I toured Huntington Homes a couple of years ago and fell in love with the craftsmanship and dedication of the production line workers to build each home as if they were building their own home.
A duplex bound for Nantucket got its start last October as a stack of lumber at one end of a cavernous factory in Vermont. Over the course of 12 days, carpenters, plumbers and finishers worked on the house in pieces as it traveled down the assembly line at Huntington Homes, a modular house-building company in East Montpelier.
The duplex emerged in four sections from the other end of the factory, with its interiors completed and painted. There were cabinets in the kitchen and towel racks in the bathrooms.
The next step on the home’s path: a truck trip to New Bedford, where the shrink-wrapped pieces traveled by barge to the Massachusetts island off the coast of Cape Cod. There, a local crew began the work of connecting pipes, hooking up electricity and making other finishing touches that could only be done on-site. When it was all done, a few months after delivery, the house would be indistinguishable from its stick-built neighbors.
Huntington’s factory crafts about 75 homes a year destined for Vermont and other locations within driving distance.
Modular buildings tend to cost less to construct than conventional ones, according to co-president and co-owner Jason Webster, whose father bought the company in 1993 after having managed the operation since its inception in 1978.
Because about 80 percent of the construction happens in the controlled environment of a factory, modular and prefabricated homes come together faster than traditional buildings. The nation’s biggest modular companies, which build hotels and other large structures, often further reduce costs by locating their factories in rural areas with comparatively low labor and energy prices.
At Huntington, each home takes about 12 eight-hour shifts to build. The indoor environment is easier on the company’s 75 workers, Webster said.
“Nobody is racing around; nobody is hollering,” he said.
Customers can approach Huntington with their own home plans or choose from a menu of several dozen options illustrated by rotatable online pictures. At 772 square feet, a cape called the Harrington is one of the smallest; the Westminster II, at 2,852 square feet, is one of the largest, with four bathrooms and four bedrooms.
A big Huntington house with simple, inexpensive finishes might cost as little as $170 per square foot. A smaller one with high-end finishes, such as hardwood floors, wood siding and a standing seam roof, is priced at about $250 per square foot, a sum that’s in keeping with most single-family home construction in Vermont at the moment. The owner’s outlay on land, a driveway, septic, electric and permitting adds greatly to the final cost.
“In central Vermont, where you’re paying $120,000 or $140,000 for the piece of land — which then needs $80,000 for driveway, septic, power, excavation — you’ve spent $200,000 before you’ve started building anything,” Webster said.
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Gary Fleisher is Editor in Chief of Modular Home Source and Offsite Builder. Email at [email protected]
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