Photo by Alan Bernau, Jr. on Flickr
Prefabricated cabins provide a quick and easy solution for homesteads, whether it’s for your main home, a barn, stables or other outbuildings. Delivered to your site complete, and pretty much ready to use straight away, prefab cabins are a great option for a quick and low cost building addition to your ranch. Here are six reasons why they make the ideal addition to your homestead.
Ease of Construction
Prefab cabins are much easier and less time consuming for the customer than kits or custom homes. The companies that build these prefabricated buildings have plenty of experience and all the best machinery to build your cabin or barn in their factories. They are then transported to your piece of land in full pieces and pieced together in as quickly as one or two days.
The only thing you’ll need to do in preparation for your new building, is to lay a suitable foundation. The type of foundation you’ll need will depend on the soil type and the size of the cabin, but in most cases a concrete slab is the most common choice.
Not only are they much less labor intensive for you than other building methods, but they also have a much quicker time frame. You can expect it to take around eight to sixteen weeks for a prefab cabin to be built and delivered to your land.
Cost
They also tend to work out lower in cost because you save on labor and additional material costs. When you build a home from scratch, additional costs are more than likely to pop up which can very quickly escalate the initial cost of the build.
Prefab cabins usually come with no hidden costs, you’ll know and pay for the precise cost upfront, which will include manufacturing and delivering the cabin to your site. When you buy a similar cabin as a kit, you can expect the final cost of the build to be at least double (or sometimes triple) when you start to include labor costs and additional materials which you need to finish the cabin.
Customization
Most companies who offer prefab buildings can customize their cabins to suit your exact requirements. If you need an outhouse which has two or three separate rooms, or the front door moving, or the windows placed on different walls, they will be able to do this for you.
You might like a style of building but want the size to be larger or smaller. Or perhaps you like a building but want to change the exterior, the options are endless, from logs, wooding siding, metal or even glass. There is a common misconception that prefab cabins are all generic and uniform.
Quality
Prefabricated homes are built in factories by experienced tradesmen, this process allows the manufacturing company to ensure the highest possible quality.
With cabin kits, the pieces are cut and put together in the factories and are then taken apart again to rebuild on site. With prefab models, they are built in a factory and then delivered on a trailer to the land, so they are usually much sturdier and any imperfections can be spotted and corrected in the factory. They also need to withstand being transported by a truck, sometimes hundreds of miles, so they need to be resilient and well built.
Energy Efficiency
Prefab cabins are highly energy efficient, due to the way in which they’re been manufactured. With tight seals and high-quality materials, including windows and doors, these cabins have been designed to keep the heat in and the cold out.
They are generally much eco-friendlier than stick built homes, because they produce much less waste in the building process. Therefore, they have a very low carbon footprint for the production stage.
Is a Prefab Cabin Right for Your Homestead?
If you’re looking for a new building for your homestead and you want a quality yet quick build, a prefab cabin might just be the ideal choice for you. Whether it’s a new stable for your horses, a barn for your chickens, or just a food store, these cabins are highly adaptable and customizable, saving you a lot of money in comparison to kits or other conventional methods of building. When choosing the right cabin for your land, ensure you choose a reputable company who has plenty of experience and good reviews.
David Woodsis a carpenter, outdoorsman, and author with more than 30 years of professional woodworking experience. He is the author of best-seller How to Build a Log Home and has educated more than half a million people on how to build a log cabin via his blog,Log Cabin Hub. Connect with him onFacebook, and read all of David’s MOTHER EARTH NEWSposts here.
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