Will Palm Harbor have a smash hit with their 2017 doublewide, "The Urban Homestead"?

 

After taking a second look at the 2017 doublewide version of Palm Harbor’s singlewide “The Santa Fe” (see my post on that HERE), I thought it deserved a post. The doublewide version is called “The Urban Homestead.”

Usually I post only about smaller homes, but this is so beautiful I wanted to do a post about it also. I still like the singlewide a little better though, but everything about this doublewide is a breath of fresh trailer, as I like to say.

Palm Harbor’s “The Urban Homestead” is a 1736 sq. ft. doublewide and also comes in two larger sizes. The base price is around $100,000. It’s supposed to be a blend of urban and country, and like the singlewide version (“The Santa Fe”), it does this well.

I have seen Clayton and a few other manufactures try to capture the farm or country look in a home, and it wasn’t this successful. Such efforts usually look dorky, although can have some nice elements.

By manufactured home standards, the front of the home, above, is balanced and pleasing looking, one of the better looking ones, for sure. It’s not going to be mistaken for a stick-built home, but inside, it’s nicer than any stick-built home I’ve seen of this size and price. It really has charm.

The exterior is nice looking, instead of odd, fake, or funny looking. It’s not urban or country, but it’s a good-looking doublewide manufactured home exterior, and better looking than the singlewide version.

My photographs look a little bit grainy, because I took ones off the Palm Harbor site and they were enveloped in fog. I turned up the contrast. Here's the original foggy exterior from their website, with flag blocking a window. See what I did on the photo above?

 I also photoshopped a different door onto the house, from an architectural drawing.

Here are three videos from YouTube, tours of the house.

 

You will notice in the video, the kitchen cabinets are not solid white, but have scratches or cracks, a distressed look to mimic those of an old, abandoned farm house. Just joking about the abandoned part, but seriously, they could have skipped the cracked effect I think, but it still wouldn’t stop me from buying the house. I’d have to see it in person to judge whether it’s cool or a little too fake looking.

 

Now, to two small reservations I have about the house...neither of which are that important. They wouldn’t stop me from buying it if I had a family and needed a house this big.

First, you will notice in the second photo of the kitchen, near the top of my post, the seam in the ceiling between the two halves of the doublewide shows conspicuously. I don't particularly like the look of that.

My other reservation is this one. This home has something you don’t often see in any manufactured home, a free-standing tub (see above) in the master bath, in addition to a separate shower. So there is no enclosure around the tub. I had an old clawfoot tub once and I loved it, but this tub sits right on the floor. I assume it’s fiberglass or resin.

One potential problem there would be with no or thin insulation in a free standing tub, the water wouldn’t stay warm for very long compared to a tub set in an enclosure with insulation under and around it. Old fashioned clawfoot tubs hold their warmth somewhat because they are made of cast iron and the cast iron gradually releases the heat it stores from the hot water when the tub is filled.

Here is a photo of the second bathroom. Can you believe they’d put something this wonderful in a manufactured home?

I’m just joking. It’s a photo I came across on the web and sent to friends as a suggestion of how they should remodel their bathroom. This bathroom probably costs over $100,000 and that’s no joke. It’s the kind of thing a rich person would do to make their house memorable to guests.

So, they say The Urban Homestead (click on this link to visit website where house is sold) is already “award-winning,” and it doesn’t surprise me. It seems like it would be a great home for Palm Harbor to send to manufactured home shows. Congratulations to the designer. It’s daring, different, functional and beautiful.

Palm Harbor Homes

The Urban Homestead FT32563C

Palm Harbor Model Center, Bryan, Texas

“The Loft,” a modern singlewide shed roof design by Palm Harbor

How many singlewides have you seen which look like this? I’ve photoshopped the color down several shades on the façade, because I thought it would look better with a unified color scheme, given all the windows and design elements they have going on. Gray and dark gray aren’t my favorite house colors, but unifying the palette emphasizes the modern look of this shed design. You can see the actual model colors in the video:

Manufactured home factories usually give a choice of colors for the home’s exterior, and sometimes type of siding, e.g., cedar or hardboard. Unless you’re buying the lot model, the interiors of manufactured homes usually come with white walls. The dealer will sometimes throw in some paint, if you ask, but it would be colors used in the model.  

Speaking of gray, you will notice in the video on the home’s website, the interior of the model is all soft gray, including the ceilings. Having worked with drywall on two my own homes, I hate gray walls. It’s the color of naked drywall. Yeah, I know, it’s a trend, like very dark cabinetry. I don’t like that either.

Gray walls and ceilings are depressing and remind me of unpainted concrete basement walls. If you’re afraid of color, paint your walls beige, and ceilings either white or a lighter shade of beige than is on the walls. That will keep the room warm and friendly, rather than cold and depressing.

The wells of skylights, and sometimes perimeter around windows look best in white, not in a color matching the wall color. No skylights here, I was just throwing it out as a tip.

Dark cabinets and dark wood in general look old, like colonial furniture and wood trim from the 1800s. Sometimes dark wood looks good in high-end kitchen cabinetry, I will give it that much.

In a small, modern home like this, light cabinetry would look better, and be in style forever. I’m pretty sure it’s an option. The rage for dark kitchen cabinets has been going on for over 15 years, and some day it will end and those cheap stained dark brown cabinets will look just fugly.

I remember around the year 2000 when a friend who follows trendy home design crap first told me dark cabinets were “in.” It looks good in some kitchens which cost as much as a singlewide trailer.

Scandinavians and the Shakers, they like light woods and design which look clean and simple. I bet some of these dark stained cabinets look awful after 10 years of wear. Then you can paint them white. That’s a big job, painting cabinets.

My other pet peeve about dark wood is when it is used as molding on any small home, but especially a home with a low ceiling, as in a strip of molding between the walls and ceiling. Thus the dark strip running around a room makes the ceiling look even lower, and it looks silly. On the more upscale doublewide manufactured homes, I have seen dark trim which was better quality and looked okay.

Natural or lightly stained wood cabinetry is beautiful, like knotty alder and other woods Palm Harbor and Karsten used. They will always be in style. Pine is soft and light, and probably not as suitable for cabinetry as harder woods, since it dents easily, but my favorite cabinets were the knotty pine ones I had in my last house.

My blog is opinionated, but I’m not shilling for any particular brand or company, even though I lean toward singlewide homes by Palm Harbor and Karsten. It just so happens I like their singlewides.

No company is paying me, except I’ve earned about $150 in the last 5 years from Google AdSense, which places ads in the right column of this blog. As some of my posts get older, they pick up more views, about 100 a day for the popular posts.

Anyway, the reason so many of my picks for fairly good quality and stylish smaller manufactured homes are either Karsten or Palm Harbor is that they have good home interiors. Besides having nice interiors, they are of better quality than most; simple, solid, and not too fake or cheap looking. For example, Karsten’s one piece tub/shower doesn’t look like the awful, cheap looking units that lower end homes have. Instead, I would prefer theirs to tile, having grout wear away, and having to re-grout around a tub because of the line where the tub meets the tile.  

You can buy a new low-end singlewide for $25,000 and I understand why someone might do that if that is all they can afford. There was a time when I had such a terrible problem with a major roof leak I couldn't locate, a low-end trailer with a good roof would have saved me from misery. 

However, when there are homes like this $51,000 Palm Harbor which in the long run may make you feel happier, save you money on energy costs, and last longer because things on it won’t fall apart as easily, then it is worth it if you can afford it, to buy a better quality home like this. Because of the better style—higher ceilings, drywall, nicer windows—these are the only homes I can really like, and would like to own myself.

With the shed roof singlewide and a home oriented toward the south, the slanted ceiling would pick up a lot of light from the clearstory windows, more than a flat ceiling, and I like this kind of slanted ceiling.

One reservation I have about this shed roof design is that when solar panels become more popular, and your house is oriented with the tall side to the south, which you’d do in climates that have snow in winter, the roof would be slanted the wrong way for solar. If you had room, you could either have a free-standing tracking solar array or in a decade or two, solar shingles or a thin panel which could be put on the front of the house.

This home appears to have 8” or 10" eaves on the sides and eaves of only a few inches on back and front. It’d look better with the same eaves on the front, or even a foot and a half of eave on the front, for best passive solar design.

Inside, unless you need extra storage, the structure with two shelves on each side, between the living room and kitchen, I think it has to go! I’m sure you could tell them to delete it from the build. It ruins the modern look of the house. I don’t know, maybe it would look better with books or something.

This model, "The Loft" is located in Albany, Oregon, which is a Homes Direct dealer which has this Palm Harbor model for $51,000. It's the only one, but you can probably put one on order at another dealer. HERE IS THE LINK to that website, which features a lot of other nice homes, all with prices, which I like. (I don't like when you have to call for a price.)

For example, HERE IS A LINK to a $35,900 singlewide called "The Perris" on the same page. It's also a Palm Harbor home. It's not as exciting as "The Loft," but with only one bathroom and less style, it's less expensive.

Paying $35,900 for "The Perris," rather than getting a bottom-of-the-line singlewide for $25,000, is probably worth it. "The Perris" would look nice inside, if it had one or two walls painted a color other than white. The whole thing is kind of a whiteout inside right now. I wanted to include this because sometimes the pricier brands like Palm Harbor produce some nice, inexpensive homes.

Some dealers offer granite counter tops and stainless steel appliances on their luxury homes, but on the inexpensive homes they're kind of cheap all through. Palm Harbor and Karsten both build quality in their singlewides and small homes. Again though, fail on the dark kitchen cabinet color.

State standards for manufactured homes are high in Oregon, Washington and Northern California. By law, they can't sell any manufactured homes with 2 x 4 walls, except if they are "park model" RVs. In states with lower standards, you can sometimes pay extra and get a home built to higher standards, and that's what you should try to do. For example, locally, for me, the Karsten factory in Albuquerque will build a home with R-21 insulation in the walls, instead of R-19.    

Back to "The Loft"...Perhaps because I’ve spent too much time trying to find roof leaks, like in places where buildings meet, the simplicity of a shed roof, one simple rectangle, it’s beautiful. Tell me what you think of this shed roof design in the comments. 

Simple roof and siding fixes to prevent small problems from becoming big problems

And now for something completely different...Rather than writing about a manufactured home today, I’m going to introduce you to three products you can use to keep your house from falling apart, or to fix it if it is falling apart. I’ve picked these three because although I’ve looked at many YouTube videos as I went about making repairs, I never saw references to these three in particular:

1. Self-tapping screws. (Get an assortment of a few sizes, like half-inch ones, and ones that are about an inch long.)

  2. Kool Seal UV Resistant Black Patch & Coat (gallon size available at Walmart or Home Depot).

3. Roof Repair Fabric (fiberglass mesh used with Patch & Coat above, for patching larger areas or cracks).

Whether you live in a stick-built house, an RV, a single or double wide, the old maxim about a stitch in time saves nine still applies. The sooner you can fix a small problem, the better the chances are that it will not develop into a major one.

For example, if you see a damp spot on the ceiling or wall, the time to try to find the source, which sometimes can be very difficult, is right away. The water that is getting in can sometimes be from a crack or opening that is many feet away from where it is leaking. If you wait a month, or sometimes even a few days, you’re risking water damage, mold, wood rot, floor damage, and needing to replace drywall or studs. My house was kind of a wreck when I moved in, and I’ve used these three things to fix many problems.

Leaks most commonly occur around outlet pipes, vents, skylights, edges of flashing, around missing shingles, under swamp coolers, at the juncture of a water spout to the roof, and at the edges of the roof, where roof lines meet, and through cracks in the roof, and around windows.

Sometimes a plain roof with no gables looks boring and cheap, but it is a thing of beauty if you’ve ever had problems with roof leaks at gable joints.

There are a few YouTube channels which feature people who tour abandoned houses and buildings. Sometimes they’ll show a house that looks like it was once an expensive house. Stacks of old magazines or newspapers show it was abandoned only eight years ago. But it is a wreck inside, not because of vandalism, although that is sometimes the case, but simply because it developed a hole in the roof at some point, water got in, or even that a window or two got smashed or were left open. After just eight years, it was rotting and falling apart.  

There are single-wide trailers that are 40 years and older, which look in perfectly good condition because their owners always kept them up, even though trailers from that era were not as well made as they are today.

Small problems may stay minor for quite a while, but at other times they don’t. The longer you put it off, the bigger risk you’re taking. Manufactured homes do not have advantages when it comes to maintenance. They need it just as often as any stick-built house. Sometimes you just don’t know when something is headed toward a disaster, because it is hidden.

 A lot of my neighbors have carports, accessory buildings or houses with metal roofs. A sheet of metal or aluminum will flap and bang at a loose corner every time it is windy. Then a big wind strikes one day and the sheet of metal flies off down the street or into someone else’s yard. Okay, I confess, that happened to me once. LOL.

SELF-TAPPING SCREWS (ALSO CALLED SELF-DRILLING SCREWS)

Sheets of metal can be screwed back on, or better yet, fixed using a few screws before they fly off. A neighbor who worked in construction, mostly on roofs, clued me into using self-tapping screws. Get yourself some self-tapping screws if you have any metal siding, or a metal roof. Putting just a few screws in a piece of metal siding will prevent it from blowing off, and it will keep water out.

Self-tapping screws come in different sizes and are easy to use, because they will start a hole in thin metal without having to drill a pilot hole. That’s why they’re called self-tapping. They seem to hold a lot better than regular metal screws. Get the kind of screw with the flat head with the lip, as shown in the photo. The lip on the edge makes it so the screw head is nearly flush with the surface. They come with different head styles, and this style works the best for me.

Sometimes you have two sheets of metal to screw together, and there is no stud to screw them to. These screws will even hold pieces of metal together.

KOOL SEAL UV RESISTANT BLACK PATCH & COAT

The next product I stumbled on myself, at Walmart. Usually I don’t like Walmart for building products because some of their building products have been on the shelf too long or they are overpriced. This product was cheaper than at Home Depot. I got my last gallon for $16, I think maybe because it had a big dent in it.

It comes in a gallon can and is called Kool Seal UV Resistant Black Patch & Coat. In 2017 at my Walmart, I think I've always paid less than $20 for this at the store. I notice it’s $25 to $30 online. Write down the exact name. Kool-Seal makes a lot of different products. This one is patching compound for asphalt roofs, although I’ve found it also works on metal roofing and siding, shingle roofs, stucco, vinyl siding, brick and painted wood surfaces too. I’ve used it as caulking around aluminum and vinyl windows, outside, on a wooden structure. When used for caulking windows, use masking tape to get a straight line. And you can paint it when it dries.

 It’s black and looks like tar, but it contains no solvent and hardly smells at all. You can get intoxicated on some of these products, even when using them outdoors, but this is odorless. It has pieces of fiber in it to reinforce it. The first time I opened it, I was surprised at how fluffy it is. But it works better than anything I’ve tried in decades, and that includes expensive latex patch coating, liquid aluminum roof coating and especially tar. You will never go back to tar after using this.

While it’s wet, you can clean it up with soap and water. I wear plastic gloves while using it anyway. And if you get it on your clothes after it has dried, it’s hard to get off, so wear an old shirt.

ROLL OF FIBERGLASS ROOF FABRIC (LOOKS LIKE A GRID OR MESH)

For use on wider cracks or openings, up to maybe half an inch, use the Kool Seal Patch & Coat with fiberglass roof “fabric,” which I will refer to as mesh from here on in. It comes in a roll usually about 6 inches wide and a 100 feet or more long. You can cut it to any size you need to make a patch.

Here is how you apply it: Put a thin coat of the Kool Seal Patch & Coat down using a plastic or metal tool, like a cheap plastic drywall taping knife (an inch or two wide), a putty knife,  a straight-margin (square end instead of pointed) trowel, a spatula with a square end, or I even use a regular old table knife most of the time.

After spreading the base coat down over a crack or opening, lay the fiberglass mesh on top, and then spread a coat of the Kool Seal on top of the mesh making sure none of the grid pattern shows through. If the crack is small enough, you don’t have to use mesh. A bigger crack repaired with the Kool Seal Patch & Coat alone won’t last more than a year, if that, in areas with standing water. So that’s why you should use this fiberglass mesh on bigger cracks.

For me, this Kool Seal Patch & Coat works at least three times as well as tar and since it doesn’t stink, I like using it a lot more. It doesn’t crack, pucker or peel off as easily as tar either. It says on the can that it dries smooth and flexible, but really, it dries hard, which I like. I guess it has just enough flexibility not to crack.

Silicone is a good sealant, but when it dries it stays flexible, so it might be good for inside a crack, but not so much on a surface that sees a lot of water and sun exposure. I find that silicone just flakes off too often at the edges, and it is very expensive.

Kool Seal Patch & Coat doesn’t last forever, but it lasts longer when used in areas which don’t get constant sun exposure, even though it’s UV resistant. I had a leaky skylight on a shingled roof and the Kool Seal has worked for 5 years without re-application. When I use it on stucco or a painted wood surface, since it’s black, I paint over it after it dries, and it holds paint fairly well.

If you’re using it on an aluminum roof where it’s visible, you can paint over it with some aluminum paint or better yet, aluminum roof coating. I mean the stuff made to spread over your roof that has bits of aluminum in it and reflects the sun, as well as coats and seals the roof. It’s not going to match a metal roof exactly, but it won’t stick out as much as black.

I live in an area of houses where nearly everyone has flat roofs, except people who have manufactured homes. A flat roof has some slope, but not much. Even new houses with flat roofs will develop some roof leaks after 5 years. A friend with a 10-year old house had a leak near one water spout, and he spent $20,000 on a new roof before he told me about it.  

Lastly, if you are doing some patching, screwing or repairs on a sloped roof, wear footwear that doesn’t slip, and take precautions like roping yourself to the chimney or a secure place, for example, a post on the other side of the house if you don’t have a chimney, if you have to. Tie one end of a rope around a post, throw it over the roof, and tie the other end around your waist. Even among professionals, falling of a roof is one of the most common and serious accidents. Ladders are also dangerous.

A 3D-printed carbon fiber experimental house of the future

This prototype house and hybrid natural gas/electric vehicle were built (3D printed and assembled) back in October of 2015. The house was assembled from 3D printed modules, by Clayton Homes. Architectural design by the large firm of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill.

I don’t know how I missed something this epic, except I must have been watching too many cat videos that month. Come to think of it, news about this broke around the time I happily retired. Don't miss this video by Clayton about the home. It is excellent.

The AMIE (Additive Manufacturing Integrated Energy) house sits on the grounds of Oak Ridge National Labs in Tennessee, where it and all of its systems are being monitored and tested. Oak Ridge is the same place which refined uranium-235 for the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos, New Mexico, where the first atom bomb was built to drop on Hiroshima during WW II (1945).

It turns out Oak Ridge National Labs does a whole range of research into things like energy and materials in their Energy and Environmental Sciences division. In fact, they were the primary players in the development of this AMIE prototype house and vehicle, along with several other private businesses, organizations, and educational institutions who collaborated. The panels which Clayton assembled to make the house were printed out on a 3D printer in carbon fiber with ABS (a thermoplastic added for strength) at the Oak Ridge National Labs.

This is a proof of concept house, built for research of a unique energy sharing system between home and vehicle—solar/electric in the house and natural gas/electric in the hybrid vehicle.

As they say in their video, “The home won't be usable today or tomorrow.” Obviously, that’s not a sales pitch, but what they mean is this particular house is not going to be coming off a production line ever. For one thing, it doesn’t have a toilet or bathroom, so it’s more of a small lab built for testing the energy systems. But there are kitchen appliances that will run, and the house will be heated and may have hot water. There’s a bed that pulls out of the GE kitchen unit. Maybe the outhouse is out back?

Let's go back to another house of the future. This one was the real House of the Future at Disneyland, built by Monsanto and MIT. Think plastics.

Monsanto's House of the Future stood in Disneyland’s Tomorrowland between 1957 and 1967 and was the most popular attraction there for years. If you like the nostalgia of the one video above, search on YouTube for more about it, because there are several different small documentaries of the house. That House of the Future never became a production model either. However, the future did turn out to have houses which contained a lot of plastics, just not with so much plastic serving as the structure of the wall. When it came time to remove it, it proved nearly indestructible, and couldn't be broken or even dented with a wrecking ball or chainsaw. They had to use choker chains.

Back to the present future house. Here are two more videos about the AMIE house and vehicle. They are both more technical and not as good as the video near the top of the post. 

This AMIE house and vehicle are about sustainability and energy, and the latest 3D printing of modular panels and parts. Both those things are pretty exciting. If they work well, the implications for scaling up these technologies could be enormous.

From reading on the web, I knew that there were a variety of materials which could be used in 3D printing for smaller things like models, or structures that would fit in a room, but I was familiar only with 3D house printing being a large contraption with a reservoir of cement which poops out through a nozzle, forming the walls of a house as it is controlled by a computer.    

How could the YouTube video about it have less than 3,000 views? Even if it were just a carbon fiber shed from a 3D printer, it seems like it would have more. I suppose it has a lot to do with it not going into production anytime soon, and it not be livable. That’s understandable. When I was young there was so much talk about flying cars, most people thought everyone would have them by now.

Warren Buffet is the owner of Clayton Homes, and it’s nice to see a tiny fraction of his billions in something like this, as I doubt any other manufactured home company would have had the resources or interest to collaborate on a project like this.

Whatever you think of Clayton, from maybe having a bad experience with their dubious lending practices -- at one time anyway -- or a problem with one of their trailers, they have stuck their necks out in some concept projects which haven’t had immediate commercial return for them. Any shadiness that went on with Clayton's lending practices were dwarfed by the subprime mortgage crisis of 2008, where 10 families lost their stick-built homes. 

A few smaller home manufactures have pioneered building homes with SIPs instead of a stick frame, but that hasn’t become an industry standard yet. Perhaps the SIPS wood sandwich with foam core insulation will be bypassed for new panels printed in 3D, thus skipping the step between stick framing and something better. I would like to see nearly all houses move away from the use of stick framing with dimensional lumber, and into something more sustainable, durable and modern.

They mention the R-30 insulation all around, which is excellent, but of course, it's not integrated and printed out that way. The insulation was just conventional hard foam board insulation, not printed out with a printer. The real leap will come when the 3D printer can whip material into a suitable exterior surface, insulation and interior wall all at the same time. 

Although this is the most rad house yet, Clayton has experimented with the i-House, eHouse, and Gen-Now homes which were new concepts with limited production. But they did pay off in being a way not only to attract attention, but also test what new features customers would like in their homes, and what things are practical to do.   

When the sun isn’t shining, and it’s nighttime or cloudy, and the vehicle is parked at home, this AMIE house can get its energy wirelessly from the vehicle’s battery storage banks, which are charged by the natural gas engine when driven, or charged by solar from the house.

When the vehicle is parked near the home, it is positioned over a wireless charging dock, and gets its batteries charged via the solar panels on the roof of the house during the day. Whether it’s receiving energy from the house through the solar panels or sending it back to the house, the vehicle doesn’t have to be plugged in.

In the 1890s, Nikola Tesla, one of the greatest scientific minds of the last few centuries, spent several years trying to transfer high voltage power wirelessly. He failed, but now smaller amounts of electricity are transferable wirelessly, for use with laptops and small devices. But Oak Ridge National Labs are getting it up to enough wireless electricity transfer to power a house or car, or at least charge one. I think I read where this higher wireless energy transfer is one of their breakthroughs in this project. It’ll be interesting to see where it goes.  

In addition to Disneyland’s House of the Future, this house also reminds me of Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion House and all of the wonderful houses which have been in the Solar Decathlon for the last few decades, built by college student engineers and architects. A few of those came with vehicles, too.

CLICK HERE for a link to the Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Innovations in Building website, to explore more information about the AMIE house and vehicle, as well as all the other projects they have going on.

CLICK HERE for a link to the Treehugger website, which after writing this I noticed has an article on this house with lots of nice photos.

The following is a list of materials and products used in the AMIE house, including GE’s “FirstBuild” micro-kitchen. Many of things you can buy and use today, or read about on the web:

1. Thin film monocrystalline PV panels (Renogy 100DB)

2. Printed interior panel

3. Vacuum insulated panels(Nanopore)

4. Steel joining plate

5. Printed exterior envelope and structure

6. Printed sleeve for tension rod & LED light

7. IGU storefront (Kawneer"Encore")

8. Micro-kitchen (GE "FirstBuild")

9. Glazing (PPG "SolarbanZ50" with PVB interlayer)

10 LED light (Optolum"Briteline 2LP")

11. Linoleum flooring (Johnsonite"Lenza")

12. Steel tensioning rod in greased sleeve

13. Disc spring assembly

14. Printed door handles

15. Minisplit (Mitsubishi"SLZ-KA12NA")

16. Printed stringer

17. Aluminum planks (Alcoa)

18. Steel chassis & amp; removable wheels

Here is a video made recently, showing the printing of a more traditional 3D printed house, this by Apis Cor and printed in Russia, outside of Moscow, in 24 hours. 

The house is only 409 sq. ft. and printed at a cost of about $10,000, not including appliances or electrical/plumbing. This will be very exciting once they figure out how to print roofs, or have robots do the windows and everything else. As it is, the crane machine which stands at the center of the building, which rotates with a nozzle which squirts out the concrete, uses only 8,000 watts.

At present, it saves time, energy and materials compared to traditional concrete building, as no forms have to be set, and complicated shapes can be printed easily: