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What are the Advantages of Prefab Additions?
Expanding the size of your home can be accomplished through purchasing prefab additions. As with any other home addition, prefab additions are reliable, durable, and relatively easy to attach to the rest of your home. As more and more people are drawn towards prefabricated homes, additions of this type are becoming increasingly popular.
Building a traditional addition onto any home is a complex endeavor. Not only do homeowners have to endure constant construction, but the cost of hiring a carpentry team to build an addition is quite high. Since builders will have to literally knock down a wall or two in order to build onto an existing home, this process can take months to complete. With the dawn of prefabricated homes, creating extra living space is no longer a difficult and time consuming process.
Prefab additions are built inside of factories. When the addition has been built, it is then transported to a home. Attaching the prefab addition to a home usually takes one to two days. Frequently, the cost of purchasing a prefab addition is far less than having an addition built from scratch on-site. Many people who consider prefab additions are often concerned about the quality of these add-ons. There is a common idea that prefabricated homes are not quality homes, but this is not generally the case. The fact of the matter is that prefab home additions go through rigorous testing, quality control, and many aspects of these additions are machine-made. In short, a prefab addition may, in many cases, be better than an addition that is built from scratch.
As with anything else, while there are many advantages to prefab additions, there is also one main disadvantage. If you want to have an addition custom-built, this may be hard to accomplish with a prefab. While some manufacturers will acquiesce to customer specifications, most prefabricated additions are purchased as-is.
No matter what kind of home addition you are considering, keep in mind that you may have to alter your home's foundation, as many homes cannot withstand the weight of an addition. Thus, discussing this issue with a builder is a good idea; most prefabricated manufacturers will send a qualified representative to your home in order to inspect your home's structure. You can purchase prefab additions by looking for manufacturer showrooms in your area, shopping online, or seeking a personal reference. Regardless of the home addition that you choose, make sure to select a reputable company or contractor.
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Discussion Comments
@Mutsy - Many companies look to prefabricated construction especially when they moved into a new location and need a building set up right away. The great thing about building a modular building like this is that if the company decided to move to another location, they can take the structure with them.
I had a friend that owned a large freight forwarding business that did this. He couldn’t believe how quickly the structure was built and how cheap it was. He is even considering buying a prefab modular home for his personal residence because he was amazed at the craftsmanship of these structures.
I live in Miami, and although I have seen some beautiful modular homes in other parts of the state, they are usually not used in this neck of the woods because most are not in line with the strict building codes that we have in Miami.
Ever since Hurricane Andrew hit the Miami area in 1992, our building standards completely changed. Our homes have to be made with concrete block construction which is different than what these prefab housing is made of. They are usually made of steel or wood.
This is why you don’t see any prefab housing here. I have seen prefabricated housing in other parts of Florida and I have to say the homes are nice and the prices are really affordable.
I really wish that this type of housing were allowed here, because I would have been able to buy a modular home and easily expanded it with a modular home addition that would have far less expensive than buying a newly constructed home with traditional construction.
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