I have had the wonderful opportunity to work with one of the founders of Blu Homes as they scouted locations and scoured the country finding the city with right fit for their innovative, new, prefab homes. Happily, they chose Salt Lake City, Utah (my home state) as one of the first locations in which to build, the rest of the country is not far behind. Not only that, the first home should be delivered and completed by late fall here in Utah and a personal walk-through for interested parties will be a reality.
What Blu Homes is building is a very innovative, prefab home that will be manufactured in 4 weeks and the keys will be in your hands within 10 days of the home being delivered to your lot. How is that for fast and convenient?
Blu Homes will be green. Very green. Not only will they cause 50-75% fewer carbon emmisions in the construction process, they will also have 40-75% lower annual utility costs.
Affordability often comes into question with projects like this and in the case of Blu Homes these homes will be very affordable. priced from $50,000 - $350,000, based on amenities and size, these homes are very affordable and can realistically be built at about $150 a square foot.
I think Bill Haney, Co-Founder and President of Blu Homes speaks best about the company and there mission in the video below.
In addition, to building wonderful homes, that will be built quickly, Blu Homes is building these homes affordably and Bill Haney explains some of the benefits and savings you will see from these homes in the second video below.
Blu Homes has launched the website this week with three basic home designs and what is called Blu Flex.
First the three designs are a studio, one bedroom, two bedroom urban and two bedroom rural. Finally, the Blu Flex feature is a series of add-on modules that will allow you to customize your home further with everything from media rooms to garages and more. You can see example of all of these here.
The process of buying a Blu Home is also quite simple and has been spelled out in this diagram.
Basically, once you have acquired your land and building permits, the rest of the steps flow easily with the build of your home taking 4-6 weeks, the setup taking 1 day and you getting the keys to your home in 10 days. You can read the full details of the buying process here.
So if you are looking for a home that will take you away from the suburbs, fill an urban lot and provide you, quickly, with a modern, sustainable, affordable home to live in, then Blu Homes are for you. Take a moment to jump over to their website and see what they are all about and please leave your comments below. I look forward to hearing them.
Finally, I leave you with a video of Maura McCarthy, Co-Founder and VP of Sales and Marketing for Blu Homes explaining the move away from urban sprawl.
26 Comments on Blu Homes have officially launched and they are on their way to Utah and Massachusetts.
OCT
10
2008
A green (or blu) home with lower utiliy costs, and should qualify for all types of financing (along with energy efficient credits/benefits) sounds good to me. Very nice.
I'll come back and watch the videos in a bit - I'm just wondering about the wisdom of 1 and 2-bedroom homes, because of the limited resale market they'd have. Maybe there is a place for this, I'll check it out further.
WOW...this is amazing news: "What Blu Homes is building is a very innovative, prefab home that will be manufactured in 4 weeks and the keys will be in your hands within 10 days of the home being delivered to your lot. How is that for fast and convenient?
Blu Homes will be green. Very green. Not only will they cause 50-75% fewer carbon emissions in the construction process, they will also have 40-75% lower annual utility costs."
My Asheville area GREEN investor/clients and ecodevelpoers are going to relish this news. I would love to hear more about this!!!!Please keep us posted.
Good to see another entry into the green home prefab market. It seems like there are a number of prefab builders incorporating green ideas. It is a good trend in that I think it will make green more accesible from a pricing stand point.
Thank you all for the comments! I am glad to see this post revived. These are beautiful homes.
JaneAnne, I have sent you an email.
Matt, these do qualify for several credits.
Suzanne, these can pretty much be as many bedrooms as you want. Depends on how many modules you use and houw you customize them. Keep in mind that they want to keep them under 3,000 sq ft. Much bigger and though it is green, it isn't green, if you know what I mean.
Sabrina, A BluHOme is under construction in Colorado right now.
Thank you again for this post. We are excited as we're in the permit process in Utah, and just finishing the permitting in Blue River (a suburb of Breckenridge), Colorado.... should have some homes up soon for folks to see!
Thank you again for this post. We are excited as we're in the permit process in Utah, and just finishing the permitting in Blue River (a suburb of Breckenridge), Colorado.... should have some homes up soon for folks to see!
I've been reading about these. How exciting to see them finally breaking ground! I love the Blue Flex! What an awesome idea! Pricing is great and I love the idea of the reduced energy usage! Great post!
This is great news. Many perceive anything Green will be too expensive. Nice to know there is an affordable green home available. Do know where where they will be in MA?
Wow. Thanks for the super post. We really need this here in Great Falls, MT. Even the two bedroom factor is okay. It is affordable, green housing that we need. No builders here are building green and it is a real bummer. I will pass this info along. Great web site too.
Very interesting, especially since I am in Massachusetts.... Always good to see "green" builders anywhere! Couple of thoughts, though. The only audience we have in these parts for one, two bedroom homes are downsizers. We have seen a marked increase in 55+ communities. Young families, especially in these times, are looking for very, very long term homes and would want much better growth potential... Also, here in Massachusetts, we have septic systems (maybe we'll get rid of them all someday, sigh). Which means the added costs of perc tests, engineering as well as installation of systems themselves.
Great post - would like to hear of any updates as it pertains to Massachusetts especially.
Thanks for the comments Carolyn. You may want to check out the Blu Homes website and also feel free to contact Maura with Blu Homes. I will have a lot of info on the Utah side of the map, but not in Mass.
Very good and fair question to ask. The cutting down of the tree was not an easy decision and was a decision made only after exhausting every option to save it. in fact, the original plan was to save the tree and build around it in order to make use of the passive cooling that it would provide. Unfortunately Siberian Elms are a very invasive non native species that not only grow big, but also quickly and are therefore inherently weak. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siberian_Elm After consulting with an arborist it was decided that the damage to the root system cause by the construction would render the tree highly unstable and dangerous.
To answer the is it green question, no, not really. But as much as the tree that could be reused was up to and including leaving mulch for the site and the neighborhood to use. In addition to that, the building of a home in an already developed urban neighborhood where single lots available for infill use are a much better option than clearing another swath of undeveloped land in the suburbs for yet one more development.
Any home, built anywhere will have a major impact on the planet. Whether it is zero carbon footprint or not and whether it is an efficient home or not. So as long as we as humans exist on this planet it is our job to do everything with the least amount of impact possible and with careful consideration of all the alternatives. Will we be perfect? No way. It isn't possible because everything we do as humans is invasive in one way or another.
On a side note, many trees on the lot were saved. Only a tree that posed a safety issue was removed. Also trees will be planted in it's place once the home is in place. Granted they won't be as big or 70 years old.
At this point my understanding is that it is to be a private residence and also be used as a show home to feature the finished product if someone wanted to see what one could look like.
Perhaps it’s a bit dishonest to label any project “green” that would remove a 70 year old tree in an already dense and historical urban neighborhood for the purposes of locating and marketing a prefabricated and pretentious building. This practice seems to do little more for sustainable design than water down the sincerity of green construction in search of the financial capitalization by yet another developer who would continue to bulldoze and construct rather than taking advantages of less invasive locations by minimizing the ecological effects of construction.
I have to agree with you, Bianca. These people should be ashamed of themselves for attempting to change the face of an historic neighborhood for their personal gain. Why did the historic society of this area allow this to happen anyhow?
Oh, by the way, the supposedly "brittle" 70 year old tree had survived many high velocity wind storms (70 mpg gusts and higher) over the years with hardly any branch loss.
Rodger and Bianca,
Thank you for your comments - it was a beautiful old tree and I share your concern about the point that cutting down trees not being green. My fiancee and I bought the property with the plan that we would build our new house around the tree, and designed the smallest possible footprint (800 sq ft) in order to do this. We love the neighborhood and the neighbors, and knew that it was an important old tree and one of the oldest on the block. It turned out that when we started planning a foundation, there was no way to save the tree. We tried looking at drilled piers (like screws), sonotubes, and smaller retaining walls. Unfortunately, all of these would have destructed the tree's root structure to the point of causing serious instability. Apparently, these Elms have a root structure that is very close to the surface of the earth - their roots grow wide, not deep. And so any disturbance to them would make the lot unbuildable. Apparently, when the lot was subdivided about 80 years ago, it was all owned by the same person. The pieces got sold off, and since this lot was slightly smaller than the others it kept getting used as a side yard to the house next door. Eventually, the owner could no longer afford to keep it as a separate piece, and we were the first owners to buy the property as a separate entity (from what I know).
We are planning to plant at least 1-2 new trees in place of this tree. New trees do 'digest' more carbon than old-growth trees, but that still does not mitigate the fact that there was a community loss of the old beauty of that tree. My fiancee and I have invested our life savings into the lot, and believe we can build a very respectful-sized (in order to respect the size of the existing buildings on the block), and green home. This home will create 65% less carbon emissions from electricity and gas use of an average home in the city, and about 50% less than 'code'. We are doing a zero-scape lawn, and using material in the home (bamboo floors, Eco Urban cabinets, recycled paper countertops, flourescent lights, etc.) that are more 'cradle to cradle' than most materials.
We had considered buying a lot in the Emigration Canyon area, but the problem was the expense and disruption to the land of doing a septic field, well, and lots of trenching for electric and gas. In addition, that home would have expanded the greenfield development and sprawl of the city, and we are more personally in agreement with urban density. We like the idea of walking places on foot, not driving cars much, and knowing and spending time withour neighbors (we're very psyched about the neighborhood). Even though this was a small lot, it was what we could afford and we think our small house on it will be a boon to the neighborhood, and add to it's beauty. We hope the replaced trees will start to make up for the lost one, as well~ we shared a lot of the wood chips left from the tree with neighbors in hopes that it would help memorialize and respect the life of the tree, which was a loss to the neighborhood.
I hope at least this helps with hearing our rationale, even though it does not make up for the loss of the tree. We are tree lovers, outdoor hikers, and try to live life respectfully to the earth. We hope that folks can come visit the home when it's built, which will likely be mid-late May. And I am happy to hear any other feedback or ideas about how we can thoughtfully approach this project.
Thank you,
Maura
So, am I to understand that people will be walking (not driving) into this wonderful, quiet historic neighborhood from miles around to see this non-historic modular home. Can't wait to see all the additional traffic this will cause in our once quiet neighborhood. Only CNG and Electric cars I am assuming, of course.
Rodger, I appreciate your concern for the private nature of the neighborhood. Our expectation is that there will just be a few days after the home is completed, where we will have folks in to look at the home. It's helpful to hear your concern, and I will try my best to keep things thoughtful, respectful, and organized to cause minimum disruption to the area. Warmly, Maura
So, the healthy 70 year old elm tree has been gone for several months now and still no work has been done to "improve" the rest of the property. What's up?
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A green (or blu) home with lower utiliy costs, and should qualify for all types of financing (along with energy efficient credits/benefits) sounds good to me. Very nice.