Episode 41 - Prefab Pod Live Chat Prefab Home Construction in Mountain Towns
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Michael Frank, Prefab Review: Hey everyone, it's Michael Frank from the Prefab Podcast back with Toby Long. Today, the second in our series of demystifying certain parts of Prefab. Luckily, we've moved on from the less fun conversation topic of last week of Fire Rebuilds to today we're talking about a fun one that me and Toby both have a good amount of experience in, which is building in mountain towns.
And what we really mean when we say mountain towns is we mean ski towns. Both of us spend a good amount of time in Lake Tahoe, have done some work here. Toby's done some work in some other places as have I, mostly in the West Coast mountains. Though I guess I've done some stuff kind of in upstate New York near Hunter as well.
With that being said, welcome Toby. Thanks for joining.
Toby Long, Clever Homes: Thanks, Michael. This is fun. I'm up in Tahoe now so I can reflect on the salient topic. Perfect.
Michael Frank, Prefab Review: That's great. Yeah. Me and Toby are both pretty avid skiers, so we both spend time here in North Lake Tahoe.
Toby Long, Clever Homes: It's a life work balance thing, right.
Michael Frank, Prefab Review: It's all research and development when you're skiing.
Toby Long, Clever Homes: You get a lot of work done on the chairlift, I find.
Michael Frank, Prefab Review: That's good to know. So if you talk to Toby and it sounds like there's a chairlift in the background, it's probably because there is one.
Okay, Toby, it would be great to get a quick bio of your experiences. I know you have some beautiful projects on your site from Colorado ski towns and North Lake Tahoe ski towns like Truckee and Olympic Valley. Maybe you can talk a little more about your experience building there.
Toby Long, Clever Homes: Yeah, for sure. Well, you know, Michael, thanks again for hosting these. I think this is a great opportunity to download and share our collective experiences with people. So hopefully folks find this valuable. Just as the early bio, right. So I'm an architect. I've been working in the prefab space for like 25 years. I think naturally the work in the offsite construction space finds its way into conversations in mountain towns.
I think that the process of building in the mountains is becoming more difficult with each passing year. Resources are limited. Subcontractors are scarce. The workforce has been displaced by high value real estate. The economics of construction continue to escalate. Obviously, the weather cycle is tough.
And so, you know, working with factory partners and deploying offsite construction, particularly modular building, I think is a natural evolution of what's going to be continuing to happen in mountain towns. I think we can see that as we look out to some of the entrepreneurship that's taking place, even state grants, and hearing a lot about Colorado is trying to make active moves into really pushing for offsite construction, not just for the fancy stuff on the slopes, but workforce housing in particular.
Michael Frank, Prefab Review: Nevada County, which is where Truckee is just this week passed that, Placer County, which is the other kind of like main North Lake Tahoe County has had this for a while, but that you can use tiny homes, which is really not the high end of the spectrum as permanent residence for ADUs.
And that's about as kind of offsite construction as you can get.
Toby Long, Clever Homes: Yeah. So I think that this is a kind of natural growth and evolution of the industry. It is being served by several marketplaces now in a variety of different categories. I think, oddly, like some of the big manufacturers are actually in mountain towns, you know, Boise, Idaho, we know there's a whole collection of, manufacturers in the large, you know, multifamily space. But, I think there's a home for projects like this, these kinds of projects, in the mountains for sure. I also think that we can demystify a little bit of, at least from my own perspective, yours clearly, as well, Michael, just, that this is possible. That you can design buildings that are resilient to the environmental conditions or that carry heavy snow or, various things that, maybe people don't really, immediately associate with modular building.
I think that's a common question we get, you know, can you do it in the snow? Well, the answer is yes. And maybe we can talk about a few of the considerations that go into that.
Michael Frank, Prefab Review: Yeah, totally. Okay. I'll make a quick point, a few points, and then we'll start to jump into a checklist.
In addition to all the building we do for clients, I just built a personal residence near Palisades or formerly known as Squaw Valley. So I have experience doing this both corporately and also as a place to, live and, have to live with mostly positively the decisions that we made in terms of modular, but yeah, it can very much be done.
In terms of the high level, this is why I think this is happening, right. And I think Toby mentioned a lot of this, the building season in these areas because of snow is short, right. We're talking about sometime in the late spring to like October more or less. And that's just like for excavation, like you're literally not allowed to start shoveling in some of these places in November or December.
So being able to build most of the actual structure of your house in a factory that is temperature controlled in December, October, February, or whenever, and then be able to, in May, when there starts being deliveries, have that drop, and then like be able to finish the house up over the summer is, I mean, it's what we just did.
And then Toby talked about the other aspect, which is a part of the value consideration on modular construction is just we're gonna take labor from a high cost of living area to a more affordable cost of living area. And some of these towns, right, everyone sort of has heard about the housing crunch, whether it's in Tahoe or in Vail or Aspen or wherever.
It's really hard to have lower cost labor. So, this can be a positive thing in terms of providing work for areas where there's a bigger labor pool. So, I think those are high level things. Having said that, as I've learned, and we've worked up with clients, there are some different considerations when building with these areas with inclement climates.
So I want to sort of talk about some of the things that I think about and then maybe Toby, you can, chime in. And the first one I wanted to talk about, is really site diligence, right. Like, you know, we constantly get the email of, "Hey, there's this remote, piece of land, like, 17 miles from Jackson Hole, can we just put a box there?" And usually the answer is, "not that easily." But what are the things you look for in terms of, ski, town, yeah, just land diligence.
Toby Long, Clever Homes: I think that is like number one, kind of, because I think naturally, any place in the mountain, we don't have, these aren't cities, right?
These are, these are small towns and, and there is a lot of property outside of most of, the ski areas that is, rural undeveloped, you know, kind of property. I think you're right. I think that, you know, understanding the ability to deliver and have logistics take place is, really important. As a note of optimism for the viewers, there is a lot of technology and a lot of technique that can go into this too. We've, brought modules down roads with excavators in the past. There's ways to kind of navigate across undeveloped property to an extent. I don't want to overestimate that, but I do think it's a note of optimism and certainly an encouragement to not rule anything out right away. From Michael and I and other professionals in this space, I think you can, solicit advice to try to get a general understanding.
One of the things that seems to happen in all of our projects is that, all properties for the most part, require some ability to access the property with fire department apparatus. We gotta get fire departments out to these properties, however rural they are.
And it has been my experience that the geometry required for fire apparatus and the geometry required for modular deliveries, at least of a certain size, are kind of similar in some ways, you know, particularly cranes. Off road cranes and there's, you know, there's ways to do this, right? That's really important.
The other thing that I think shows up a lot in our projects, Michael, is that, you know, it's one thing to be in a suburban environment and you've got, you know, oak trees and bay trees, like you've got these deciduous trees and they're all the certain height and you can kind of, but, you know, most of the mountain towns are really tall pine trees.
We can't lift over pine trees, you know, so you have kind of move through this and maybe in some ways, dealing with trees, particularly in Tahoe is, a little bit forgiven because of just how forestry is taking place here and the fire hazards give us a kind of accommodation on trees, but also to be respectful of the environment and to not remove, you know, clear cut property.
We can't, you know, lift over, you've got to kind of navigate through it. As you may have seen on your property, there's a little ballet right that happens with the crane and lifting it and you can kind of maneuver but trees become an important part of this consideration to if it's a really, fine treed area.
Sometimes that becomes a question with just these access conditions. So, I think you hit the two of those and then otherwise, like the rest of it becomes due diligence for building in general, you know, like I think on your list is like, well, septic and utilities and that kind of stuff, maybe not specific to modular construction, but definitely things to consider.
Michael Frank, Prefab Review: Yeah, we find that by the way, I think I say this like every podcast, call planning, like call planning early, electric and plumbing is definitely, your life is easier if you can get those to your site.
Yeah, that's one of the things, plus like, I'd say insane driveways are not as big a deal. Where, you know, those are the things where when people say, "Hey, can this piece of land work?" And again, we see this not just in Tahoe, right, like again, I mentioned things in Wyndham, New York, where there's a lot of pretty affordable land, we see these questions as well.
And that's our first question usually is like, okay, " how challenging is it going to be to get utilities to the location?" The other thing that I think, that we, think about especially in these winter towns that I think about honestly much less if someone's building on like a mountain in Santa Rosa or something, it's just like how crazy is the topography gonna be when there's multiple feet of snow? And again, Toby's probably a much better judge than I am, thinking about like what's the degrees you're trying to avoid? I honestly I think about this, I know we both cycle as well. But like when you start to see driveways more than like 8 degrees, in these, kind of mountain town areas, I start to sort of be like, alright, we really need to talk to experts and think about how much of a headache is this going to be with the livability aspect.
Toby Long, Clever Homes: Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, I think it sort of depends on what type of services are around first off, right? Right. If you're here in the lake, and it's kind of a developed area, there's the snow removal services, and we all sign up for snow plowing and such. Obviously if you're out on a ranch, very different kind of situation for sure.
Once we hit 10 percent slope, I think we start to, you know, scratch our chin a little bit on how that's working. Is that, you know, adequate and appropriate?
I do think there's an impulse and an instinct to get into the conversation about active melt technologies.
Michael Frank, Prefab Review: Like radiant heat in driveways and stuff like that?
Toby Long, Clever Homes: Radiant heat driveways, hydronic roads, and these kinds of things. You see this around the area. It's a surprise to people, but it is pretty expensive to install these systems. We've been working on a couple of projects here in Tahoe that are really trying to eliminate gas, which the Cal energy code is really pushing for, in certain places. Electricity is pretty common in Wyoming, electricity is pretty cheap.
But it does take a pretty big service to run an electric driveway melt system. So, I think these are kind of natural instincts that can kind of go to, how you would deploy these systems. I think it also comes down to surfacing. The other thing about driveways is just how you clear snow.
And, you know, gravel's tough for snowblowers as we know. You know, concrete's expensive to put in, asphalt tends to be pretty resilient, for snowplowing and snow blowing. And I think all these go into this sort of access assessment question and trying to keep driveways, at, you know, low slopes is definitely part of the equation.
Michael Frank, Prefab Review: And then, I encourage everyone, if you're working with an architect who is not from the local area, I would strongly suggest someone who's experienced. Like, you probably don't want to be the way your architect learns about snowy areas.
There's just lots of stuff in terms of, like snow storage, for example, which is the concept of like, when the snow gets plowed, it doesn't just melt, but it, you know, so where do you put it? Like that's a part of the literally just like the, sort of after it's surveyed the plans like on the site that we see all the time in those areas.
Toby, one question I had for you, and I sort of know the answer cause I've seen some of your projects before, is my impression is technology and building the resiliency of building materials and building technologies, maybe change some of these answers. But it seems like people's attitudes towards roofs are quite different now than they maybe were like 40 or 50 years ago.
So we see all these HOAs in Tahoe and other places where there's this rule of like, hey, everyone needs a 412 roof or a 612 roof, which basically means, right, you go up an inch for every two inches, you go over if it's 612, or if it's 1212, I guess it would be like a 45 degree slope. And I don't know if that was like a necessity in terms of shedding snow because, you know, structures weren't as strong or water resilient, whatever, 40 or 50 years ago.
But it seems like, yeah, a lot of times like we're having to educate about why like flatter roofs might be okay. What, what's your perspective on this?
Toby Long, Clever Homes: Yeah. One of the biggest challenges of managing snow on a roof is the freeze thaw cycle that happens at the drip edge.
People heard of the phenomena called ice damming, which is literally quite that where you get, a thaw moment, or you've got heat from your residents, which is pushing water towards the edge of the roof. Of course, it now goes outside the envelope. So it freezes and it, over time, creates literally a dam. And now I've got water that can't get off the roof. So it starts kind of ponding back across the roof. We install what they call ice water shield and in snow country, those, those water barriers, you know, they go up your roof surface to prevent water from being able to come down through the roof structure as a result of this phenomenon.
Well, this happens because we're pushing snow off the roof. And I think we are all aware of the hazard of icicles and things that tend to fall off of roofs. I think ironically for this reason, people will have steeply sloped roofs and then also put snow catchers on the roof to hold the snow.
I've always adopted a, I think it's, you know, also kind of a common European strategy too. And you look out across like Switzerland and places that are in the mountains, a lot of these, you know, structures historically have had low slope roofs because one of the best ways, in my opinion, to manage snow is to hold it. And to, you know, engineer a building that can carry these loads. I don't find that to be, incredibly daunting. It's certainly a rigor and there's certainly an investment strategy that is associated with building a really robust building. But we like low slope roofs that allow the heat of the home to melt the snow over time, and don't create the kind of hazard this problem of a lot of snow melt coming off the structure and creating, you know, piles of snow below the roof or creating a hazardous problem for icicles or even just ice that ponds on the ground, can be a problem with, with steeply sloped roofs. I mean, I think people still like sloped roofs, but everybody likes the idea of having snow on your roof over time.
I've experienced in Tahoe. I mean, you've seen it too, Michael, like when it snows hard here. And we get four feet of snow in one night. There's four feet of snow on everybody's house, no matter how steep your roof is.
So I think a lot of this in my mind is a little bit less related to the snow and it's more related to how we melt the snow over time.
And whether or not there are strategies that can be implemented that assist. Now to your point, one of the technologies that's pretty common in snow country, certainly a lot of projects that we've done are, heat tape trace lines that are used at the edges of roofs or in gutters or in downspouts.
In some instances, we've actually used, you know, vertical roof drains and have run a heat, tape element down through those drains just to keep them open over the winter. I think this is probably more of a conversation, honestly, about homes that are being built as second homes or rental property, where you don't have somebody living in the building full time.
Michael Frank, Prefab Review: We see fire departments require these heating elements some of the times at this point, because there were, they're being, you know, freezing close to, you know, pipes and stuff like that.
Toby Long, Clever Homes: For sure. Yeah. And I think if you're in your house full time, if you're a full time resident and the house is always, you know, 68, 70 degrees, it's sort of a little bit of a different problem.
And if you're shutting them down for the week, cause nobody's there, but I like low slope roofs. I think if you look at, you know, again, across the globe, how have people managed snow historically, you see these different philosophies, and, I'm not sure there's an exact right answer here, but I've always preferred, low slope roofs for this reason, to just manage the snow a little bit more actively than trying to do it outside the building.
Michael Frank, Prefab Review: Okay. So we talked about snow shedding on roofs. That's the big one. If you look at the slope of your house, what you don't want to have happen is you don't want everything to point at your front door. A lot of times, what you see is arches, or peaks above doors and you see the home slope out to the sides.
So basically the snow loads up in places that people don't walk. That's a big one. Another thing that, honestly, like we, I don't know if we were thoughtful about this, about this enough on our house because we have an enormous, mostly uncovered deck, is the idea of okay, if you have a deck and you're going to get a huge amount of snow on it, it's actually like, there's a question of, okay, that's cool in the summer. And it's just a lot of work in the winter. So it's another thing we think about and encourage people to think about. Again, there's bear boxes, which is not a big deal. But a lot of times people in these areas, there's, you know, bears or wildlife. So there's these basically metal containers, that hold your trash hands.
Again, it's not a big deal, but on site, we tell people to think about where they are in advance because people don't like being like finishing their house and then being told, okay, you have to put a big, like metal trash receptacle directly in front of your, you know, front door.
Toby Long, Clever Homes: Yeah, I like, I like all that. I think it's, you know, I've always thought it's sort of funny, Michael, that like you see a house in the snow and it has this like perfect thing over the entryway, but then the gable slopes right in front of the garage, right?
So I think garage is first off, you know, best practice from my perspective that we try to encourage in all of our projects is to really make sure that your garage and your driveway are as South and West facing as possible. Sunlight on the asphalt and then the front of the garage door. You touched on snow storage. I think it's a big issue in a lot of towns, you know, those snow piles will stay around until the end of the summer.
In some jurisdictions, we do a lot of work in Mammoth Lakes, snow storage is a minimum requirement of your planning process. You have to demonstrate where the snow storage exists. and there are snow storage easements on the roadway.
So as they plow the streets, you know, that the town can pile up snow, on the edges of the roads, in areas that get, a tremendous amount of snow. I think that's a really important part of the considerations for sure.
Michael Frank, Prefab Review: I think we covered, oh, last one, by the way, let's see, what did we cover? We covered snow loads, decks, driveway, slopes. Oh, we've talked about this a little bit. But most of these areas are also high fire risk areas. So you want to be really cognizant on egress in terms of fire retardants and mud room areas for like your toys.
A lot of times you have snowmobiles or snowblowers, et cetera, bear box areas.
Toby Long, Clever Homes: Yeah, bear boxes. So one of the things is that I think you're right, like a lot of places now it's required. You have to have a bear proof box. You have to be able to shovel your bear proof box for trash access.
Most trash companies aren't going to do that for you. So a little bit of planning that goes into that. In some cases we've encouraged bare box planning to also be connected to garage opening. So you could almost load your trash one side, the trash company, pull it out on the other side. Yeah.
It's some of the neighborhoods around here, you know, you end up doing that, cause they don't want the thing out on the corner. But I think you're right. People sometimes get surprised.
Michael Frank, Prefab Review: Yeah. We see the same issues with people who, some of the towns in Tahoe particularly require you to, have propane instead of natural gas.
So again, a lot of people want to bury their propane tanks. And then the question is just like, if you bury them in a way that they're like essentially inaccessible to the people who need to refill them, during ski season, that's also a problem.
Toby Long, Clever Homes: Before we leave roofs, I think another interesting thing for people to think about that I think there's a variety of opinions about for sure, are gutters.
It's been a sort of interesting thing to learn about, as I practice professionally for so long is just how people think about gutters in snow country. I think there's a strong philosophy, we certainly see a lot in the Sierra. Where we don't put gutters on, there's no gutters.
We don't get rain, you know, it's mostly snow. And so, what I've seen and my neighbor here, you know, gutters don't perform well. If they start collecting a lot of ice and over time they get bent and move and sometimes fall off buildings. So, I do think people can feel comfortable in a lot of instances not having gutters on buildings and just letting snow melt and drip.
We do what's called a hardening of the drip line. So you kind of put a gravel, edge around the base of the building. So as the water is dripping, it doesn't create erosion, but it's an interesting thing. The other philosophy is to actually use a heavy gauge metal gutter, which has suspense to it.
And then with a heat tape wire, you know, that's another nice way of collecting, drip water off of a roof. If there's a budget to do that kind of stuff. But I think that the whole gutter question is an interesting one that people will go through with their architects as you're doing some snow management planning on the house.
Michael Frank, Prefab Review: Honestly, I just assumed, I grew up in Boston. We had gutters on our house in Boston, but I assumed that no gutters was the best practice. I don't think I've seen a home with gutters in Tahoe or Colorado or Wyoming since we've done this.
We've like again done a non trivial number. Maybe one thing before we get into maybe looking at one or two houses and some FAQs is do you need to talk a bit about landscape because obviously landscaping is again, there's this home hardening aspect, but we're talking about pretty hardcore seasons here or say we're talking about areas where, you know, the summer season might be short.
Toby Long, Clever Homes: Yeah. I mean, I think so. I think there's an instinct that I would probably push back on where, because we're up in the mountains, we're not doing landscaping. Yeah. I think there is landscaping. That's always part of it. Now it's gotta be appropriate. Right. So we're, you know, choosing fauna that matches well with the environment and things that survive the winters is really important.
I think that's part of it. I think to your point, you know, what we're calling fire escape, like fire scaping like these are some questions on how to have best practices.
Yeah, defensible space, super important. Not having a lot of bushes up against your building, super important. As we were talking in the last podcast, I think these practices still apply. Landscape architects add value. I mean, most of the projects we work on in the mountains, we're trying to develop a you know, au naturel aesthetic.
It doesn't look manicured. It kind of looks like it was, you know, the landscape and I think that involves rocks and boulders and rockery walls are really important and commonplace. I think in a lot of mountain towns and I think the other piece of this is that most mountain properties have some amenities.
Maybe it's your spa. Maybe it's your you know, covered porch of sorts. You know, these things, I think, all benefit from having landscape design become part of the process. I think mulch gets replaced with pine needles. There's actually a pine needle market, where you can buy pine needles of different colors to kind of lay out to cover the ground.
But I just, I think people should think just because we're building over the mountains that you're not doing landscaping. You are going to do some. And then real quick before I forget, one of the things that we've seen on decks, Michael, is that, I have clients that just keep a snowblower just on the upper deck
Yeah. You know, how do you deal with that? These different philosophies, drains, decks, that drip deck, power
Michael Frank, Prefab Review: There's all sorts of these, I think Toro or one of those companies makes it. It's like a, it's like halfway between a snowblower and a like shovel with a little tread on it.
Yeah. I think it's like a six volt snow. It's like a pretty soft core snowblower. One thing by the way, is that we, I don't think we've seen anyone struggle with this, but we encourage people to look at is Toby talked about amenities. We see a lot of right saunas, hot tubs, et cetera.
Warning, and I like all that stuff as much as anyone. I know nobody who doesn't put one in who doesn't have a significant level of maintenance issues with whatever they have. I think it's just a reality of those things, which is whatever part, part of the game. But one thing that, you need to be cognizant given that these are things that need to be maintained is access.
So, there are a lot of the sort of companies that they'll put this in their specs and sometimes the general contractors will listen to 'em and sometimes they won't. You need really good access to like the panels and the under parts of the hot tub. So just when you're thinking about, hey, we're going to sink this in a deck, we're going to sink this in the ground.
Again, you just want to make sure that usually like people, if they know what they're doing, they're building hatches, they're providing for access. But again, like I know no one who doesn't have significant maintenance issues on that. And, I know some of the leading companies in these jurisdictions actually won't service your different like, saunas or hot tubs if they're sort of built in inaccessible ways because it's just, it's not worth their time.
So that's, that's another silly one that we try to get people to avoid.
Toby Long, Clever Homes: It's a true statement though. My experience is that mostly the people who provide services to homes in the mountains do not want to shovel snow. So it's either accessible and it's easy and they come in and do it. Or, you got to take care of it, in which case, like you said, access is so critical, or, you're gonna have to do it yourself.
So, it's a good point and it applies to a lot of different aspects of the house. It's just good access. It's easy to see it in the summer. It makes sense on the floor plan when you're looking at it. You drop five feet of snow on top of it that sits there for the rest of the winter, and gets hard as hell.
Michael Frank, Prefab Review: Toby, I was thinking we could jump in to one or two of your projects. Let's see what we got here. You can see my screen right now? All right. So anyway, if you go to Toby's website, cleverhomes. net, you can see he's done a lot of work on a bunch of really beautiful houses. I assume this is just jumping through from, house to house, in a variety of places, right? Carbon nail, a lot in Truckee, et cetera, et cetera, but yeah, so we can really look at any of these, but maybe you can talk through, this house, which it seems like is built into a really steep hill and talk about some of the considerations.
Toby Long, Clever Homes: This film starts with a consideration as we were just talking about, related to driveways. So, the good spot for this property was sort of lower on the hillside and there were some early designs for this project, that had a kind of a snaking driveway to get down to that little bit lower spot, where it kind of flattens out off the road edge. And, it just didn't make any sense, for all the reasons. So this sort of got kicked off, by understanding how to make the driveway just short, sweet, simple, right off the road.
Michael Frank, Prefab Review: You're saying there was a flatter plateau even below?
Toby Long, Clever Homes: Yeah, almost where those little stairs come off of that kind of roof. There's some lower areas down there.
Michael Frank, Prefab Review: So you thought about being one of those Tahoe houses that has 400 stairs to, to get from the, you know, you know, I'm talking about the covered stairway.
Toby Long, Clever Homes: Exactly. Or just like the long driveway down or the top. So we just kind of moved everything up, but it really got kicked off by understanding the garage and just, how to keep the driveway simple.
And right off the road, it's towards three that kind of gave us some base elevations. The property didn't want to be up high for a variety of different reasons. So we wanted to get the living areas down. So it's kind of two entries. This has like a door beside the garage. You can kind of go in and come down to this project.
It's kind of a unique design that has a little bit of a bridge. You can see in the center there, you can actually see underneath, the building. As you drop down a half set of stairs, that little staircase comes across that bridge and leads over to the open living spaces, which are over there on the right hand side.
And then there's an outdoor path. Obviously that path is a little bit less useful in the winter. So it's really that upper door, which is kind of the winter access. Well, it's sort of interesting, you know, in some places, Michael, we've seen design controls. I think like out in Sugar Bowl and some other places I've seen where, you're actually required to design like at Soda Springs, you're required to design, you know, a winter, a winter access and a summer access because the snow is piled up to the point where you're probably not going to walk in your front door.
Yeah. You're going to be up higher. So, it's got a little bit of a lower area and then a kind of upper access point, adjacent to the garage that kicks off this, you can see a little bit of the snow management. we got a really low slope, roof over the garage.
That really holds the snow in that location. So it doesn't drip onto the garage door. It sort of slopes towards the back, on the other upper portion of the property. We've got our, entry door roof kind of slopes away from the entry to keep that area nice and clean, to open up the view, the adjoining section kind of slopes in the other direction.
So kind of a playful use of the structures to not only characterize the design, but to speak to a little bit of that snow management, place there.
Michael Frank, Prefab Review: One question. So we talked about, areas, for, snow storage. Obviously this isn't a huge driveway. Where, if I'm a plow, am I just, where am I, where am I pushing the snow here?
Toby Long, Clever Homes: This just really gets snowblowed. So you got to blow the snow and it blows over the rail on the left. That was the hope anyway. So yeah, I think that's probably where it goes.
Michael Frank, Prefab Review: What else can you tell us about, sort of the considerations behind, this project?
Toby Long, Clever Homes: Yeah. So just, you know, mountain style use of materials again, wood siding, we know the kind of questions that come with, that and maintenance and, and fire hazard. This is a siding over fire sheathing to create a fire barrier. So that's used throughout.
Michael Frank, Prefab Review: Is the blue wood siding too, or is that like some kind of like composite?
Toby Long, Clever Homes: The gray is painted siding painted to just try to match the metal panels. So all of the darker material, wainscoating at the base is a hot rolled steel, just mounted on a very simple rain screen assembly, try to, you know, pick up those same details through the window areas to kind of create that cohesive look, for all the glazing.
And then it kind of shows up as a few other locations to, kind of break up the facade and to introduce just a change of material along those edges. Metal fascia at the edges of the roofs, to help provide some resiliency. You can see a little bit of that ice formation on the far right hand side of the upper second story there.
So yeah, it's kind of got a good friendly look. Obviously this is an area that like a lot of places have some HOA stuff and you've got some design controls to navigate. I think stone is just inevitably part of mountain construction.
People probably aren't surprised to hear that masonry is a pretty expensive part of projects. So in the work that we do, it tends to be used fairly carefully, fireplaces and such to try to use the stone. Yeah, those are some of the basic material treatments. a lot of this design was really to capture the view.
You can see a little bit of that comes off of the downslope side of the property. So, orienting rooms this way, a lot of glazing in those living spaces. It has a certain privacy given its location on the site, which allows for it to be pretty open and, airy. And, you know, uses a bunch of different, mechanical technologies. This is a radiant floor heated home, which is a really great way to heat anything in, mountain towns hydronic heating.
So it is, throughout very comfortable. We also did air conditioning, which I think people will continually look to, even in mountain towns that tend to be not quite as hot. Inevitably, it seems like these are, conversations emerging in all of our projects, of course, brings a pretty heavy investment into mechanical technologies themselves, but nothing too active here.
We don't have any snow melt systems or anything that's, really, ambitious or, extra layer of resiliency, but, yeah, house is performing well and it looks good.
Michael Frank, Prefab Review: So for a house like this, the thing that seems honestly most intense about this house is the foundation work on the slope.
So from a cost perspective, was this one of those homes where it ended up being that like the foundation and site work ended up, like did the sort of 50, 50 ratio we sort of talked about last time maintain here? Or did this end up being one where actually the site work ended up being the more expensive part of the whole equation?
Toby Long, Clever Homes: Well, I think that's sort of a natural condition for a lot of mountain projects. I found that foundations are just somewhat challenging in mountain towns anyway. I mean, the upside is that soil conditions tend to be pretty good. We don't get a lot of play up at elevation. It's a lot of sand, a lot of rock, a lot of granite, that kind of stuff.
We have some projects in Bear Valley we're doing that has unbelievably high snow loads, actually is on granite. We're actually kind of bolting the house to these rocks, which is an interesting thing we can talk about in another podcast. I mean, I think there's always costs there.
Concrete, In the mountains tends to be sometimes tough too. A place like Jackson, Wyoming is at the edge of transport distance from the nearest quarry. And so as you mentioned at the beginning, Michael, concrete work and excavation, site work, is something that's really limited by the weather schedule.
Everybody builds, foundations in the summer and then turn the excavators into snow plows in the winter. It's a very seasonal part of the project as a result. It's really in high demand for everybody building. So I think you get some high costs there. And then of course, just kind of amenities and such that spill off of the projects like this tend to drive a little bit more cost back into the site side, I think.
But I think, generally speaking, this project still had a pretty heavy emphasis on the modular elements. The project was entirely modular with the exception of a kind of interesting roof panel that happens at the center of that living area. The living room is made up of a couple of different modules coming together to make that volume.
So it's still a pretty heavy investment in the offsite portions of the project and it was delivered finished. So there's still, a decent amount of work that's taking place in the factory. But, to your point, I think those ratios can sort of get slanted a little bit as the site work becomes more technical and more expensive by nature.
Michael Frank, Prefab Review: Yeah. Are there any other projects, going through a few of them, that you want wanted to touch on quickly that you thought were particularly interesting?
Toby Long, Clever Homes: These homes that are really contemporary, you know, I think you sort of deploy that low slope flat roof kind of strategies you know, we try to provide some resiliency on those roofs by putting down ballasts or kind of pebbles and stone covers over those roofs, that sometimes help aesthetically, but also help performance wise.
You kind of see a little glimpse of that roof there has like a black volcanic rock on top of it that, is, you know, part of the roof structure. So I think these sort of play to a little bit of those aesthetics. Again, the use of stone in a selective way in this project, which is kind of built up into an upslope, that becomes a pretty important part of the aesthetic. These are pretty luxurious homes. So clearly there's an investment into the glass and other things are a little different for this one. The one that's in Olympic Valley, that's sort of near your place, is sort of an interesting, case study, just because it uses, might surprise people, actually an inverted roof.
So that project kind of has more of like a butterfly roof geometry. Right. Which actually is another way of kind of containing the snow. This was an opportunity to kind of lift up the roof structures to catch the views out into the woods. so it uses, you know, some slope surfaces, but they tend to kind of aggregate along central areas where we position roof drains.
Yeah, that kind of come down in and through the structure. This project does use, you know, heat tape and other things to provide an open water course throughout the winter season. But it does keep bicycles and things off of those windows. So you've got these unobstructed views, throughout the year.
So I think this is just kind of a fun, somewhat unanticipated, kind of, geometry for the project that people might find interesting.
Michael Frank, Prefab Review: Yeah. We see these butterfly roofs a lot in wine country these days, on projects there.
Some other, like Stillwater Dwelling, which is sort of another kind of fancy, they do them quite frequently. But, you don't see them quite as often in Tahoe. So it sounds like you guys made accommodations to make that work with the snow and all that.
Toby Long, Clever Homes: Yeah, it just sort of carries the snow and designed accordingly. So, kind of a nice, contemporary aesthetic, fairly soft, exposed steel, that shows up along some of those ridgelines that we wanted to make part of the aesthetic.
Michael Frank, Prefab Review: How much do you think about the number of, because we see windows very frequently. One of the things that certain people come to us wanting is this idea of like a passive house, which is, I guess it's sort of like a certain construction method that is basically really focused on the installation of the house and just not, you can probably better define it than I am. We've had a few people who are major proponents on the podcast before. They're very focused on the number of openings, making sure everything has no gaps. When you think about the fact that, you know, you do need an R18 garage door. You do need higher insulation ratios throughout the house.
How do you see windows playing into that? Or is it not a big consideration?
Toby Long, Clever Homes: Well, I think it's a big consideration. I'm a big fan of doors and windows, so I think investing into good glazing and, having lots of light and natural air is a great place to make an investment in a home.
Obviously, people prioritize this differently. Surely it chases back to, our architectural vernacular and style. But in most of our projects, we're trying to put in as much glass as we can. Those are pretty high performance these days, almost in all categories. Certainly the stuff out in California that's just, bound by our rigorous energy code and the compliance therein.
Most of the projects that we work on end up having post occupancy testing, like blower door tests or other things that demonstrate how the building is sealed properly and how we don't have a lot of air gaps or a lot of leakage out of the envelope. I think that as the construction systems, technologies and inspection regimes continue to evolve, I think we're all pushing towards this higher performance standard that we expect of buildings, but I've been pretty amazed at how the window industry continues to advance.
And this is not just with regard to energy compliance and insulation value, but the coatings on windows, the ability to minimize UV or heat gain. And all the things that used to be sort of our problems of the past seem to have been solved.
Even just inexpensive windows these days all have a lot of these core values. And most window companies have an opportunity to upgrade, the glazing as well. So, yeah, I mean, it hasn't been a massive point of analysis and a lot of our projects, we're not kind of working in that way so much as trying to really capture an aesthetic or an opportunity for views or sunlight.
Kind of work backwards towards engineering the building after we've captured, you know, kind of the architectural values. I know that's maybe not a totally popular thing to say, but I think naturally for the kind of work that we're doing anyway, people are looking at it.
Michael Frank, Prefab Review: And it's certainly how it often happens on these custom homes.
Toby Long, Clever Homes: Yeah. I mean, if you have a passive house goal, I mean, having engineering strategies that then facilitate design seems natural. But, you know, those can be also sometimes challenging conditions in a place that's more moderate in climate, you know, trying to not have a real temperature differential and trying to capture passive house strategies isn't quite the same.
The mountains are a good place to try to do passive heating in the winter and keeping, you know, your eaves at the right point. So we get sunlight coming in in the winter and then in the summer, it's sort of guarded for this. I mean, a lot of best practices, maybe another podcast just in the making.
I mean, I think particularly the mountains windows are just kind of where people's heads are, if you've got stuff to look at.
Michael Frank, Prefab Review: Okay, last two questions, and these sort of get to a little bit more, kind of the sort of general questions we get. But I think they cover a huge part of the audience.
We talked about one of them a little bit. So someone comes to you, I'm sure this happens to you, it happens to us, many, many times a month, and says, "Hey, I found this. great piece of land. I just want to figure out how to basically do this off grid. Like, I just want my little bit of, you know, whatever, like little bit of land with, my home and, you know, connecting to everything else."
It sounds fine, but I'm, focused on, keeping cost control, keeping infrastructure controlled. And, yeah, what do you say to that person? We typically have slightly different answers for slightly different states. But mostly it's, this is really hard, here's probably the minimum you need to do.
Or you need to look into like a fully off grid system which, I think it is hard beyond a certain size home. But yeah, how do you answer those people?
Toby Long, Clever Homes: So I think about it from a couple of perspectives. I mean, one, I think it's a natural instinct, not even just for being in a rural spot or mountains, but I think just given, you know, concerns about the ongoing reliance of our energy, energy grid and all parts of the country.
I also think that technology is advancing pretty quickly in this way too. And so there's things that are available now that we didn't have, you know, even a few years ago. So I think first off there are, you know, in some places you have an obligation to connect to the grid if you can.
So if you're in the middle of a suburban area, you know, you may have an obligation to connect into a power grid, even if you don't intend to use that power, you may have a statutory or legal mandate to make those connections. I think secondly, as we think about off the grid systems, the question that seems to be coming up in all of our projects this way, is the potential use of a generator.
The generator is an interesting question because it is a pretty affordable way to be sort of off the grid, but also requires a fuel source. You know, if you're going to be all electric, which is a lot of our projects and clearly the trend, you know, generators aren't as productive, in which case now we're back into battery storage and other kinds of that, you know, are electric by nature.
Then to your point, you start getting into kind of a cost analysis, cost benefit kind of analysis.
Michael Frank, Prefab Review: Generators are a couple thousand dollars versus battery systems.
Toby Long, Clever Homes: Yeah. $15,000 versus $60,000 you know, or whatever. So I think you can kind of see that go both ways. I think some of the smart panels and some of the smart batteries are starting to shift this around a little.
I even suspect that as, you know, electric cars become, I think Ford has an ability to like plug in the starting or whatever, Rivian. So there's probably some conversation, you know, that's gonna continue to take place there. I mean, I do think it's common in a place like California where we know our energy grid is suspect to fire hazard and other types of things where we get shut down.
I don't hear it quite as much in Wyoming. You know, it seems like the energy grid is, pretty reliable. Most of the distribution is below grade. So the kind of concern about the reliance on the grid is a little different for our clients in the Wyoming area than they are in the, you know, the California area.
And so there's kind of just a maybe a philosophical question about, you know, what we're really concerned about. I think the technologies are there to support any amount of capacity that people are thinking about. I do sort of believe that you know, being, fully off the grid without a power connection at all is going to be one category versus the other category where you do have a grid connection, but you're trying not to use it.
I think there's a slight difference there. Or if you're trying to protect against outages.
Michael Frank, Prefab Review: I think about water as not totally trivial. Are you drilling wells? How are you getting water?
Toby Long, Clever Homes: The systems are pressurized. So we know that, you know, big earthquake out here and the power systems go down, we don't have water either.
And so there's, you know, some question about that. Not every place allows you to drill wells. If you have municipal supplies and other places, we're just going to be part of the equation. One of the things that I see kind of interestingly, particularly up in the mountain towns are, community water grids, if you guys are running to those, but you know, HOAs form up or subdivisions form up, they'll have wells that pump into, you know, a larger storage vessel that then feeds down or whatever into a bunch of houses and, these kinds of hybrid community style utilities, I think are are common.
Michael Frank, Prefab Review: Yeah, we see that. There's some of that in wine country, actually, like in some of these more rural areas.
Toby Long, Clever Homes: Yeah, and I think there's going to be some movement to create, you know, micro energy grids too, where there's, you know, shared access to solar arrays and other kinds of things in the future.
We'll see how that, kind of manifests but I think that these mountain projects kind of, you know, facilitate this type of thinking that ultimately benefits in some way, you know, a lot of different kinds of projects. So, yeah, I mean, I think these are good considerations and I am way more optimistic about being off the grid, you know, in today's date than I was 20 years ago, where it just seemed like it was not as reliable.
Of course, it was being done for sure, but I think some of the smart technologies are kind of the key here to, you know, move power around your house in the right places, the right time and with the right solar array that could work pretty effectively.
Michael Frank, Prefab Review: And then I guess the other question that we get a lot, which is, we try to be pretty unbiased. Like we'll give people whatever solution works for them is I would say we are broadly speaking, more favorable towards modular in ski towns than maybe in any other jurisdiction except for maybe island towns. Island towns are, right, like, Nantucket, I think, has the highest concentration of modular homes of anywhere in the entire country. There's some stat like that. But basically, I actually think it makes a lot of sense relative to stick building in these areas in terms of the labor supply in terms of the speed. But yeah, how do you see, I know you've talked to me, in general about how you've been quite open to stick build to, different kinds of kits. Where do you see that falling out? And obviously it's a project by project decision.
Toby Long, Clever Homes: I think it's the same, Michael. I mean, site construction requires a lot of manpower and if you're in a place without a lot of people, it's just expensive. It's hard. Mostly it seems like these markets are being elevated by high value, high end construction projects. I think that has affected the market for everyone else. It's becoming very expensive to hire local people that have other larger projects potentially in competition with your own. So I think modular building makes just a lot of sense.
I think that the weather cycle, like you mentioned, is just a real, great reason to consider modular building. You can get a lot of work done while there's a bunch of snow on the ground and, you know, try to deliver a building in the spring. I think that's another just important topic for people to understand.
Maybe not surprising. We really try our best to not deliver a modular building at the beginning of winter. Yeah. The challenges of modular construction, as you may have experienced, is just keeping the building warm and dry, over the course of the winter. Of course, it has all of its finishes, right?
So our cabinetry, our sheetrock, our insulation is going to be sitting there, you know, through January, February, March, and being able to have good weather protection on the building is really important consideration for people, their architects, the contractors, for sure.
It's like modular, you know, doesn't work stylistically in the mountains sometimes. I think there's still going to be aesthetic for, you know, log homes. There's only one way to build a log home. I think having a lot of exposed structural elements, which I think is part of how mountain language sometimes emerges.
If it's not in the contemporary side of this, vernacular. I think that sometimes all the exposed timbers and elements that we associate with mountain vocabulary is sometimes better just as a site assembled kind of consideration. So yeah, I mean, I think about these things really about where, where's the rub? I think the rub is mechanical, electrical, plumbing, and finishing, you know, framing sometimes, but really it's those trades that seem to me to be hardest to connect with and in the highest demand. So if we can bring in a mod that's got all that stuff done, you know, we can add timbers and we can add logs and you can, you can make all the other stuff happen, you know, locally, I think a bit more effectively than trying to sort.
Michael Frank, Prefab Review: Quick question. This is getting really nerdy. When you guys do a project, right, so, just so everyone, people are talking about MEPs, so like, obviously the house typically will have the internal plumbing, mostly done in the factory, but then there's this concept called crossover connections, right, which is the mods do not ship connected typically, right? They ship down the road disconnected. So you need to actually connect all the different parts once you get to site. Are you typically having the local, the local labor do that? Or are you like through the GC are you having the factory labor, cause they put in a lot of the stuff, do the crossovers as well? How does that typically work on projects?
Toby Long, Clever Homes: I don't know of that many operations that do stitch work. You know, those crossover stuff is sometimes lumped into that term called stitch. It just seems to me that those sub trades are, you know, they're planted, they're in the shop, they have their tools there, they're not flying all over the place, how to make those kind of connections.
So, usually that happens on site with subcontractors that are affiliated with the general contractor. And then different ways of doing that from, you know, running to central hubs versus doing mod to mod connections and there's pros and cons in all these trades, depending upon what that system is.
Michael Frank, Prefab Review: Got it. Yep. we've seen some of both and honestly, like a non trivial percentage of the issues we have on projects end up just being like making sure everyone's like fully coordinated between, you know, what we've been advocating for, if it's possible, and I appreciate that there are costs and coordination here, but instead of having the shop people you know, go out to the field and do things, I actually think it's better to do the opposite. Have the field people go to the shop.
Toby Long, Clever Homes: Yeah. Usually, we'll at least have the GC come and spend some time for sure. But we've gotten really good benefits from having the electricians go or getting mechanical contractors to go.
I think as we all know, building is still an art form. Everybody's got their own kind of unwritten ideas, things that are like not in the plans about like, here's where X, Y, Z thing is. Just getting those people on the same page, you know, having your local electrician know what to expect when the boxes show up.
Yeah. Hugely valuable. So, yeah, that makes sense. I think those are good, good observations good advice for anybody considering a project like this.
Michael Frank, Prefab Review: Cool. Well Toby, thanks again. This was awesome.
Toby Long, Clever Homes: Absolutely. Yeah. I hope you get some good skiing this week and we'll talk to you again soon.
Michael Frank, Prefab Review: We'll see.
Toby Long, Clever Homes: Thanks Michael.
Michael Frank, Prefab Review: Thanks. Bye everybody.