Kenwood fire survivors turn to modular homes to speed up rebuilding, lower cost

With the steep costs of rebuilding, some Sonoma Valley wildfire survivors have turned to modular homes.

Sammie and James Lee were still looking in May for a contractor to rebuild their Kenwood home, which was destroyed in the October 2017 Nuns fire. The cost to replace their Treehaven Court residence led them to Hybrid Prefab Homes, a modular home builder in Santa Rosa.

“I met them on June 26,” said Otis Orsburn, president of Hybrid Prefab. “We wanted to get it done for them quickly, just like we do with others.”

The Lees moved into their new and slightly larger home in mid-March.

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Making tough decisions

One of the couple's neighbors, Susan Miron, also found the cost to rebuild her home prohibitive. She said it “has become far more than I expected,” so she's now talking to Orsburn.

The Lees initially were working with an architect that designed a house similar to their previous house, which they owned for 40 years before it burned, Orsburn said.

They considered selling the lot, he said, but they raised their children on the property.

“They couldn't bring themselves to live anywhere else,” Orsburn said.

Orsburn redesigned the couple's new home with more “direct openings to the backyard” and added a door to the master bedroom, so they can easily access the porch - something they didn't have before.

He also said he “pulled the house a little bit forward,” giving the family more space in the backyard.

“We also put a front porch on. The front porch screamed to be on it,” Orsburn said.

The house, he added, also has “ceiling fans all over the place.”

While designing the modular homes, Orsburn said he keeps an eye toward helping clients maintain the lifestyles they enjoyed before the fires.

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More hybrids to come

Connect Homes, a Los Angeles prefab home builder with a factory in San Bernardino, is constructing seven homes, some of which are granny units, for delivery in Sonoma Valley.

“Ironically, the first house we did (as a new company) is in Sonoma,” said Jeannie Wittmeyer, spokesperson for Connect Homes. “It was featured in Dwell magazine.”

Builders like Connect Homes and Hybrid Prefab deliver their modular structures to sites, where they then are permanently affixed to a foundation.

Each company offers limited design options, such as altering where windows, front and back doors go.

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Less waste, less time

Modular homes can be less expensive, in part, because they are factory built.

Wittmeyer said traditional site-built homes in the Bay Area can cost anywhere from $700 to $1,200 a square foot, compared to $250 to $300 a square foot for the prefabricated ones built by Connect Homes.

Jessie Whitesides, a principal architect for Asquared Studios, volunteered at the Santa Rosa local assistance center just after the fires.

One of the most common questions she heard from fire survivors: How much it will cost to rebuild?

At the time, architects estimated the cost at $300 a square foot for the Coffey Park area and $500 to $800 in the Fountaingrove area. Those costs were for the “bare minimum,” things like “dry wall, paint, baseboard,” she said in a story in the North Bay Business Journal.

The prices since have risen.

Factory-built homes take less time to build because they are constructed in a controlled environment where weather conditions are removed from the equation, according to Wittmeyer.

She said when homes are built in a factory, scraps of material such as plywood and drywall can be set aside and used. At a site-build, the material ends up in the dumpster.

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By the numbers

As of mid-March, about 150 of the more than 800 permits issued by the Resiliency Center, the branch of Permit Sonoma handling the fire recovery, were for properties located in Sonoma Valley.

Within a three-block radius from the Lees' Kenwood residence, 15 homes are either in the process of being built or their permits are being reviewed.