“Modular homes don’t come in all shapes and colors. They’re the square container like boxes that have little-to-no character and look like they have been designed by a 5 year old playing with Lego.”

Unfortunately this is an often heard prejudice that has tainted modular homes. Not only is this category of housing generally omitted from the dream purchase list it is also seen as a product of poor quality and design.

Not only can there be great beauty in some of the designs out there. The quality is very much on par, if not better, than traditionally built homes. Modular homes are built in the controlled environment of a manufacturing plant and are transported in one or more sections to the construction site. This results in a drastic lowering of on-site errors and a much shorter completion time, which in turn attributes to better budget and quality control.

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Every homeowner wants to future-proof his or her house as much as possible, with a bias for the highest quality of everything, because they promise themselves they will only do this once. Too often, this results in a depleted budget half-way through the build or barely enough stretch to furnish the complete residence (i.e. many episodes of Channel 4’s Grand Designs).

Let me ask you a question. Given the fact that the average Belgian changes homes every 12 years and the average (Belgian) residence gets a face-lift 4 times during its occupancy, does it make sense to do all of these in the traditional way? Why are we trying to make every renovation last as long as possible if we’re going to remodel it anyway in a couple of years?

Planning and managing renovations aren’t always that easy. It can be very frustrating at times. There are so many actors at play that work can get delayed way too frequently. Aside from the many sleepless nights, delays can prolong the time to completion with 7 weeks. On top of missing your set deadline, this can knock a 16% bigger hole in your budget. On top of that, with new emerging technologies and the ever changing norms and regulations it just seems harder to make the right building choices.

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The fact that we renovate or move so many times during our life is not that extraordinary. It’s just a way to cope with our changing living needs.
As we grow older, we may or may not want to have kids, or like to have a spare room for guests. Maybe another child follows or the garage is becoming too small to properly accommodate everything needed for both you and your partners hobbies. Maybe later you give up on your hobbies or the kids move out of the house. All of these are valid reasons to change your living quarters. Albeit remodeling or moving to a bigger or smaller house.

Have you ever considered the many advantages of building modular?

So why not go modular? Pre-fabricated modules have a much more foreseeable, fixed price-tag in comparison with their traditional counterparts. The pre-fabricated aspect also reduces the amount of different parties involved on-site, which can drastically reduce errors and speed up the process while keeping the costs to a minimum. Others let you take-out entire walls with ease, making that fancy looking bathroom wheelchair accessible with almost no effort. Some of them even can even be picked up, and moved to another location. This would make relocating to a nearby care giving facility, or to the ones we love, a lot easier when we grow old.

A modular residence isn’t just a cheaper option, it is also a way to truly future-proof your house. If you change your mind about something — and we often do — changing the lay-out or adding a whole new living space is just a matter of making a design and sending it off to the manufacturer.

So how does that work? If you disconnect all the utilities from the structural elements of the building, you can add a whole living space in a couple of days without having to live in a half finished house for six months, waiting for your next contractor. This is exactly what we do at Bao Living, giving you the option to change your mind.

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I hear some of you thinking already, it is often cheaper and easier if you just tear the place down. Well, we think disconnecting utilities from the wind and waterproof shell is not only a way to make renovations much easier, it can also elongate a buildings lifespan, lowering the structures’ environmental impact. If we don’t need to demolish the place because it is cheaper and easier to renovate it, it can live on for longer, unless of-course you just think it is ugly as hell — Des goûts et des couleurs, on ne discute pas!

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