Happy November!

After a week of rain, it was back to work for Team Norris. Down at the wood shop, the better half of Team Norris was busy priming the siding and putting the last touches on the windows. Out on site, the other half of Team Norris installed insulation under the house and began the cistern enclosure. Here, the gang learned a lesson in one of the downfalls in prefabrication. The cistern was previously build by students last semester, but plans and drawings of the design have changed since them. Although we appreciate prefabrication in all of its glory, much of today was spent taking apart prefabricated panels, re-fabricating them, and then installing them correctly. Because so much time was spent redoing the panels of the cistern, we didn’t get to finish. But that’s ok because we can finish on Wednesday and it is going to look awesome, like always. In other news, the plumber and the electrician were also on site to discuss some details in their line of work. We look forward to finishing up the cistern and installing some siding and windows in the new few weeks!

LEED Prefabrication

While the New Norris House is committed to achieving LEED platinum certification, we have carefully examined every opportunity to earn LEED points. This process of identifying possible points typically begins even before the design of the building. For the New Norris House, we realized that many points could be achieved through off-site prefabrication.

There are many advantages to using prefabricated construction. First, it is generally less destructive to the site and requires less room for staging materials. As far as energy efficiency, there is typically better quality control, which leads to a tighter, more efficient envelope. Prefabrication also encloses the interior faster than traditional methods of building, reducing the time that materials, finishes and products are exposed to rain, sleet, and snow.

We have witnessed the advantages of using prefabricated construction first hand while working on the New Norris House. In one day, the house was brought from the factory at Clayton Homes and dropped onto the foundations with its moisture barrier in place. However, we have also seen how using this method of construction can be inconsistent with its original intent. One such shortcoming of prefabrication was seen during the installation of the home's dormer which was prefabricated by the students at the College of Architecture and Design.

For such a small component of the house, the dormer took a considerable amount of time and resources to install. Using seven people and a Sky Lift, we spent four hours installing a component of the house that had already consumed numerous man-hours in prefabrication and had been transported to the site. In reality, it would have taken about the same amount of time to build it on-site using conventional methods of construction as it did to merely install it. Another advantage of building it on-site is that we would have been able to adjust for certain construction tolerances that were overlooked while building it in a laboratory setting.

We have seen the advantages and the disadvantages of prefabricated construction while working on the New Norris House. While building small, unique components, prefab construction loses many of the efficiencies that it touts. However, its full potential can be realized at any scale when using repetitive systems.