Everything Pre-Fabricated Housing

For as long as I can remember houses have been built with concrete – going by building sites; some women and men would be found toiling long hours and longer months, with steel bowls on their heads carrying concrete. This process eventually culminates to a building that has no true reflection of the money, time, and sweat that has been put into its construction. With the level of technological advances we have seen in the world, there are much better, safer, time-saving, and cost-effective alternatives to this method of construction.

Pre-fabricated housing solutions are not necessarily a new development, but they have been adapted and refined in this era. This makes me wonder why we still have a lot of concrete homes being built here in Nigeria, seeing that the world has moved passed the typical hard-work to more of a smarter-calculated work, with the same or much better results.

A prefabricated house as the name implies means a ‘pre’ (prior) and ‘fabricated’ (made) house. These solutions are majorly residential but in recent times there has been a feature of modular high-rises – a version of pre-fabricated buildings. These building-parts are made in a conditioned environment i.e. a factory, with machines and precision tools before they are ferried to the final destination where it is mounted or pieced together. It should be noted that these types of houses just like brick buildings cannot be moved. However, other types can be reassembled once they have been fully assembled depending on the design and purpose. The Qatar World Cup stadium will be demountable built from shipping containers. In contrast to that, there is a building solution referred to as ‘Tiny Homes’ and these are almost similar to the prefabricated house, the difference being that they are always smaller, can be mobile, and built outside factory-settings.

There have been certain myths surrounding prefabricated houses; some say they are not real houses, others say their worth, in monetary terms, depreciates after a while – like clothes and other commodities, you might also hear that these buildings are all generic and lack creative expressions, these are all untrue comments. Well, asides from being a time-saving building method or more cost-effective, there are other numerous benefits of this disruptive innovation, and they include environmental-friendliness, allowance for creativity when it comes to design and aesthetics, reduced cost of labour. Furthermore, they also help to cut out waste and use of unnecessary materials, and the houses offer a guarantee of quality and safety for occupants as they are usually inspected before they are delivered.

Traditional houses have their disadvantages, however – like everything else that exists, but some companies, have used technology to mitigate the issue with some traditional building solutions. One of the companies refining pre-fabricated home is called Proto Homes ^TM. These disadvantages have no serious impacts on the customer or construction company as long as adequate research, budget allocation, and the necessary structure was put in place before the project was undertaken. Some of the issues with getting involved in a pre-fabricated housing project especially for Nigerians are that fact that shipping distance might be a challenge in terms of cost and protection while in transit but this can be seen to with careful and proper planning of how and where the pre-fabricated structures would be gotten.

To put it lightly, there are so many better alternatives to housing that should be incorporated in places like Nigeria; especially in cities where we have accommodation problems and people having to pay an arm and a leg to live in certain accessible areas. The pre-fabricated home especially modular building, shipping containers, and even tiny homes offer a rich and sustainable solution to these problems.