Coming to terms with prefab life

Oh, the prefabricated life, how I do love thee, let me count the ways. I woke up in a prefab bed. Made coffee in a prefab coffee maker. Showered in a prefab shower. Put on prefab clothes. I am now writing on a prefab laptop computer. In a while, I will walk out of my site-built house and get in my prefab pickup and drive to fab downtown Oklahoma City. And I will sit at my prefab desk to do more work. By now, any pre-died-inthe-wool stick homebuilders reading this — hey, how are y'all? — might be suspicious that I'm setting up to say something untoward about their bread-and-butter, houses built on site, not prefab, as in a factory or with some other kind of offsite assembly process. No. But I do like what prefab design expert and writer Sheri Koones had to say about the words used to describe different kinds of prefab houses. “Prefab” has a stigma that is pretty much undeserved, Koones said. It goes way beyond the difference between “manufactured housing,” and “mobile homes,” which haven't officially been called mobile homes for years despite their chassis, and “trailer houses,” which apparently is what people called trailer houses everywhere but Oklahoma, where they were known, and tagged as, “house trailers.” Koones wrote “Prefab 101: Defining The Many Forms Of Factory-Built Homes” for Forbes. Read it all at www. tinyurl.com/prefab101. Here are the highlights. • “Modular is one of the most complete types of prefab housing. Modules or boxes are built in the factory, and wrapped and taken by a flatbed truck to the construction site. One or many modules are lifted by a crane and set on a foundation.” • “Panelized construction is

another popular type of prefab method. All of the exterior walls are installed on site like a jigsaw puzzle. Some panelized homes arrive on site with windows and doors installed and others have those parts installed on-site.” • “Structural Insulated Panels are another form of panelized construction. These are panels that generally have two oriented strand boards (OSB) that are fused with a type of insulating foam in the center.” • “Kit houses go back to the old days when people bought houses in a catalog (think Sears houses), and they were shipped by train to the house site. However, kit houses today are far more sophisticated, efficient, and elaborate.” Why bother to learn these differences? Koones said that while prefab houses still make up just 5 percent of all home construction, they're growing. Plus, innovation always meets growing need or demand for affordabilty, whether for houses or coffee makers — see tiny houses, or my son-inlaw's Nespresso. And, speaking of millennials, who reportedly are slowly taking to homeownership, if they do it like everything else, it'll be their own way, not necessarily their parents'.