Blu homes factory and model home

Blu Homes' Factory

The other day we went out to Mare Island near Vallejo to visit the Blu Homes factory and general offices.   The goal of the visit was to discuss the project costs and the lending options. We met with our sales representative and the guy who facilitates relationships with the lenders with which Blu commonly works. We discussed Blu's new 2015 line of home designs and some options for lender financing a prefab home. In future posts I plan to discuss both of these in greater detail.

Blu Homes factory and offices

The Blu Homes factory is located in a former Navy shipyard where submarines, among other things, have been built in the years since World War II. The home modules are built on a production line where each module moves from station to station on large dollies. They're a little touchy about taking photos of the factory floor, so I was shooed away before I could get a photograph of the prefab modules actually being built.

The factory floor

Blu Model Home

Just the phrase, "model home" inspires images of rows of identical suburban tract homes, but Blu has taken a slightly different approach with their Mare Island model.  We visited their newly opened Breezehouse model home (they call it a "design center") which was installed on a hillside nearby with an incredible view of the San Pablo Bay.

Breezehouse living room

Breezehouse kitchen

Breezehouse entryway

The Breezehouse is the largest home that Blu Homes makes. The standard Breezehouse layout is about 3,000 square feet with 3-4 bedrooms – all on one level. As a result, this model is a little sprawling for me, but it has a nice separation of the common space from the more private bedroom space. The real selling point for both the Breezehouse and Sidebreeze is the breezespace which has optional NanaWall doors and create that indoor/outdoor feeling.

Breezehouse breezespace

Breezehouse NanaWall

Standard Breezehouse floor plan

Now that it's September, we are coming to the end of our escrow period and so we have limited time to complete our due diligence on the land.

We are well aware that there's no way to get complete assurance that our project will be approved for this lot, but we will do what we can to mitigate as much of our risk by understanding what the county will let us build and how much it will cost. We have a meeting with a Marin County planner this week, so we should get a clearer sense of what will be required of us to get through the permitting process in the coming months.