Prefabricate Your Country Home... in the City
(Page 2 of 3)
November/December 1985
By Jack Wade
Having decided upon a definite plan of action, we shopped around until we were able to purchase a suitable country lot. Then, whenever we could steal the time—a day here and a weekend there—we put in a foundation consisting of nine pillars of doubled 16" cinder blocks, with each pillar resting atop a 2'-square concrete footing. When the foundation was finished, we left it exposed to the elements to cure while we began prefabricating our house-to-be.
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PREFABRICATION
The name of the game in home-prefabrication is to do as much of the sawing and nailing-together as possible before moving the parts to the building site, while simultaneously keeping the size of the preassembled components small enough to allow them to be transported with ease and safety.
Since the basic element of an A-frame—standard or modified—is the truss, and since trusses tend to be rather large when assembled, we divided each of them into four conveniently sized pieces for transporting to the site: the two sides, an upstairs floor joist, and the preassembled upper truss. Many of the other parts, however, involved nothing more complicated than cutting standard dimension lumber to length and labeling the parts for ease of assembly later on. Working in the evenings and on weekends, we were able to finish the prefabricating in just a few weeks.
ASSEMBLY
With our "kit" constructed, we were ready to begin hauling the component parts to our building lot. We used a small trailer to speed the process, but a pickup truck with an elevated rack for hauling long structural members would have worked almost as well (though more trips would have been required).
Once everything was at the site, we were ready for the big push to get the shell of the house up and weathertight during my two-week vacation. Since our prefabrication work had been careful and exact, the assembly chores went smoothly. Getting the floor joists in place and decked with plywood took only a day. Assembling the modified Aframe trusses consumed another day, and erecting them a day more. So, by the end of the third day, all the trusses were up, the upstairs floor was in place, and we had the skeleton of the house completed.
