A better home

In the last year, I have lived a couple very different climates in very different housing. Also, the last 5 years I have had the experience of helping completely rebuild more than one house from top to bottom. These experiences have given me some insights and ideas related to modern housing, and some idea for what would be better.

First, housing today is too expensive, too slow to build, poorly designed and built, and not very effective.The biggest failures of housing today are poor insulation, poor usability, and poor quality. Unless where you live never gets over 80 degrees or under 60 degrees Fahrenheit, you probably could use much better total insulation in your house. This isn't saying that those with R40 insulation in their attics are doing badly, it is just that there are far too many other parts of modern houses that even when highly insulated in the normally insulated spaces, still are sources for massive energy loss.

Second, if you have ever had a house for more than a couple of years, you probably noticed that they fall apart and wear out very quickly. The materials used for them is about as cheap as can be had, and the overall quality of workmanship often leaves something to be desired. This is not saying that you can't get quality products or workmanship. I have seen those homes and other buildings which are built to last with very little maintenance, and they are awesome, but with a very high premium attached to their price tag. Most people and developers are not willing to go this route for a couple of reasons. They couldn't resell the home for anything close to what it cost them, and the don't plan on keeping the home for a very long time. This only exacerbates the first problem.

What if we could have a housing system that would create high quality houses with extremely high efficiency and very low upkeep requirements that could be built very quickly by very small teams of people for costs equal to or less than our current housing offerings? If you had developed such a system, how would you go about marketing it? What would such a system include?

I can picture a day, not very far down the road, where you can order such a house, or office, or whatever, and it can be put together and finished in only a few days, but would last centuries. It would be well laid out, and custom configurations would be available and would not add huge overruns on the initial cost. There are those working on such systems, and they are, for the most part, not compatible with current building methods. Who will be first, and how will they succeed?