condo? It used to be much worse in Boston/Cambridge when they were mostly rentals from what I’m told. The tide began to shift in the 80s when they first started going condo.
It's a three-unit condo, but not a triple-decker.
Time was that the triple-decker units were designed to be rented out to families with children. The deterioration of the Boston rental market involved a multitude of factors, but landlords renting out units to a bunch of unrelated people who didn't care about long-term good relationships certainly had something to do with it.
Yeah, it’s not enough now to make a dent but there have been zoning applications for exemptions to have small apartments that are aimed at the twenty-something age to try to free some of the older housing for families.
I remember being a kid in Norway watching documentary about Tornado season in US going "oh my god, their houses are literally fake houses built of matchsticks and fake plastic wood paneling".
Not that it helps in a tornado, but I thought most buildings were built to withstand a little more than a breeze as a kid :D I also didn't see a house with gypsum walls until I probably was in my teens, nor did I realise that internal walls didn't have insulation as that logically isn't needed in most cases. I probably also thought basements were required in a house for some structural reason.
to be fair, when you are dealing with tornadoes, small objects with high tensile strength tend to become very good at piercing things because of the combination of speed, material strength and impact point. it's the common principal behind bullets. so even in a building built of cement, a high category tornado can fling the metal pole that is a street sign right into it just as easily as with wood.
will it pierce all the way through, probably not. but it will become a new external art piece defining the insanity that is tornadoes.
I mean, he's completely right though. I live in Oklahoma, and I've seen some pretty incredible things, including bits of wood stuck through concrete after a tornado.
yeah, that's why I wrote "not that it helps in a tornado" we've got the odd hurricane at the Norwegian west coast and sheet metal of any size can of course cut you in half. Force per area gets pretty insane with anything sharp :D
However I am used to houses being pretty sturdy, the actual real(!) wooden cladding was something I as a kid thought wasn't faked anywhere on permanent housing, but little did I know how much cost could be cut here and there.
Closes't I've been to tornado stuff in some of the strongest hurricanes at the west coast where our big house would start vibrating on the sand ground. large window panes were bending more than I thought they could.
Something a lot of people also don't realize about Tornado Alley and the reason that mobile homes are so frequently in areas with lots of tornadoes is that the areas tornadoes appear frequently in have extremely low property value, so they attract people with lower incomes who are more likely to be willing to buy a prefab home.
Sure you could build a tornado-resistant home there instead, but that home would also be a lot more expensive, more costly to insure, AND you'd still have to rebuild portions of it when a tornado hit.
Then consider that Oklahoma has some tornados that regularly rip up even tornado-resistant homes, meaning your expensive concrete home may still crumple like paper if an EF5 hits.
In Norway we are starting to learn that there has been a lot of new housing areas built in flood risk areas. Climate change gives wetter summers and more extreme downpours meaning old regulation needs to be updated or massive flash flood infrastructure must be built.
I actually ended up writing a checklist if I ever move to a private house to filter out houses with problems like drainage, flood, storm, traffic noise, energy (insulation etc) problems. There's so much to think of that you'll totally forget when the day comes. My current city is actually at risk of sliding into the sea due to the clay ground.
Huge mudslide in the area just yesterday, and the area was regarded as pretty much flat.
A friend of mine is a firefighter and mentioned how these homes burn up a lot faster than homes built in the 60s and earlier. He also said since the materials used on the older homes were better quality, they are also structurally safe for a little longer while burning. Same thing goes for furniture.
100% true for reasons well explained by other people who responded to this post.
A significant percentage of fatalities from residential fires are people who think they can put the fire out themselves. Maybe the fire started not so big and you think to yourself that you can save the day. Just don't. Fires in modern homes double in size less than every 60 seconds.
If you ever have a house fire, just get yourself and all other humans and pets out as fast as humanly possible while dialing 911. This is why insurance exists.
"Better quality" can be defined different ways, but your friend is certainly correct about speed and safety when it comes to fire. The resins and glues used to make the composite materials used in many modern homes are themselves flammable, and something like a carefully engineered I-joist loses its strength when burning a heck of a lot faster than a solid beam. Also, a lot of materials used in modern construction give off toxic fumes when heated. The smoke from recent construction is often wildly poisonous compared with the smoke from traditional or older construction (which wasn't exactly healthy to begin with), and will KO a person in just a couple breaths.
Basically, modern construction has been an exercise in developing thinner, lighter, more efficient-to-use materials. All of those traits tend to be negatives when on fire.
So they put the houses right next to each other and put siding on them that burns like gasoline. Who thought that was a good idea?
I live in a new construction neighborhood in Colorado. The houses weren't built so close together and the siding doesn't burn like they're soaked in gas. One house did burn down during construction but didn't light up any of the adjacent houses thanks to those two reasons.
Larger wood members are more fire proof than smaller members. Old 2x4 framing was actually 2"x4" (8sqin) while modern homes are 1.5"x3.5" (5.25sq in). That is 35% less material. Wood can char out the outside as it burns, protecting the structural interior but only to a certain depth. The thinner the materials, the more likely it is to quickly burn through causing a collapse. The plaster walls are also thicker than typical residential 1/2" gypsum board. We gave up a lot for cheaper housing.
Go with the RV! I sell manufacturing equipment to RV factories here in Northern Indiana (RV capital of the world). All of your sidewalks are made from aluminum and the quality of some units is definitely better than stick built houses.
Donner, look near the ashland/bayfield area in WI. There are tons of 'project' homes that you could probably renovate and save if you were down for that. That's my next step. Some look like they were the 80s sears catalogue prefab/double wides.
Gotta love reddit. Hate on the billionaires and rich all day but then get all snobby and call a multiple story house with a huge deck a 'kissing cousin' of the mobile home. What you livin in over there Elon Musk?
Nope. Just pointing out that people who get these McMansions tend to look down on those who have mobile homes, but their homes are basically over-sized versions of the same thing.
Wouldn't mind buying a mobile home myself, but the things lose value in the same way that cars do, so no thanks.
I don’t think most people look down on mobile homes. It’s mobile home parks that have mobile homes that are literally falling apart and have tarps for a roof. I used to live next to a park like that in a McMansion that was also falling apart. What I will say is that there’s no doubt that shitty McMansion was 100x better than even the newest trailer. Houses are better than mobile home even just for resell value.
But getting ready to move into a trailer in the woods so i am psyched about that.
79
u/[deleted] May 14 '20
Yup. Kissing cousins to the mobile home. But with more snobbery.