Considering alternatives

After the disappointing news from the delivery assessment the other day we have been exploring other possible options for building a house on this land.  Of course if Blu Homes is going to have difficulty delivering it's more than certain that the other prefab companies will have the same or an even harder time considering the others require wider roads and have similar weight constraints.  This leaves us with building a conventional or "stick-built" home on-site.

We are starting to talk with some architects and builders in West Marin to figure out how costs might vary with a custom home.  So far we have received building estimates from $300-$350 per square foot.  This figure is somewhat comparable to what we spent when we built our addition in San Francisco in 2006.  There are a few downsides to building a stick-built home:

The project will take longer

Building a home on site requires construction to happen in succession.  The foundation and other site work must be complete before the home framing can begin.  The prefab house manufacturer can save time by sequencing the site work and module building in parallel – largely independent from one another.

Project timeline (from Blu Homes' information booklet)

Construction loans will be carried longer

Construction loans are more risky for lenders and so their interest rates are higher.  While building conventionally might take months and be delayed by bad weather, prefab construction takes weeks and can be installed and ready for occupation in days.  This means that a higher-interest construction loan can be more quickly converted into a lower-interest conventional mortgage, thus saving money.

Costs are less predictable  

Assuming that you let Blu handle the site work, by the end of the detailed design phase the costs for a Blu home are fixed.  This is a pretty sizable advantage over working with a traditional builder where costs seems to shift around and there are almost always budget overruns.

Impact to the neighborhood is greater

When building on-site a construction crew will be traveling to and from the job site 5 days a week for however many months construction is occurring. This can add up to quite a neighborhood disturbance – not the way you'd typically like to introduce yourselves to your new neighbors, am I right?

The fewer days you are making construction noise and blocking road access the better, and installing a prefab home generally minimizes this disruption.

Delivery assessment

One of the unique factors to working with a prefabricated home builder is that the home is not constructed on site, but rather built in a factory and transported by truck to the land.  This, obviously, presents some challenges in "delivery," as they put it.  The entire road – from factory to foundation mush satisfy minimum height, width, radius/elevation and weight criteria.  Again, you have to imagine a semi truck carrying a 60-foot house module when finding a suitable piece of land way out in the country.

Normally delivery is all included in the price of the house (even across the country), but in certain circumstances Blu will ask for additional money if there are special delivery costs to be factored in.  Last week Blu Homes performed our delivery assessment and we found out we may have some problems with the bridge that crosses a small culvert on the driveway to the land.

The bridge in question

They've determined that the bridge is not crossable by the heavy trucks and they have proposed craning the modules over the bridge onto trailers on the opposite side of the 13-foot bridge.  Somehow this process adds up to a $41,000 surcharge.

Honestly, I can't imagine paying that much money to cross a bridge.  I would guess that the bridge, itself, is worth about that much.  Unless we can come up with an alternative to this plan it might put the whole prefab project in jeopardy.

Selecting a prefab manufacturer

What is modern prefab?

Prefabricated or manufactured houses have a history and connotation of being devoid of character, low-quality construction, and only one step up from a double-wide mobile home.

Traditional prefab home

Architects began to appreciate the benefits of prefab and a number of higher-end modern designs began to surface.  When Lena and I got married and discussed buying a home we were quite curious about prefab building and whether it would be possible in a dense urban environment like San Francisco.  A local architect named Michelle Kaufmann had just started to promote her "Glidehouse" as an ecologically-responsible alternative to site-built houses.  Lena and I loved the idea and even talked briefly with Michelle, but buying vacant land in San Francisco is, in reality, not easy.

And it was just as well because Michelle Kaufmann found it difficult to work with the manufacturers and ended up selling the rights to her prefab designs to Blu Homes in 2008.

We returned to the idea in 2012 after broaching the idea of a vacation home and contacted Blu along with a number of other manufacturers of prefabricated houses.  Here are some of the ones we considered:

1. LivingHomes
2. Weehouse
3. Stillwater Dwellings
4. Method Homes
5. Resolution: 4 Architecture

LivingHomes

Stillwater Dwellings

Weehomes

Resolution: 4 Architecture

Method Homes

Why Prefab?

Most companies will focus on four reasons to consider prefabricating a house instead of building it onsite:

1. Cost (companies claim that prefabs are 25-50% less expensive)
2. Environmental impact (less wasted material)
3. Quality (precision of construction is higher)
4. Speed (crews can build the house simultaneous to the foundation and other site work)

We haven't been able to verify any of these, but they sure make for good marketing.  In San Francisco construction roughly ranges from $500-$1,000 per square foot.  That could put our project around $2.6M if it were built conventionally on-site.

Once we do our financial plan I'll calculate how our project budget will compare to this figure.


Why we chose Bluhomes

Weehomes was really interesting and seemed the most affordable, but was located in Minnesota and did not manufacture their own modules.  Their designs were also a bit uninspired.

Overall I think I liked the Resolution: 4 Architecture designs the best because they were dynamic and breathtaking.  Unfortunately, they are on the East Coast and I don't think shipping the modules to California was cost-effective (or even possible at the time).

I don't even remember talking with Method Homes. They do have factories both on the East  and West Coasts (Pennsylvania and Washington), but I don't think their designs inspired me much.

Stillwater was the least interesting.  There was something about both the website and interaction I had with the sales person that turned me off.  I can't hardly remember the specifics, but it wasn't a hard choice to eliminate them.

Bluhomes is the only manufacturer at the time that was located in the San Francisco Bay Area.  They were also more established because they owned the design, engineering, and building of the homes they sell.  They pioneered a method of folding each module so that it will fit on a standard-sized semi truck trailer as opposed to an oversized "wide-load" truck that requires two-lane roads and an escort.

Blu Homes - Breezehouse

You can see a video below of one of their homes "unfolding" on site.  It's pretty spectacular!

They seemed the most capable to make it happen at the time and so we kept them at the top of the list.  From time to time we would attend one of their local events and talk with customers and employees about the process.  We toured a couple of completed homes, met one of their senior architects, even toured the factory in the former Mare Island Naval Shipyard, near Vallejo, CA.  It's impressive – if you ever have the opportunity you should visit.

Meeting with Marin County planners

Yesterday I met with Larry, from LAK Associates, and my agent, Stephen Pringle, at Marin's Civic Center where the Planning Division has its office.

Marin County Civic Center: Frank Lloyd Wright's last and only public commission

We met with a planner to research what record the county had on this parcel and what was required of us to do to receive building permits.

Marin Planning (Room 308)

The county is in the process of digitizing all of their paper records, but chances are that the records you are looking for are spread across multiple departments and they don't seem to cross-colaborate well.  I learned that you should never take "we don't have it" as an answer until you have gone to each department.

We did a cursory search on the parcel to see which ecological restrictions the land might be subject to.  In their database our planner noted that monarch butterflies were not breeding in the area, but spotted owl potentially were.  This she explained was due to the fir trees at one end of the property -- a favorite nesting habitat for the spotted owl.  Fortunately, building outside of the nesting season would mitigate any possible threat to the owls.

We decided to request a copy of all the records the county has for that parcel.  This is called a Planning Information Packet and it costs $128.  We also set up a consultation with one of the senior planners which is more than what we could accomplish over the counter.  The planner would spend time researching your case before the meeting in order to make it more productive.  This special 1-hour consult costs $290.  Also, bring cash or check -- they do not accept credit cards, as I found out and had to run down to the other end of the building to locate an ATM machine.

Our planner explaining the requirements for construction

Next we went down to the Department of Environmental Health (room 236) where a septic system would be approved, and requested all the records they had on file for this property.  They had nothing, and here's another lesson learned.  We asked for the records for the neighbors parcels and for the parcel number from which this one had originally been subdivided in 1998.

BINGO!  We found piles of records now and began to look through them in one of their conference rooms.  We found old biological reports that confirm no likely threat to native species and archeological reports stating that while the Miwok Indians settled on land close by, there had been no discoveries of native artifacts on the land.  Very good news!

Larry and Stephen review county records

While I was there we bumped into District 4 Supervisor, Steve Kinsey.   I guess it's good to know influential people, right?  That's why we are working with Larry and Stephen.

Finding land in Northern California

My wife, Lena, and I began this journey in December of 2012.  I set out to convince her that we should build a prefabricated vacation house in the country.  I had been researching and dreaming for years, but she was much slower to warm up to the idea.

We found a real estate agent pretty early in our search.  He was super-helpful in learning what went into building in Marin and Sonoma counties.  I highly recommend talking with Stephen Pringle if you are looking to buy in Marin.  More about Stephen in future posts.

Lena and I spent every spare weekend driving around the Bay Area and somewhat beyond looking for that perfect undeveloped parcel.  We searched from Mendocino County to Santa Cruz County and dragged our 4-year old son around for most of the road trips.  We were looking for a parcel with privacy -- lots of land or within a reasonable distance to open space for hiking.  We love the scrubby oaks of Northern California and found our first likely candidate in the Mayacamas Mountains in Cloverdale.  Lena was sold on the idea at that moment.

Perfectly quiet, perfect views, perfect size -- everything was perfect except the road getting to the parcel.  It was 25 minutes of treacherously windy and narrow, single-lane driving.  It was hard to imagine a semi-truck carrying a 60 foot house module making its way on that road, let alone one of us late at night.  We kept looking.

Our original search zone

In fact, we saw lots of nice properties but many of them were either out of our price range or geographic range.  We discovered after many 7-hour round trips that proximity to San Francisco was very important.  We made one other offer on a parcel in Lagunitas, but were not able to negotiate with the seller, so we kept looking.  Occasionally I would get discouraged and need to take a break from searching.  Sometimes Lena and I would disagree about a specific location and that was not always easy.

In the end we mostly shared a vision of what that ideal land would look like.  We settled on the Sonoma Valley and West Marin as targets for our search.  We loosened some criteria and tightened others and we kept looking.

Our refined search zone

The "One"

It had been a number of weeks since we had gone out looking.  Driving to "look at properties" had long lost its appeal to our son and so we would try to schedule other activities for him while we searched.  We drove out on our usual way across the Golden Gate Bridge with at least three possible destinations in mind.  The first time we looked for that 6-acre lot in Point Reyes we couldn't even find it.  Google maps led us to an empty field with no visible address nor for sale signs to be seen.  This was not unusual when searching for vacant lots, and so we looked around enough to know that the area was a possibility and moved on.

Stephen got the information from the listing agent and we went out shortly thereafter to meet her on the site.  She took us down a private drive and out to what was the prettiest little piece of land we have seen since we began looking more than a year and a half ago.  It has gently sloping land with a ravine on one side and a seasonal creek at the bottom.  It faces a partial view of the Nicasio Ridge and even a glimpse of the town of Point Reyes Station through the trees.  Best of all, much of it borders federal parkland.

Looking Northeast through the oaks and bay laurels

We had learned that there was much more to a parcel than the view, however.  Developing unincorporated land can be quite difficult.  There's soil composition for drainage and septic systems, there's connecting water and electric supply, there's building envelopes and zoning restrictions, and there's a whole variety of environmental restrictions.  Part of the reason we were originally drawn to the property was that the listing stated that much of the preparation and surveying had already been done by the owner.  There was municipal water on the site.  There was conduit already run underground for the electrical, and "perc" tests had already been performed to guarantee the quality of the soils for the septic system.  This was a pretty big selling point -- it's a bit surprising that this lot had been on the market for well over a year.

We made an offer knowing that we would still have time to do our due diligence within the escrow period and then waited for a response.  Our offer was below asking, but fair.  There was an adjoining lot that had sold four years prior and that gave us an excellent "apples-to-apples" comparison.  I had briefly met the owner during one of my visits to the land and so I made a personal appeal to him in a letter explaining how much I appreciated his experience and insight about the geology, plant and wildlife on the property; also what we loved about it.

Within a day we had our reply.  He had accepted our offer with a few (mostly administrative) clarifications.  We promptly paid a 1% deposit and we had ratified the contract and entered the escrow period.

At this point uncertainty takes over.  Holy shit, we're about to spend how much money?  Why was the seller so quick to accept our offer?  Is there something we don't know?  Are we going to regret this decision?  As much as I wanted to be excited about our pending purchase it's hard not to dwell on the fact that we will soon be depleting our savings and taking on more debt and risk on top of it.

Yesterday I returned to the parcel to meet some specialists and the excitement returned.  Everyone who sees it remarks on what a rare and beautiful find that piece of land is.  The gentle smells of coastal air and the peaceful sounds of dozens of bird varieties relax me the moment I step out of the car.

Over the coming months (and possibly years) I'll be updating this record of our house building experience.  I'll cover the closing process, what it's like to work with the home manufacturer, the permitting process in Marin, finding and working with contractors, and anything else that seems relevant.