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Brochure Touts Speed, Quality of Panelized Home Building
A new free publication from the NAHB Building Systems Councils — “Panelized Homes: Custom Designs, Your Building Solution” — provides prospective home buyers with information on the advantages of panelized homes.
The illustrations in the 12-page, full-color brochure are a great resource for home builders trying to explain the panelized construction process, said Jeremy Bertrand, director of NAHB’s Building Systems Councils. “It’s much easier to talk about structural insulated panels — SIPs — when you can show your customer what they look like,” he said.
The brochure includes articles that offer tips for choosing the right type of panelized home and describes several benefits for home buyers:
- Panelized systems can turn design dreams into a reality. “With computer-assisted design programs, designers and engineers can turn just about any idea into a working blue print,” the publication says. “In many cases, the plans for your home are sent directly from a designer’s computer to the panelization shop floor, ensuring your home is built accurately and efficiently.”
- They are faster to build. The panels can be engineered and fabricated in a manufacturing plant in just a few days before being shipped to the home site, and once on site, the shell of a panelized home can be erected and made weather-tight in just a few days. This can cut weeks off the construction time compared to on-site stick building and reduce delays associated with weather, the delivery of materials and subcontractor scheduling. It also keeps the home safe and dry, and free of the warping, mold, mildew and squeaking that adverse weather may cause.”
- The precision and efficiency achieved in a panelized facility can’t be matched on a job site. “These state-of-the-art machines produce panels that are engineered to the highest quality, ensuring your home is built precisely square and dimensionally correct without room for human error,” the brochure says. “Your home’s panels are built to meet your local building code before they even leave the facility, no matter if your area requires special considerations for high winds, floods or more.” The precision achieved by panelized construction results in homes that are comfortable year round and less costly to heat and cool.
- Panelized systems eliminate costly overruns. Not only are framing materials not subject to weather delays, but they also reduce the number of laborers and subcontractors needed on the job site. “Depending on your location, finding and scheduling subcontractors can be time-consuming and costly, with imperfections resulting from the varying degrees of expertise being applied at different jobs,” the brochure says. “Panelized construction allows a builder to better schedule and coordinate your new home’s completion.”
In a study of the integration of panels into the production home building process commissioned by the Department of Housing and Urban Development, conducted by Steven Winter Associates and released by the Partnership for Advancing Technology in Housing (PATH) last September, builders using panelized housing technologies reported that “they can reduce the amount of time spent on site, reduce labor costs, can improve the quality of the homes they build (which results, according to the builders surveyed, in fewer costly call-backs to correct problems), and can offer builders a niche market in meeting the desires of potential home buyers looking for energy-efficient homes.”
The two “rewards” most often mentioned by the panelized builders interviewed for the PATH study were faster construction and better construction quality.
For a copy of “Panelized Homes: Custom Designs, Your Building Solution,” click here to visit the Panelized Building Systems page on the NAHB Web site; or e-mail Cortney Klein at NAHB, or call her at 800-368-5242 x8357.
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