It's all about logistics
The whole process of building a prefabricated house requires tremendous planning. It’s important to count with a company that it’s been doing this for years. Wasting time would be wasting money for them and throwing off all other house assembling appointments; therefore, everything is well-timed to happen seamlessly.
For instance, the electric power need to be on site before the construction, so machines and lights are available during the construction. This is done by requesting the power company to install on site a special power box. The execution of that doesn’t happen quickly. Before you get an appointment, the power utility company has to notify other people on your neighborhood block that the power will be out during the process.
Also, you have to arrange by yourself to have a deep hole excavated immediately after the end of where the street buried electric lines run. If you are unlucky and live in a very cold region like we do, then you to remember to organize this before the frost hits and your ground is frozen. The same applies for connecting water, specially because the water lines can’t be exposed for long to freezing temperatures (of course).
Our power box was installed in September already in order that the concrete slab construction in December happened without a glitch. The roof material also arrived a few weeks before the big day and was unloaded on the property.
Concrete slab and garage foundation
The concrete slab itself, along with the garage concrete foundation were completed shortly before Christmas, with temperatures approaching zero degrees Celsius (32º F). When you think about pouring concrete, freezing temperatures is the worst that can happen, as the slab can fail to dry out completely and/or build cracks. We were pretty worried but the specialists told us that the drying concrete is under a chemical reaction that causes heat so it wouldn’t be really freezing. We just needed to cover it with a plastic sheet, so the humidity would remain long enough as well as the heat.
They were right. And even the garage foundation we did by ourselves turned out fine. They worked for three days, first excavating a foundation, laying the water and power pipes, then framing the slab around, placing the insulation plates, then smoothing the poured concrete. They worked on the house slab every day from down till late night on the bitter cold. I hope the two men got a real fat check for the extreme working effort they pulled off.
Crane in chains
The days immediately before the house assembly were cold and plagued with snow storms. The construction site street and landscape were in no way fit to have people and heavy vehicles transiting around. It was at least 600 m2 (6548 ft2) that needed to be cleaned. Thank God we kept a mini excavator for that week and we used it to move the snow mass out of the way.
The crane arrived but, with its weight of 40 tons, it had to stop to put chains on the tires before it drove into our slippery streets. The crane drove up our street without an issue and, due to the lack of reach, it parked upon the garage site, so it could later reach the truck carrying the house parts – they didn’t have the same route because they anyway couldn’t maneuver through the small village streets.
Snow mess one day to go
Sunday morning and everything was frozen. Just one day before our house is built, one day till we finally can see the real thing out of the CAD program, blueprints and approved architect’s plans, into real life, to its final nest in the middle of the beautiful Black Forest.
Are we ready? It was -10º C (14º F) degrees and the concrete slab was covered with plates of ice. Not only that, but we still had to build up the scaffolding all around the slab, preparing the site for the building crews to work next day. And so far they were all buried in a lot of snow.
Scaffold around
As you can imagine, it was a long Sunday. The neighbor came to complain that we were using the excavator and making noise. We apologized and explained that we had no choice because our house was coming in the next day and we had no chance to free the slab from the ice by hand. He left angry saying he hoped this didn’t happen again. Oh, well, it’s not like we love to spend Sundays working hard outside in freezing temperatures, and we can safely say that we are not going to build another house here… 😅
We finally got all ice cleaned and the scaffolds were assembled. We went back to the rented apartment you were renting and didn’t know if we could sleep. Anxiety was really high for what was going to happen in the next days.
