From: games@max.u.washington.edu
Newsgroups: misc.consumers.house
Subject: Re: why don't we live in prefab concrete houses?
Date: 9 Oct 92 18:07:06 GMT
Article-I.D.: max.1992Oct9.110706.1

In article <6023@dove.nist.gov>, bagwill@swe.ncsl.nist.gov (Bob Bagwill) writes:
> My impression is, after land, labor is the biggest building cost.
> Prefab armatures for ferro-concrete, reusable aluminum forms for
> poured concrete, and those insulated mesh panels you bolt together
> and spray concrete on, all seem like fast and low-labor methods.
> 
> Are they too expensive?  Are they too difficult?  Are they too
> uncomfortable.  Are they too ugly?  Are they just unpopular?
> Commercial construction uses a lot of techniques and materials that
> yield a lower cost per square foot than standard residential
> construction.  Why don't they use them for houses?
> 
> And, where (besides USENET :-) would one find answers to these kinds of
> questions?
> --
> Bob Bagwill
> bagwill@swe.ncsl.nist.gov

My impression is that many people would see it as too expensive (never mind
the realities of the situation)  Most people understand a little sticklike
2x4, and they could even think about working with one, but to go to a 
prefabbed concrete wall, you are no longer in the range of what is 
understandable or doable by most people.

Second point:  And this may not be one of the main reasons, but it is
an important point...  If I want to remodel my house, and the whole thing
is concrete walls, then I am going to have a hell of a time cutting a new
door, or putting up a new wall, etc...  I would be more likely to want
to buy a house that I could tweak a little bit (because I do tweak them
a bit)  This is strictly personal preference.

Here is my suspicion on the real reason...  The commercial spaces that
you speak of are only walled on the outside with concrete.  The interior
T.I. (tenant Improvements) are done with normal wood frame (or steel
frame), and gyprock.  This means that for your house, the only thing that
you would build out of extra concrete would be the exterior walls.  And
commercial buildings tend not to have the nice peaked roofs, so that cant
be done in a commercial fashion either.  This means that you loose economies 
of scale as compared to the larger commercial buildings.  You would have to
bring in a crane for less than a day to erect the exterior walls, but you would
pay for the full day.

The cost of a house is determined typically by its square footage, but that
is convention.  If you look at where the money goes, a lot is in the 
electrical, the plumbing, the kitchen cabinets, the bathroom fixtures, the
wall-to-wall carpet (or oak floor), the fireplace, and chimney, the ...
you name it.  In light of the total cost, it looks like your savings on
a house project, would not amount to much in terms of a percentage of the
final total.

Oh, yeah, your building general contracter is typically also the framer, and
so you are taking work from his guys for the exterior walls, but that means
bringing in an extra contracter for the exterior walls, for which you now
pay extra...

And last but certainly not least...  Nobody does it that way now.  This may
seem either a totally stupid or a brilliant thing to say, but...
We have a business impetus to keep doing things the way we are now.  It takes
time to learn a new way of construction, and that means spending money.  It
also means taking a risk that may not pay off.  We have architects that have
never designed a residencial house that way.  We have inspectors that have
never had to interpret the UBC for a concrete wall house, and we have a UBC
that was not written with concrete walled residences in mind meaning that
there may be silly provisions there (I don't know if this is the case, but then
that is the point, neither will the builder without a good deal of study),
and finally there are the neighbors...  What would they say...
Let me give you an example...  My house is a nice lightish steel gray, with
high gloss jet black trim.  Contrary to how it sounds, it is very attractive.
(and it took me a while to convince my wife that it would look nice, but now
that we have it, she loves it)  I want to paint a small amount of trim on
the front door fire engine high gloss red just to help the door
stand out, and she is telling me that that color just simply isn't painted
on a house..., when I ask why, she points at all of the other houses around,
and asks me if I see that color used anywhere, then she tells me that she
has made her point.  However, I think that it will help set off the front
door, and the fact that others are very conventional with color is not the
point, it is the end result.  Well in any case, this is the same psychological
imetus that would tend to keep someone from even considering a concrete wall
house.

Oh, yeah, the last point.  About a mile from my house is a house that has been
built from cinder block, and the trim is bright green, and the roof is black,
and the cinder block has been left natural, unpainted...  It is set back
in the woods just a bit, and it looks like a hobbits house, and I love it,
but it is very unconventional.  The moral of this paragraph is that even though
I have listed several reasons against the doing of this thing, I am not
personally against it.

			John Stevens-Schlick