A Tour of Factory-Built Houses | This Old House 

They've progressed to the point of being able to have huge CNC machines build a house from the ground up in concrete.

Cost cutting more gain for those investors. Quality suffers.

Hopefully they don't get hunted down and shot like someone else...

I'm pretty sure they got caught, otherwise there's no way they would have stopped at two homes.

So they can see all your saws hanging from the basement ceiling

They usually have to be better built to travel on tractor trailers.

Just use google. The guy mentioned at the beginning of the video, "Mike Connor," closed up his shop in VT ["Connor Mill Built Homes"] just last year/2020. So, you won't be buying a home from him, unless it's a one-off.

they really start at about 200k

In the Twin Cities, $200 to $250 per square foot is a fair estimate for single-family new construction. Most people can't afford them, so prices for 60-year-old tract houses are skyrocketing.

I drove past the Grafton Inn today. I will also go back to see if I can find this house. Must be near the common.

Most homeowners have no idea that almost everything is crooked and it's because you don't have a reference point

@@thecloneguyz in my case, it was just plain sloppy work.

Yes, i think most people need buy the Bostonian to English dictionary to watch the show. 😁

Agree 100% Would like to see a 1200-1600 ft Ranch home that is built and insulated well, not the 2200-3800 like they're always showing.

i hear you but it really looks worse, it darkens a room big time

I agree Jdplayz2007, should be a law against it !

august what would the law be against?

@@Jdplayz-bq4ys, painting clear old growth Yellow Pine because it basically doesn't exist anymore. Just an opinion, that's all and kinda joking around. I just like natural wood color with a coat or 5 of Poly, lol.

@@augustreil yeah our old house from 2007 had maple baseboards and birch floors. Something you don't see anymore.

I would be nervous also, but it sure looks like they did a good job ?

lol

@@Kevin-mp5of got that right. Its insane. Houses now in my area in MA are $600k+ minimum for a 1500 square ft house. Its disgusting really but with low rates people just pay it and are house poor.

A major reason houses cost so much these days is because land value has sky rocketed in most places. I wish they would tell you the value of the lot so that you can get a better sense of the real value of the building that is sitting on it.

@@Kevin-mp5of so are current lumber prices.

@@TheGuyThatEveryoneIgnores There's multiple reasons why costs are higher these days. Just inflation, the value of the dollar has dropped a lot over the years. $1000 from 1933 has the buying power of $20,121.69 today! Every time the government spends more than it has and prints money the value of the dollar just drops that much more... We also don't have as much resources as we once did, no longer can you harvest a forest of century old trees and thus getting good quality lumber cost more to get in significant quantities. Then there's the fact the population has more than tripled since 1933 but housing growth hasn't kept up for decades. So there's a supply shortage with ever growing demand that creates more competition that generates higher costs. Most of the population moved to high density cities that require a lot of infrastructure to function, adding a lot of costs for services, etc. all while forcing more and more of the population into apartment living and renting instead of owning, which also increases long term costs. Let's also not forget regulations, there's far more bureaucracy involved in housing now with more complicated and more demanding building codes that can tack on up to tens of thousands of line item costs before you can even build anything. Compounded with the trend towards big massive houses becoming the norm, prior to the 1950's the average home was below 1000 Sq Ft but now the average is well over 2200 Sq Ft. Plus consumerism as we have homes designed to require lots of stuff. So cost of housing has gone up for numerous reasons... The recent pandemic, the major forest fires, and the housing building boom has just created a perfect storm of events that now raises costs even more as resources get stretched thin and we can be facing another housing bubble crash if it doesn't ease off...

That is pretty cool.

Nope, unless a farmer lives next to you and has a building full of dried corn cobs !

@@Kevin-mp5of not dead, but incognito !

I wasn't aware his house is a Sears house.

He sounds bad in this episode though.

Mike Connor Mill-Built Homes. Sadly, he closed it down in 2020.

Yep

Well they don't call it the roaring 20s for nothing guys if you read the ad, it says the final cost is 1573.00 (23k today) A goog says the average salary was about 3k a year (44k today) Mind you this doesn't include the cost of land to build the house on. It makes sense though, a prebuilt house in a box that gets slapped together in a weekend would prob cost about half your yearly salary IN 19 FREAGIN 20!

Well like most things in that industry labor is what really increases the cost of the project, often costing much more than just the cost of materials. They you're paying for the labor of building it in a factory, which sure may cost less than site built, but then they need to deconstruct it and ship it to the site, then needs to be built on site, now if it's a very simple design then it probably would not be as costly, but something like that last home? No way that thing just snapped together easily. And things like plumbing, electrical you can't just lego that stuff together.

@@Mike__B I've worked on site built homes and most of the workers were people who couldn't get a real job. They were criminals and people who came across the boarder illegally. No one used there real social security numbers. They worked extremely hard and cheap. Can't so that with factory works which increase the overhead.

I think they already are in EU.

The started selling tiny homes in USA

There is a Lustron in my town. The owner said it was free to anyone willing to move it. He also owned the house next door and wanted a bigger yard. There weren't any takers, so, his plan was to knock it down. However, he kept it, but clad it in vinyl siding. It is great he saved it but why would anyone wrap it in vinyl. Sentimentality is a thing of the last, it seems.

@@bg147, Low maintenance is my guess ?

@@bg147 there's a vinyl siding-ed house in oak park MI near me that looks suspiciously lustron

Being able to appreciate the machinery is not the real reason they should know how to build from scratch As much as machines do make tasks a whole lot easier; wood is still wood and the tradesman needs to know how to work with the wood from the scratch point of view in order to get the machine to create the highest quality product it can make. It doesn't matter whether you are running a router by hand or CNC; it's still going to give poor results when cutting against the grain.

​PUT YOUR MASK OVER YOUR EARS WHEN READING IT.

leoz ... and that's why they invented bold crown moldings. You put that precut coffered wood in place and afterward you fill the gaps around the edges / walls with molding.

Machines can actually do it better than by hand, it's why virtually everything is manufactured in a factory these days. By hand just allows for craftsmanship and adapting to flawed materials. While machines are best for repeatable tasks with materials that get consistent results.

I will stick to my 100 year old craftsman bungalow. That house in the clip was overly detailed for me. It was a nice house and everyone has different tastes, though. We live in a modular world.

This is false, pre cut is factory because it's done in a factory and it cuts down the time it takes to build the house, as well as keep the materials in more ideal conditions where they won't have to constantly handle the outside weather, where site built houses can be exposed for months to even years. While there's no such thing as always one quality. Everything in the market can be built from lousy to ultra luxury high end. There are also companies still making house kits... Reasons for problems deal more with how the building codes have changed, how we now have massive bureaucracy that can make things take longer and tack on up to thousand line item fees that can add up to thousands or even tens of thousands before you can even lay the foundation, homes tend to be bigger and more complicated with a growing demand for high energy efficiency, there's more restrictions, income hasn't kept up with rising costs, housing growth not keeping up with population growth, etc.

@@ZeoCyberG These "pre cut" houses may spend less time being built but they are still out there in the weather. I'm sure they get rained on like anything else when they are being built - maybe not as much as a conventional house, but really some wet framing is just fine. They are probably more efficient with less material waste but how much of that is really passed onto the buyer?

@@ryanroberts1104 A lot because labor can be over 50% of the costs. While no, they aren't still out there in the weather because the house gets finished faster and the materials don't even leave the factory until they are going to be used in the build. Factory production also allows for mass production, which can reduce per unit costs to a fraction of what it cost to do them one at a time...

@@ZeoCyberG This is still not a very common construction method, mostly depends on if their is a local builder factory or not. People will confuse this with modular houses, and those are very different - they should have made that more clear.

@@ryanroberts1104 Perhaps, but they can only cover so much in a single short video clip. Understand, modular houses expands this to Pre-Fabs, manufactured houses, whether or not the structure has to meet local code, different types of foundations, idea of scalable sizes, etc. While the focus here was kit homes... Too much information all at once can also confuse people and this is still a TV show and not a webinar...

A used mobile home or an old abandoned home in a crappy area.