The Low Down On Green Living
October 26th, 2009
Blu Homes Completes a Chalet in Colorado
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One of our favorite prefab home designers, Blu Homes, just completed a home in Colorado at the beginning of the October. The Fischer Chalet, a modern green prefab home in Breckenridge, Colorado, is a perfect example of what Blu Homes is capable of. While designed as a custom home built with the Colorado climate in mind, the plans for this home will be standard Blu design by mid 2010. The Blu Chalet combines a simple and practical floor plan, with sustainable materials, lots of natural lighting and energy efficient design.
Michael and Nikki Fischer had dreams for a modern prefab and eco-friendly home, but thought it would never be possible or be in their budget. Somewhere along the line they heard about Blu Homes and met with VP, Maura McCarthy, and fell in love with their design and building process and their eco-friendly designs. The Fischers describe the house as “open, modern, simple, clean.” At 1,700 square feet, this modest home cost about 20-30% more than one of the standard Blu Homes designs currently available, which generally cost anywhere from $75,000-$350,000. The open, spacious and efficient layout makes it possible to have such a reasonable sized home and still allow the Fischers to feel like they have a lot of space.
Custom home design with Blu Homes takes roughly 4-6 weeks to complete, and then the home is built in a factory, where the builders can ensure proper and efficient installation of all the components. Manufacturing is also roughly a 4-6 week process for a standard home. The frame of the home is a combination of wood and recycled steel framing, insulated to R-45 with spray foam insulation. Efficient low-e windows and an R-40 roof make the home very tight and energy efficient. Once the land is cleared and site is ready, the home is shipped to the site and goes up very quickly, almost too quickly for the Fischers, who were surprised at how fast the home came together.
The home is characterized by a traditional mountain and cabin looking exterior clad in modern cedar v-groove siding. Although it is a very modern house, the classic wood exterior helps it blend in with the surrounding log cabin homes in the neighborhood. Tall windows and a raised ceiling give the home a very spacious and bright interior. The natural daylighting from the multiple windows help lower energy use for lighting, which is already low because the interior lights are LEDs. The foundation is made from pre-cast concrete and foam, and a high efficiency furnace supplies the heating. Inside, cabinetry is built out of completely non-toxic materials by EcoUrban, all appliances are ENERGY STAR by Bosch and Whirlpool, Kohler low-flow water fixtures, and the flooring is bamboo.
“Blu allowed us to build our dream home, one that embraces the beautiful natural surroundings and preserves the environment, at an affordable price,” said Michael Fischer, Blu homeowner. “The Blu team was remarkably professional and easy to work with and their cutting-edge technology allowed us to ‘interact’ with the home from initial concepts through completion, making the whole process smooth and easy.” Since the recent acquisition of Michelle Kaufman designs, Blu Homes currently has nearly 50 homes in use.
Check out this great video of the Fischer Chalet, which gives a tour of the home and shows some of the manufacturing process.
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Comments
Low Impact Living » Blog Archive » Blu Homes Completes a Chalet in … | Go Low Energy
October 27th, 2009 at 9:50 pm
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cube.ge
June 20th, 2010 at 11:43 pm
i like this house!
architecture,interior design,render
devin
July 30th, 2010 at 12:25 am
do you guys deliver? These places would be perfect in Canada.
$350k at the high end still seems like a good deal.
micheal verns
September 1st, 2010 at 2:37 am
Its difficult to really find some answers so a detailed research needs to be done in order to help me on my home improvement problems. This somehow gave me an idea on what i really want for myself siding repair contractor katy
check it out and decide what is the best for you.
Walter
October 17th, 2010 at 5:48 pm
I’ve recently toured the factory of blu in mass. The quality of the framing was right on but the quality of finishes and trim work were sub par.
As a modular home builder you would expect whole units of lumber stacked and ready to be installed into your house……NOPE, they buy individually from local lumberyards just like you and me.
Seems to me that your 125K that you spend on a home is going to the suits that are calling the shots from another zip code. Wake up and build a tru green house…FSC lumber would be a great start.
Maura McCarthy
October 26th, 2010 at 9:07 am
Walter,
Hi there- this is Maura McCarthy, the co-founder of Blu and our VP of Sales. I would love to speak with you sometime. You are welcome to contact me directly at maura@bluhomes.com.
We try to be very open and available with our factory tours, and by our records we do not have anyone under your name that has recently toured. However, assuming that you did tour our factory at some point, let me make a few clarifications: first, we build extremely energy efficient homes - usually testing very well in blower door tests, and using specs like radiant flooring and other products in the homes that we’ve spent months making affordable (we do $15K worth of radiant flooring for effectively a few thousand dollars to our clients). Second, we do not finish the trim nor finishes in the factory - they are finished by our team on site. So any work that you saw there would have been only partially complete. You are most welcome to come to an open house to see the finalized product. Last, although you are right we often procure from lumber yards, we do so in bulk as we are typically building 3-4 buildings at any given point. Not sure how this compares with the economics of a local builder but we believe it helps our homes, at least, be more affordable for many clients.
In general, I do not like making blog comments but I think it would be great to hear from you directly about any of your questions, and please feel free to connect directly. Prefab has a great deal of benefits around having an architect-designed home for a reasonable price, having pricing that we do not change - giving our clients some stability in their costs vs. costs that can easily run out of control on many site built projects, and the fact that we work with our own team to ship and set, and with preferred contractors to do the site work. Ideally we would like to work with local contractors on an ongoing, multi-project basis, so that we grow a great relationship with them and make sure they get volume and economics that can work for their business as well.
Hope all this makes sense - feel free to contact me,
Maura
amanation
November 9th, 2010 at 2:49 am
Electricity supply is big problem in the whole world ,the methods shown in blogs are really useful but along with these we should try our self to reduce the power consumption because saving in electricity will save our nation from power crisis.I have an product called amanation which is approved by America government which helps the people to save electricity.
55 gallon water barrel
November 21st, 2010 at 11:13 pm
Not bad for a prefab.
Tile Wet Saw
December 7th, 2010 at 4:49 pm
The Fischer Chalet from Blu Homes, does not look like a prefab home from the inside but on the outside there are traces where you notice that it might be.
Green Blog
December 18th, 2010 at 6:15 am
What a beautiful, and green, home! I love all the large windows providing natural lighting. It’s amazing that they can build this in a factory in just 4 - 6 weeks, I’m considering just knocking down our existing home and ordering one of these!!!
If you get time please check out our article on houses made entirely from bamboo, very cool;
http://www.oureverydayearth.com/houses-made-from-bamboo-thanks-to-glubam/
Painter Burnaby
February 4th, 2011 at 2:31 pm
$350k? In Burnaby BC that would be considered a cheep build. And I think we would all love to live in such a cool house.
Discount Flooring
February 7th, 2011 at 6:02 am
Suggest me a nice floor plan for my home? I am confused between Laminate Flooring & Bamboo Flooring.
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