Buying a Factory Built Off Site Custom Home

Surprise! We recently moved and built a new home. It was a year and a half adventure. I will try to give a honest review of our experience with building a home off site. This was a long process, so sorry for the length.

We weren’t going move again. The plan was to eventually build on to Ugly House and to retire there. I honestly loved all the renovations we made to the home and was excited for the next phase of renovations we had planned. 

One April weekend I was out of town buying supplies for a bathroom renovation we had planned, and my husband called me with an interesting offer. We had to been contacted asking if we wanted to buy an acreage. My husband had often commented to the owners that their acreage was his dream property, and as they retired and move into town, they had remembered his comments. I came back from my trip early, and we headed out to take a look. As we drove down the half mile winding tree-lined driveway and the lake came into view, it was game over. Ugly House had been beat by 20 acres of once in a lifetime lake front property. Land like this doesn’t come available in our area.

A week later the paperwork was being drawn up to buy the property. Our future plans were thrown out the window. Ugly House was a project to be finished by another family.

Initially we hoped to salvage the original farmhouse. We love historic homes. Well okay, I love historic homes. However, the cost of renovating, moving and, adding on was prohibitive. We decided to build. 

Anyone who has built before knows that building a house is not for the faint of heart. We found a floor plan we loved and had four different contractors give us estimates. They were expensive. Like a 100k over our budget expensive. We could have made them work, but we would have been stretching ourselves to stay in Ugly House until the home was built. Not to mention on-site builds take time especially with the unpredictable Midwest weather. Each minute we were in Ugly House was time were paying two house payments. Not to mention we didn’t want to show and sell while living in Ugly House. I worked from home, we have 5 dogs and 3 kids. The house would be a nightmare to keep clean and leave for showings. (We couldn’t have known then, but COVID changed the housing market completely. We had 10 so people inquire about buying our house the minute we announced we were building. We sold it directly to a couple we knew and never had to list it.)

At this point, we had officially owned the property for 6 months and had been pursuing building for 9 months or so. My husband had a client recommend a company that builds the homes off site and moves them on a foundation. We started working with that company. From the first interaction, we were very clear. Budget was our #1 concern. We could jazz up a house down the line (we do love DIY) so a floor plan in our budget was paramount. We had plans drawn up, and walked through another build they did. We worked with this company from October 2019 until March 2020. We (finally) got an official estimate. $100,000 over the budget they had promised to stick to. We walked away and a week later the world shut down. (Fun fact. Apparently their company was sold and decided to stop building off site and never told us. Their current operation couldn’t handle the plans they drew up for us so they were calling around trying to subcontract the entire job to another contractor including one of the contractors we had already got an estimate from directly.)

On a random day off, I stopped by Custom Touch Homes in Madison to tour their homes. After an hour with a sales associate, I had plans drawn up and an official estimate to take to the bank. It was incredibly fast. Everyone else took weeks to draw up plans then weeks for get bids and create an estimate. The reason everything goes quickly with their operation is because they have everything in house including the architect. One of the biggest hold ups during a build is the scheduling of subcontractors. Especially in a COVID world, this was helpful. This particular business basically went on lockdown. They kept their workers safe by keeping everyone else out and doing a ton of safety checks. We didn’t even get to see our house in person until it was almost done.  

Once we had the bank paperwork done (which took a couple of weeks even with preapproval) and contract signed, our house was scheduled. Honestly, the process was so quick and well organized that I sometimes had to step away and take a breath. I had a notebook full of what I wanted in the floor plan and all the finishes (I had after-all been planning this for a year now and I am very much a type A person). Even with all that pre-planning, I felt overwhelmed at the speed of everything. I think if you aren't prepared, you could get put on the spot and pick something you don't love. 

After the contract is signed but before building starts, you customize and finalize your floor plans. You have a choice day where you pick all your finishes. They do have a set of materials to pick from, but you can deviate from those. For example I had a particular flooring picked out for my bathroom in Ugly House. I gave them the information, and they ordered it for this house. I also had a dream bath tub picked out, so that was special ordered as well. Something that I found VERY helpful on choice day was my mood boards. Before choice day I had created a vision/mood board for each room with the finishes I wanted. I had made lists of what color tile, cabinets, floors I was looking for. So instead of feeling overwelmed to make all the house decisions on one day, I could just find the finishes that matched what I had carefully picked out over the past year. I also could look at the house as a whole rather than in pieces. I would recommend this for anyone that is building. 

Once building starts, our sales associate sent us weekly updates and pictures on the progress. Their set-up is basically 4 lanes of houses inside a massive building. The first houses in each lane are getting framed. Second house in the lane is getting electric and so on. So each department basically goes down the line and does their job. Slowly the house makes it way down the lane until it’s the last house. Then big warehouse doors open and the house is slid on a truck to be delivered. You have one contact person through the entire process. The house moving day is really quite easy. The house movers do all the work with getting power lines moved. You just wait for the house to show up and they handle placing it on the foundation. It's pretty remarkable to watch (and very unnerving). I have a video of the process on my instagram.

Here's the progress of our house in their warehouse:

I think one of the misconceptions I run into when I tell people we used an off site builder is that this is a mobile, manufactured or modular home. There’s nothing wrong with those homes, but this home is 100% stick built. It’s framed all in one piece like your on-site homes. It wasn’t pieces when it was delivered.  They make the house strong enough to be easily moved as one unit. There’s some preliminary research by FEMA that these types of homes actually are stronger than on-site homes based off post hurricane damage data. 

Over-all the process was  easier than the traditional contractors we were initially dealing with simply because there were no subcontractors. They didn’t need to get bids from them or schedule them. The process took 2 months from the date they started. The moving of the house took about 12 hours to get on the foundation (more on why that was longer than expected to come). Also our house didn’t go over budget because they don’t have to worry about a subcontractor bid not being accurate. The inspections are done just like an on-site build, but because they can do them as part of their assembly line, they are also faster. 

In the spirit of transparency, there are two things to talk about. First of all, while they make all kinds of modifications based on whatever your heart desires, their homes do have some limitations. There are size restrictions since it does have to fit on a road. Our home is rather large at around 3,700 sq feet with the basement, but it had restrictions on width, length, and height. So I could make all the floor plan edits I want, but it still had to fit in that footprint. You also have to stick to a ranch style which initially I did not want. However, with a walkout basement, we don’t have a traditional ranch. I would have pitched the vault in our living room higher if I could have. Also, there are some truly beautiful custom homes out there that my house can’t hold a flame to. There is a reason some builders are more expensive. The materials and craftsmanship is worth their asking price. You also don't get to see and tour your home as often since it's on their premises, not yours. We didn't have any issues with something being done wrong, but that's not uncommon during a build. We also decided to wait on a big deck on the front and a garage and do those separately. The cost on those two items seeemed high compared to other contractors.

Second, there was one aspect of the house build that was a sore point and added a couple of months to the build. We used the off site builder’s sister company to build the walk out basement. We weren’t going to finish the basement initially, so it was just the foundation, walls and some electrical/plumbing. We thought since they worked exclusively with these off site builds, they would be better equipped to build the foundation and coordinate with the house builder's specifications. Also, in theory, they are doing all the basement work while the main house is being built so they finish about the same time. Not so much. 

That relationship was tough. The sister company was hard to work with because they lacked communication. Sometimes I would hear nothing and see no one for weeks. As an example, the day of the house move, the house moving company had to get on the phone and very sternly talk with the head contractor to get him to our property, because the basement wasn’t ready. The house movers had to spend several hours moving dirt so the house could be moved up the hill...something that should have been done well in advance. I noticed after we closed that all the windows in our basement are the wrong color. I’m still missing a screen for a window because they brought me the wrong one. They put the stair railing into the drywall with anchors and it came out within a month. The construction site wasn’t kept clean, and I had to clean up cigarette butts and spilled spoiled milk when we moved in (yeah...not ideal on closing day). They did come and fix the railing within a couple of weeks. I didn’t bother pushing back on the windows because honestly I just wanted to be done with them. 

After we moved in and closed, we realized that building a home isn’t really done when you move in. We decided pretty quick the unfinished basement wasn’t going to work for us. So we hired an awesome general contractor to do that work (which is still ongoing). We also hired a landscaper to hopefully do something with the mud pit around the house. Five dogs and three kids do not do well with a dirt yard in the spring. Also, the bones of our house are pretty standard, so I'm wanting to add more custom touches here and there.

Feel free to message me any questions you may have. I would recommend the process especially if you are on a time crunch or need to stick to a budget. 

Kitchen Island Before & After

Good Morning!

I finally finished painting and caulking the support beams on each side of our island and thought it was a good time to reveal the finished island. Other than a bit of trim to finish up (I'm slowly but surely making my way around the room) and some trim on our plank ceiling, the dining room/kitchen/living room is fully remodeled. Sure, there's some changes we want to make down the line (replacing the banister, a garage/mudroom addition, and french doors in the dining room out to a new deck), but the main ugly parts are fully gone. To see individual tutorials and more before & after pictures, click on the "Ugly House Renovation" label on the right hand side of the screen or click here.

So, let's take a walk down memory lane to what our house looked like in all its 1979 glory when we first moved in.

And Now...

Pretty great huh? It's so much brighter in our house now. Here's the progression so you can see how we ended up here. 

We trimmed out each vertical support with pre-primed white boards and lattice trim pieces. Once my husband had them nailed around the 2 x 4 supports, I wood filled each nail hole and caulked everything to make the trim nice and clean. Everything got many coats of white paint to complete the look.

I have individual posts for much of what we've done (Click here for the collection of Ugly House posts), but here's a quick run down. First we removed everything from the kitchen (cabinets, countertops, that red back splash, sink, soffet) and replaced with subway tile, Ikea cabinets, butcher block countertops (that I stained and finished) and an apron front sink. After that, we painted everything including the pantry door and stair railings. New doors throughout the upstairs. The wall came down, new lights were added/changed, floors were removed, new island built, horizontal beam wrapped in barn wood and vertical supports wrapped in trim, drywall patched up, ceiling covered in plank and new floors installed throughout the upstairs. Final step is putting new taller trim throughout the upstairs and trim around the ceiling.

DIY Barn Wood Ceiling Support Beam

2017 is almost upon us. Thank goodness. Although this year hasn't been a great for many people, we have much to be thankful for in our house. Sweet Cheeks came into our lives, and she's a constant reminder of what is good in the world. We were able to make great progress on Ugly House. Work was pretty great for both my husband and I. On the flip side, I lost an aunt, a dog, and two cats. Then there's that election. Ugh. No other words are needed.

Since December 1st, I've been reflecting on how I can make 2017 better, and it mostly comes down to action. Taking action on the house, in my children's lives, in my work, in the community and of course, on this blog. So, buckle up because 2017 will be a good year even if I have to bend it to my will.

One big project we're still finishing up at our house is the kitchen, living and dining room remodel. We tore down the Indiana Jones Lost Tomb wall at the beginning of the summer. (Click here for that amazing before and after) We've added in a island, fixed drywall, removed all our floors & replaced them (post forthcoming on that odyssey), framed in the vertical support beams, replaced light fixtures, built a new countertop, and added a plank ceiling. We are working on trim on the floor, on the support beams and ceiling right now. One big project was figuring out how to wrap the new large support beam in the middle of the room.

Support beams after wall remove and new light fixtures. 

Support beams immediately after wall removal.

Support beams after new lights and new ceiling

I would like to go on record that I liked barn wood before it was cool. Before Fixer Upper made everyone want to put barn wood or ship lap into their house (including myself because I want to force the Gaines to living in my house and do work for free...just kidding..kinda). I have always loved old stuff. I collect vintage Pyrex, collected antique books growing up, and of course, I have Myrtle. So, while my house is probably more on trend now than I ever thought it would be, I hope it also has some staying power. When we bought Ugly House, it was my vision to make it fit into the farmhouse idea since we live in the country. She might not be old, but I wanted to make sure she felt like she was.

Now that barn wood is all the rage, it's very difficult to find it! We were going to to try to salvage some barn wood from the barn we got our headboard from, but the wood was too brittle. We asked around (one plus of having a large animal veterinarian as a husband), but no one had a piece that would be long enough to go down the entire beam.

My husband was over at his parents one day to cut some boards and noticed their large shed had long pieces of wood along the bottom. He went in to talk to his dad and asked if it would be possible to remove some of the wood if we replaced it with new wood. He didn't have a problem with it, so suddenly we had wood. (That's what she said..he..he..he)

I was about 6/7 months pregnant, and the husband thought we could put this 20 foot piece of wood up ourselves. Nope. That was a whole lot of nope. First problem: he decided he would hold the entire piece of wood while I drilled it in. Second problem: at the time we didn't have an impact drill, so to get through the wood, we had to use quite a bit of force. I wasn't quite tall enough, so I was drilling above my head. (Why didn't we get the bigger ladder you ask? I don't know. Don't ask obvious questions.) So picture this...6/7 months pregnant, I was leaning in trying to drill above my head while the husband is channeling Hercules holding 20 feet of thick solid wood. What could go wrong with such a safe smart plan?

Of course I slipped and tried to drill a six inch screw through one of my fingers. He knew better to ask me to try again, as I was ugly pregnancy crying and cleaning my wound in the sink.  He called his dad over to help, had him bring over the impact drill and ta-da, a couple hours later, it looked pretty darn amazing.

Oh, there's another thing to be thankful for. Father-in-laws that give you free wood, bring over the proper tools and dedicate an afternoon to helping remodel your house. Just like my dad and uncle that helped install an entirely new kitchen and our neighbors that helped bring in our countertops at 8 o'clock at night. As my new secret best friend Jen Hatmaker would say, "Love People. Love God. The End." I have many people to love in my life.

Almost done with the trim around the support beams. Just need a coat of paint! :) 

WiFi Thermostat without a C Wire

Like everything in Ugly House when we moved in, our thermostat was straight out of 1979. It's the classic Honeywell round thermostat in a stylish gold hue.  It certainly did the trick, but as we all know, there's more energy efficient options.

I was a bit intimidated to tackle this project. I wasn't sure what it really entailed. However, like other home improvement projects, it was a good to wait to tackle it until we lived in the house and got a feel for what we really needed.

I knew I wanted a programmable thermostat. That makes sense from an energy saving perspective. The second issue was more tricky. We have a duel heat system. In addition to a gas furnace and A/C unit on the thermostat, we also have electric baseboard heating in each room. We use both since there's a crazy set up to our HVAC and some rooms don't get the furnace heat. Adding to the complication is the thermostat is located where there's no furnace heat. So, if you set a temp, you will freeze or burn up all the other rooms before the thermostat even gets close to the set temp.

This strange situation meant that a regular programmable thermostat wasn't going to cut it. I thought immediately of the new WiFi options available.

I didn't go towards the very popular Nest option just because of the price. I might go down that road in a few years when we completely redo the HVAC and when whole home smart hubs have the kinks worked out.

I found this affordable Honeywell one at Lowes.

I realized about 10 minutes into the installation that the normal smart thermostats weren't going to work. Newer systems have what is called a "C wire" but my antique system had the older 4 wire set up.

I had to go back to the drawing board and do a bit of research. I could have forgone the WiFi option and just gone with a regular programmable thermostat which normally run on batteries.

I did find two options that don't require the C wire. The first option actually sounded pretty awesome. The ecobee3 thermostat has an option to add in satellite sensors throughout the house. With our strange set up, I was thinking that would work really well. It did require you to get into the furnace and add in this converter thing. I thought that was do able until I saw the disaster in our furnace area. (The air was added many years after the furnace, and it's quite the set up now) So that option was out.

The second option was a simpler. It's a simple programmable WiFi enabled battery powered thermostat. I decided to give the Sensi a try.

First of all, the instructions aren't included in the box. The instructions are done via the Sensi app. I actually found it extremely helpful. You just had to put in some information and you had customized installation instructions. Additionally, if you got lost on any step, you could watch a how to video right from the app.

I won't bore you with the process to install the thermostat, but I will say from start to a 100% completion only took me 30 minutes. That's including pairing the device with my WiFi.

So far so good. I have already found the WiFi very useful for when I'm laying in bed and it's just too hot or cold. Rather than going downstairs to attempt to fix the setting, I can do it from my bed. I also appreciate being able to set up all the programs on my phone rather than clicking through 50 screens on the device itself. Finally, I look forward to being able to warm the house up before we get home from longer trips and monitoring the heat while we are gone. This model is nothing fancy. It's not going to automatically adjust when you leave the house or "learn" your habits to adjust accordingly like the Nest, but it does solve our issues right now. I count that as a win.

Ugly House: New Office Reveal

Good Afternoon,

To answer your burning questions, no baby isn't here yet. Also, I have not finished the nursery. However, I did finish my new office area (with much, much help from the husband), so we're getting closer to converting the old office into the nursery. Baby has a schedule induction in a week and a half, so we're going to finish that nursery this weekend!

To give some background, here's my old office after I completed painting, making a new desk, etc. I liked my office quite a lot. There was plenty of room for all my craft stuff and my work related items.

However, to be honest it became the dumping ground of the house. Oh, people are coming over? Grab a laundry basket, pile all the random stuff from around the house and put it in the office. When we started round two of renovations of our upstairs, the office became the storage garage for all the random stuff that we needed to move out of the living room/kitchen/hall closet. So, for a few weeks my office looked like this. It drove me insane.

We had thought about bunking the baby with the sibling of the same sex. After all, my husband roomed with his brother when he was a kid and both of them turned out somewhat okay. The more we thought about it though, the more we realized that especially in the infant stage, we really needed a separate room for all that baby gear. Plus, sleeping babies and crazy loud siblings aren't the greatest mix. I started to think about my different options and decided that creating an office space in a little used play area was the best use of space in our house. The kids never used the area to play. They would just grab toys and take them into their rooms or upstairs. So we downsized the toys, moved around some things and we had a empty(ish) area to build an office.

I have a lot of craft stuff. I use most of it, so I couldn't see myself downsizing my stash too much. (That being said I probably filled over 5 garbage bags when I was moving the stash, so did a fair bit of downsizing) So, having storage options was a must. We also didn't want to break the bank creating the office space since we are in the middle of renovating upstairs. We decided stock cabinets were the best option for my office. So, step 1 was painting the walls of the basement a man cave friendly color, and step two was painting the stock cabinets we picked up at Lowes.

Half of the basement is a family room/man room area for my husband's leather chair and hunting pictures, so I had to pick a color that I liked, meshed with the rest of the house, but still fit in with the wood and leather. My solution for that problem was "Perfect Greige" by Sherwin Williams. I paired with that "Bunglehouse Blue" also from Sherwin Williams for the cabinets. I feel like both colors blend well with his rustic manliness downstairs and my farmhouse feel upstairs.

Using stock cabinets wasn't overly difficult; however, you do quickly realize you get what you pay for. It's worth it to invest in some better screws to reassemble the doors (the ones that come with strip very easily). You will probably need to do quite a bit of sanding to smooth out the rough finish. I removed all the doors and drawers and used my paint sprayer to paint. Then I just painted with a roller on the boxes. During an evening with a two hour tornado warning (!), my husband and I hung all the cabinets.

We priced out getting a regular laminate countertop, but for a bit less, we could make our own. We used plywood as a base and then used poplar in a unique design on top. Once my husband cut all the pieces and wood glued them to the plywood, he sanded the ever living heck out of the top since the pieces didn't all quite sit flush.

Lots of clamps, heavy paint cans and weights to hold down the boards as the glue dried.

Before sanding. You can see the tiny lip that appeared between some pieces.

After sanding everything was nice and level.

I stained the top using "Dark Walnut" from Minwax. We did a very small bit of wood filler in between each board, but I would probably skip that step if I did the project again. The wood filler doesn't take stain well (even the kind that claims you can stain it) so I had to go back through and touch up everywhere that was lighter with some oil based brown paint or more stain.

See that light spot right at the top? That's the wood filler not taking stain.

The final step was a couple coats of Waterlox (just like our countertops, which you can read about here).

I'm quite happy with the final product and it has tons of storage. I organized everything with plastic bins and chalkboard vinyl labels, so I can easily see what I have. My husband rolled his eyes that my office for "work" was 90% cabinets filled with craft supplies. But hey...he's got all that hunting stuff, so I don't feel so bad about my wall of cabinets.