More School Districts Choose Modular Construction

Prefabricated Schools are not what they used to be. Advancements in modular engineering, design, and method have changed the construction industry. Modern prefabricated schools can be built with all of the same amenities of a traditionally constructed building, in less time and with fewer interruptions to the faculty and students school year.

Modular classrooms are able to deliver safe learning environments in less time. As communities grow, more and more school districts are choosing modular construction to create and maintain the proper atmosphere conducive to learning, one that will allow our children to develop and shine.

School districts may have a variety of reasons for needing the vast array of solutions that modular schools can provide. Some applications available are:

• Offices and Administrative Complexes
• Classrooms and Classroom Complexes
• Media and Library Centers
• Multi-Purpose Rooms
• Dormitories
• Restroom Facilities
• Gymnasiums
• Cafeterias

Prefabricated schools can be customized to fit various styles of learning facilities. Whatever type of school facility you’re in need of, modular construction can provide a viable and efficient solution.

Click here to find a modular solution that's right for you.

Healthcare Facilities are needed in North Dakota

The explosive growth in North Dakota has been wonderful for the economy in North Dakota. Many local mineral owners report royalties from $50,000 a month to over $100,000 an month. Some counties have increased in population by almost double. However, all this growth causes a strain on all government services and healthcare facilities. According to the New York Times, the sudden boom has positively impacted the economy, yet has put a severe strain on the existing infrastructure. This has created a strong demand for new construction.

Hospitals, medical clinics, and dental offices weren’t prepared for the sudden growth. Overcrowded waiting rooms, congested emergency rooms, and patients packed like sardines in their rooms, has reduced the personalized service these communities have become known for. CNN Money reports that Mercy Medical Center (the only hospital in Williston, ND) had to double the number of seats in its waiting room.

Municipalities, community developers, and doctors looking to either build a new structure or expand their facilities as quickly as possible should consider modular construction. The doors to their new facility can be open 50% faster than with conventional construction methods. Additionally, all of your chosen improvements can be completed with minimal disruption to your staff or your patients.

You can select temporary or permanent structures. These buildings can be designed within the specifications of your needs, without sacrificing quality. These structures will also be able to comply with the leading edge, technological advances of this industry.

The end result is a healthier environment for your patients, smoother workflow for your healthcare staff, and a less crowded building for a better overall experience for all involved.

If your community needs a healthcare facility, clinic or hospital please click here for more information.

Time Saving Tip For Commercial Construction

(Image Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/05/Modular_Construction_Timeline.jpg)

Commercial Construction today is all about reducing waste. Whether its time or energy, commercial construction has been designed around efficiency. Probably the most efficient method leading the way is modular construction. Modular Construction can be just as customized to your needs as site built construction. The image shows just how quick modular construction is over site built construction. Why?

As you can see, the first two phases of either project take approximately the same amount of time. Both projects take equally as long to design and engineer, and both construction methods are under the same strict code guidelines needing the same permits and approvals. The real benefit is seen in the second phase. While the site is being developed and the foundation is laid, the actual construction of the building is happening simultaneously off-site in a quality controlled environment. This process reduces the completion time by 50%.

Another time saving tip goes mostly unseen. Modular construction is also a safer building method. Hundreds of hours can be lost when someone gets hurt on the job site. By reducing injuries on the job the project can be completed in a more timely manner.

So whether you are building a shopping center, office building, hotel, or convenience store consider modular construction. The sooner you get your project completed, the sooner you can start receiving your return from your investment.

Modular Construction: The Standard for Efficiency

While there are many different ways to build a home, the truth is that building in a modular fashion is an option that is both efficient and environmentally-friendly. Designing a home is no easy task even under the best of circumstances, but modular construction offers design flexibility and efficiency. Buyers appreciate the many advantages that modular construction provides to homeowners.

The Benefits

There are many different benefits that modular home users enjoy. Two of the biggest benefits of modular home construction are the customization capabilities and the environmentally-friendly process.

A modular home can be custom built to the buyer’s specifications or can be chosen from pre-designed standard models and even then, each house is carefully built with the home buyer in mind. Design and construction of this type of residential structure can be completed as a turnkey operation. Contemporary designs include exteriors covered in fine-quality paneling or shake, faux stone, and even brick. Many prefabricated designs available have numerous options for interior decorating such as natural stone flooring, double-strength storm windows, and custom fireplaces. These attractive homes are the modern way to begin home ownership or upgrade an existing home.

Modular construction is also an environmentally-friendly process that helps reduce waste and pollution in the construction process. Since the buildings are constructed in a factory environment, they are capable of recycling the waste and using it for other building components. Modular homes are built using green building practices that use the least amount of materials necessary to build a solid and safe home.

Putting it All Together

In the end, there are a lot of ways to have a home built today. Modular homes are a great option for people who want speedy construction and a sturdy home that is safe and good for the environment. When you look at it from all sides, it's easy to see why so many people choose modular construction when they build a new home.

Why Modular is the Best Choice for Overcrowded School Systems

Brother Thomas Ward teaches "Introduction to Mathematics" to the first students to start class at Southern University at New Orleans

With class sizes on the rise, overcrowding has become a serious issue for many school systems in the United States. Cities are finding it increasingly difficult to handle the sheer size of the growing student population. There is a rather simple solution to maintaining the overcrowding: modular classrooms. Of course, a discussion about modular classrooms should probably first begin with what exactly a modular building is.

Modular buildings are built in an off-site climate controlled facility while the main site is prepared for their arrival. The streamlining of this process allows for simultaneous construction to take place, saving time for both the construction workers and the clients that have funded the project. Since the majority of construction takes place off site, there are minimal disruptions to the school staff and students

With that in mind, it's easy to see why prefab classrooms or a prefab school would be the perfect fit for an overcrowded school system. With their quick turnaround time and affordability, modular classrooms or a modular school is the perfect fit for a school system that has too many children and not enough classrooms to house them. Even the best teachers acknowledge that they can only handle so many children at any given moment. There's no question that modular buildings are an efficient and fast solution to school over-crowding.

Contact us today for more information on our Modular Classroom Solutions.

Five Things to Consider when Choosing a Construction Company

Whether a soon-to-be business owner is planning on hiring a large construction firm to help build the perfect dream building, or just a small team to finish remodeling an old worn down building; the contractors that are employed need to be experienced professionals that can finish the job on time and on budget. Fortunately, finding a competent crew for a new project doesn't have to be a challenge if a business owner considers the following 5 tips when looking for a contractor.

Do they have Work Experience?

Construction companies tend to specialize in certain areas of the trade. For example, one company may focus on prefab construction, while another concentrates on roofing repair. A prospective customer should only hire a company that has a long history of working on projects that are similar to the job being planned.

Can they Provide References?

A well-regarded construction company will have a long history of satisfied customers. Customers should ask for references involving clients that have requested projects similar to their own, and are willing to let others inspect the job's workmanship. For instance, if the project involves erecting a modular building, customers should ask the modular construction company for past clients who are willing to let others inspect the building for any shortcomings.

Are they Licensed and Insured?

By only hiring a licensed and insured contractor, customers ensure they are working with a professional that has passed licensing tests and has a proven work history. In the event that a licensed contractor fails to deliver on the promised goods, customers have the final recourse to file a complaint with the contractor's board.

Can they Provide Cost Details?

With so many unfamiliar tasks that need to be completed, it is very easy for an unscrupulous construction company to gouge new customers. One way customers can protect themselves from this undesirable practice is by requesting a detailed list of all parts and labor fees the company charges. This summary should include, among other information, the exact quantity and dimensions of parts, number of hours of work planned, as well as any taxes or other fees. By asking competing construction companies for their own detailed summary of parts and labor charges, customers can compare prices and inspect for any instances of overcharging.

How is their Customer Service?

Call the company's phone number to find out how well their customer service representative handles the call. Is the agent helpful and knowledgeable? Do they return calls promptly when necessary?

By following these tips when choosing a construction company, customers can expect their project to be completed professionally, on time and on budget.

For more help in choosing a construction company please click here.

Modular Construction Delivers Flexibility To Healthcare

When it comes to capital improvement projects, healthcare providers across the board are looking to reduce costs and shorten construction schedules while still seeking high-quality design and building materials. While this may seem like a lofty aspiration, modular building systems are stepping in to make it a reality.

Even just a decade ago, modular construction was seldom used in healthcare but today is picking up steam, with hospital owners turning to prefabrication for headwalls, bathrooms, or even an entire hospital. In fact, healthcare is currently the leading market sector utilizing modular construction at 49 percent, according to recent industry statistics. Furthermore, as healthcare organizations move toward more standardized environments and systematic approaches to care delivery, modular is proving to be a great fit.

For example, take the Miami Valley Hospital Heart and Orthopedic Center’s bed tower, which opened in 2010. As the first U.S. hospital to extensively apply modular prefabrication, the Dayton, Ohio, hospital’s patient rooms, exam rooms, single-toilet rooms, and patient-unit overhead utilities were all built at assembly warehouses just miles from the site and then erected on-site. The modular units worked exceptionally well with the hospital’s repetitive design, which incorporates 178 identical rooms on five identical floors.

“This degree of standardization provides flexibility, allowing functions to shift from floor to floor and reducing the need for patient transfers,” explains Ryan Hullinger, principal at NBBJ (Columbus), which designed the project. “The inpatient room dimensions, infrastructure, and environmental attributes are designed to support the broadest possible range of patient types and clinical activities, making each room capable of flexing from low-acuity use for general med/surg functions to maximum-acuity use for cardiac ICU.” The standardized components include identical room layouts so staff can quickly locate supplies and equipment, as well.

Another example is the four-story, 188,000-square-foot Texas Health Harris Methodist Hospital in Fort Worth, Texas, where instead of coordinating and installing on-site the dozens of electrical outlets and medical gas and vacuum lines required for each of its headwalls, the hospital opted to have all of the headwalls prefabricated off-site. “The efficiency gained is astounding compared to building headwalls in place in the building, where each trade is getting in each other’s way,” says Winjie Tang Miao, president, Texas Health Harris Methodist Hospital Alliance.

In addition, Texas Health used modular components for the patient room bathrooms and portions of the HVAC and plumbing systems. “We expected less material waste and decreased total labor costs but were pleasantly surprised when the actual savings exceeded our expectations. In some cases, we had more than 40 percent savings in materials and 30 percent improvement in labor,” Miao says.

Explaining how these cases of massive savings work, Hullinger says that off-site fabrication is a great way to bypass the intricate, painstaking process of organizing all the on-site routing and installation of complex building systems. “Regardless of the degree of coordination prior to construction, when highly complex architectural and engineering systems are conventionally installed in the field, the organization is often lost, wasting time and material,” he says. "This isn’t the case with our prefabricated approach, in which a coordinated layering of engineering systems is resolved digitally in BIM. The precise relationship between the BIM model and the fabricated components provides the building owner with a high-fidelity understanding of what’s inside the walls and ceilings, which streamlines future modification.”

In fact, savvy designers are even building future flexibility right into their modular designs, as was the case with the overhead MEP racks for Miami Valley, where linear “no fly zones” were left open inside each rack in order to accommodate future routing systems and provide easy access for maintenance.

Learning the ropes

Overall, NBBJ walked away with a number of lessons from the Miami Valley project. For one thing, the factory fabrication work proceeded along at such a clip that a second fabrication site had to be leased, since the contractors weren’t ready to install the units in the field.

Applying this insight to its next modular project, a new OhioHealth Riverside Methodist Hospital Neuroscience Institute patient tower in Columbus (scheduled to open in 2015), NBBJ was better able to manage the project timeframe to avoid monopolizing the fabrication shop as a storage area. In addition to incorporating the same modular systems used for Miami Valley, the scope of prefabricated components was greatly expanded for OhioHealth to include exam rooms, perioperative spaces, holding bays, and toilet rooms.

“There’s a long list of complex, multisystem components throughout the 410,000-square-foot tower being prefabricated, such as inpatient headwalls and the above-ceiling engineering racks in the inpatient wings and ORs,” says Tim Fishking, principal, NBBJ.

Future potential

While modular construction touts an impressive list of benefits, there’s still a certain stigma the method is struggling to overcome. “Historically, there have been some unfortunate associations with prefabricated architecture that was executed in a low-quality manner,” Hullinger says. However, this is far from what’s being produced today. Hullinger says that by standardizing components, designers and builders actually exert more control over the process, ensuring adherence to the design vision and creating greater aesthetic value.

Despite some design limitations (for example, required column work often doesn’t allow for open spaces like atriums), the ability to finish these structures with just about any exterior—be it brick, stone, stucco, or glass—means today’s modular buildings can look just like conventional architecture.

And as more modular healthcare projects are deployed, experts believe lingering doubts about the method will dissipate. Aspen Street Architects, Angels Camp, Calif., designed the Mercy Joplin replacement hospital in Joplin, Mo., relying heavily on modular construction. Founder David Hitchcock foresees a day when designing a freestanding clinic, hospital wing, or a critical access hospital will be similar to picking out a car, with all the features and amenities chosen by the end user. “I do believe that the field for modular healthcare construction is wide open at this time. There are just too many projects that could benefit from modular construction to believe that the concept could stagnate at this point,” he says.

Sidebar: Piece by piece at Parkland

While the nation’s largest public healthcare project to be built in one phase can use modular only to a certain extent, the construction management team for Parkland Health and Hospital System’s 2-million square-foot Dallas hospital regrets not incorporating more modular components. “If you do have a project that’s conducive to a lot of repetition, don’t be too conservative about how much modular can be used,” says Walter Jones, senior vice president, facilities planning and development, Parkland Health and Hospital System.

For the $1.27 billion project tracking LEED Silver and scheduled to open in summer 2014, 862 bathroom pods were built by a contractor in a nearby warehouse and then transported to the site, as opposed to going with a modular company and a remote factory location. Whereas producing all these units in the field would have created some slight variation in the dimensions, by building the pods with a single workforce in an assembly plant, the consistency of construction is much higher. “Because I know exactly how each one was produced, this will be a great aid from a maintenance standpoint, as I have the exact template,” Jones says.

Beyond the bathrooms, Parkland is using modular components for the adult patient room framework, headwalls, and rough-ins for the outlets and lines. For the patient tower, the main MEP ductwork, plumbing, fire protection, and cable trays were built in 20-foot-by-20-foot sections, raised up to the ceiling, and connected together.

“My construction manager is cautiously reluctant to put metrics on the benefits from a cost or scheduling standpoint, but quality-wise, it’s already clear that we’ve gained a big advantage from the modular construction,” Jones says.

Horwitz-Bennett Barbara (2014 January 6) Modular Construction Delivers Flexibility To Healthcare Retrieved on January 7, 2014 from Healthcare Design Magazine

Future Construction Trends

The Lake Washington School District was expansion project.

As the construction industry rebounds from a global recession, many insiders predict modular construction is poised to take its rightful place in building as one of the more preferred building methods. This trend, according to construction industry experts, encompasses growth in residential and commercial building.

Longer Lasting Construction

Prefab construction; according to many in the industry, lasts as long if not longer than traditional construction. While today's modular building resembles more conventional construction, and often includes many of the same materials, such as wood, metal and concrete, it is likely to last 50 years or more.

Modular buildings, or modules, are built at offsite climate controlled factories, but adhere to the same construction standards and codes of traditional homes. Since they are constructed to withstand transportation to a building site, they are generally stronger and generally more durable than conventional buildings.

Modular is Greener

"Going Green" when constructing a modular building allows for less waste than traditional construction. Through the controlled manufacturing process, unused module components are recycled or used in other projects rather than being sent to the landfill. Builders can also incorporate pre-leasedmodules, which are relatively interchangeable, from older projects into new construction projects.

Many prefab buildings are more energy-efficient than their conventional counterparts, with fewer gaps through which air can escape or infiltrate its interior; a quality valued highly by consumers.

For more information on modular leasing programs click here.

Take the Green Pledge -- Go Modular

Materials for the building were selected from recycled or recyclable materials as much as possible.

When it comes to green building, modular construction can be an excellent way to obtain a sturdy and practical space that’s also environmentally friendly. Prefab construction helps reduce waste and pollution in the construction process.

Green modular buildings are designed to take advantage of natural lighting and use high efficiency fixtures.
The use of better temperature insulation helps make the structure more efficient. Better insulation means less energy used in the heating and cooling process. That translates into both reduced stress on natural resources as well as lower utility costs.

"Going Green" when constructing a building also means a better indoor environment for its occupants. Utilizing non-toxic building materials helps create a space that won't cause health issues. Since the buildings are constructed in a factory environment, they are not exposed to any moisture from outside. This helps avoid any mold from forming in the modular structure. For individuals with allergies and chemical sensitivities, this is especially important.

When it comes to a new building, the choice is clear. Choosing green modular buildings is the way to both protect this precious planet and a way to achieve financial savings with the increased efficiency.

Contact us today for more information on ways to go green in commercial construction.

5 ways to Go Green in Commercial Construction

Modular homes ready to be delivered to your site.

Eco-friendly construction has become a popular trend when businesses are looking for savings and energy conservation. In the U.S., commercial buildings are responsible for 40 percent of the total amount of energy consumed. An estimated 68 percent of the total U.S. electricity consumption can be attributed to commercial buildings. Companies must now explore opportunities to integrate green building practices into their construction process.

Prefab and Modular Construction

One way to go green in commercial construction is to use the modular construction process. A modular building provides opportunities for custom additions ranging from energy efficient fixtures to quality, resilient sustainable materials. The green modular construction approach also presents endless eco-friendly building options, and allows for hand-picking features and systems that will achieve the desired level of energy efficiency.

Smart Roofing in Green Construction

Another way to go green in commercial construction is with the use of solar panels. Solar panels attached to a rooftop generate electricity for the building’s use and any excess power could even be forwarded to the electrical grid for distribution, thus lowering utility costs.

Indoor Air Quality

Improved air quality is another feature in green construction. Because the buildings are built indoors away from the elements, the chance of mold forming in the building is minimized.

Green Retrofits

Green construction retrofitting is slated to become the new norm in the industry. Companies will pay close attention to upgrading existing buildings. This may mean installing new state of the art environmentally efficient plumbing and electrical systems. In recognizing that starting over isn’t always feasible, the green retrofit remains a viable option for a firm that is considering the benefits of upgrades.

Rainwater Systems in Green Building Practices

Rainwater systems recycle water for use in custodial and plumbing functions. The collected water is used in gardening. These systems consist of water efficient fixtures and drainage technologies, reducing water consumption and supports municipalities in preserving the limited fresh water supply.


There are many advantages to green construction. These buildings cost less to maintain and require less energy to operate. The emissions are substantially reduced and businesses see fast returns on their investments.

Contact us today for more information on ways to go green in commercial construction.