Extreme Home Makeover

They're down the street from my neighborhood doing their thing.

I drove by there by chance on Sunday night and I noticed a street was blocked off and it was manned. Then I heard on the radio on Monday morning that they were in town. Then I drove past the old IBM building at lunch yesterday and noticed a tent city starting to raise. That's when I figured the street that was blocked off is where all the work is going on. Turns out it is.
On the way to work this morning as I drove by the old IBM plant I could see people with blue T-shirts and white hard hats hanging around.

Here's a link to the builders site that has pics of their progress.

http://www.jacobshomes.com/extreme/

They did a house a few towns away from me. My grandfather knew the builder so we got the blue volunteer shirts and got to go on the site. It was pretty sweet. Quite the operation that those guys run to get these houses done.

I know that the new houses that they build have to be built to code, but is the house of a quality build? Seems like if they can finish a 4,000 sq ft house in a couple days that they'd have to cut some corners. Are these houses gonna start falling apart in 10-15 years?

It's built faster because there are a lot more people working on it, not because of corners being cut.

As an example... there are maybe 2-3 men on a dry wall crew that hangs drywall for an entire house.
On the Extreme Make Over's there are maybe 2-3 men hanging drywall per room, doing the same quality work.

If you've ever watched the show, you can see the house is just packed with people working. A normal work site doens't look anything like that.

X2 with Austin, more people less work.

I'm probably wrong, usually am. Now that I think of it half the house is pre-fab anyways so its more a matter of setting the walls in position and nailing/bolting them down. I know that they have a very large and motivated crew which helps greatly. I have heard that pre-fab houses arent always the best, some companies like to use inferior materials which is why a pre-fab house is usually cheaper and has a lower re-sale value.

Have you ever noticed that they rarely ever build a house with a basement? Must take too long to set the concrete for a basement. If these houses they built had basements they would be much larger house in terms of square footage.

After reading some of the local forums, I've learned that the builder was made aware of the project long before. The builder has had time to pre-fab what he can to speed the job up.
Pre-fab homes can be a bit on the cheap side, but when a quality builder is pre-fabbing his own stuff, the quality tends to be there.

I've seen a couple of the Extreme shows that did have a basement.

When they did the house in MA, there were literally complete portions of the house trucked in. These outside walls were drywalled and painted. They basically just screwed it together and built the inside.

I'm supposed to get dyno'd on Saturday but it's looking like that may fall through. If my Saturday ends up being open, I might try to get over there and click off some pics. The wife wants to go over there on Sunday. The family is due to return between 1 and 3 pm.