Drop Ship………..you want one?

First let me say this, if you want me to drop ship you a house I will do it in a heartbeat.  This is by far the easiest deal we can make and for me it is risk free. It is neat and clean, you give me a check and I send you a house.  For years this is how the modular home industry was run.

Then the factories had to get involved and messed it all up. Tired of phone calls and court claims for house failures associated with a botched set up the factories started regulating who could set their houses if they were going to have to stand behind their product. Generation two of the Modular home industry was DSF. Delivered, set and finished.  Yes the prices went up a little but at least the house came to you and was finished.  Right? and it was warrantied.  Right? Not even a little bit.

Then the banks got involved and messed it all up. Turns out banks got tired of foreclosing on houses they lent money on only to find out they were not completed and were a disaster and were not worth the money that was owed on them. Now they want a general contractor to build them.  But wait. How is a retailer that sells stuff going to play General Contractor.  Isn’t that a different set of skills all together.  I know how to sell stuff to people not build it for them, if I did I would be a builder. So that is who you want to buy a house from. Right?

I have people come into my office every day that want to tell me all the experiences they have had and how prepared they are to make sure this is done right.  They know about 2×6 walls and insulation and crappy cabinets all that stuff.

The truth is, most of us don’t.  I have been in the building industry my entire life.  I have run every piece of construction equipment that exist.  I can do carpentry, electrical, heating work, I can weld, read plans and do architectural designs.  But I screwed up my first modular home. (I fixed it but I screwed up the job a bunch of times first)

How?

1. I did not make the site open enough to get the house into it, a minor delivery day nightmare.

2. Then on set day I did not have the sill plates down and did not have lolly columns on site (the first thing the set crew needs) Oh yeh and there was not a spot close enough to the foundation to put the crane the size I had ordered to lift the house, the weight that is was the distance it needed to to get it on the foundation. And we had to take two more trees down to swing it after we moved the house boxes with a dozer.

3. OK, ready, lift set it on the foundation which was perfect, square and exactly the right size, but for some reason there was a lot of daylight between the sill plates and the bottom of the house, that cannot be good. Fine we will shim it and insulate the seam.

4. I want the second box tight, really tight, pull it tighter. Crap, now we can get the cables out without damage and the roof does not line up right because it was designed for a 3/4″ gap, damn they build these accurate.

Need I go on? It is not complicated but it is also not easy, and you don’t know what you don’t know.

Be Carefull.