STORY AND PHOTOS BY KATE DALY
You are not imagining things if you think you just saw a house drop out of the sky at Walnut and Fifth streets in Ketchum, because it did in one day.
Earlier this week a caravan of trucks carrying oversized loads of seven prefabricated modular pieces pulled into the Wood River Valley. Dispatched from Method Homes’ Ferndale factory in Washington, the house parts overnighted on the side of the road around Ohio Gulch.
The following morning at 5:30, they were hauled through Ketchum before Main Street construction resumed. Parking space near Hulen Meadows provided the next staging area. And then all day long, one by one, the trucks arrived at a closed-off block to unload their heavy cargo.
A stream of curious onlookers showed up to watch all of the maneuvers.
After each piece was stripped of its white travel wrapping, a crane from CCI Crane & Transportation in Idaho Falls slowly lifted the modules into place, guided by a set crew from Bozeman, Mont.
In a maneuver somewhat akin to handling unruly Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade balloons, the crew tugged on ropes to steady the pieces dangling in the air. Some modules hovered over the width of the street while getting angled into the right position, while others needed to be hoisted higher to avoid tree branches.
The modules weigh between 20,000 and 34,000 pounds each, depending on what’s built into them, according to Method Homes project manager, Levi Markowski.
Markowski reeled off the dimensions for one module flying through the air: 40 feet long, 15 and a half feet wide, and 13 feet tall. He added that in some of the company’s other installations in the West, up to 16 modules can be stacked together with the longest one running 60 feet in length.
Typical factory production time is 20 weeks. The company takes pride in using sustainable materials and practices.
Wearing a hard hat borrowed from the project’s local contractor--Lloyd Construction of Ketchum, Southern California Architect Scott Prentice is overseeing the installation, as well. He says the assembling process is like Jenga.
He is pleased to see his clients so excited about their modules. “It’s just like Christmas … as they open one up, and she says, ‘Oh, those are my windows!’ ”
The Marvin windows were on back order and slowed down the construction timeline a bit. But that’s one minor hiccup given what has happened over the last five years.
In June of 2019 a San Francisco family bought two non-conforming lots with houses on them at 520 and 540 Walnut Avenue North. One house was built in 1944, the other in 1954; one had a foundation, the other didn’t. The next step involved combining the lots into one and removing the structures.
One house was deconstructed so the materials could be repurposed elsewhere; the other was donated to ARCH Community Housing Trust and relocated to Bellevue.
The family wanted to design a custom-built new home on the site, but the pandemic interrupted everything and to save time the best option proved to be prefab modular construction.
Last December the family signed a contract to build a four-bedroom, four-and-a-half bathroom, three-story modern home that’s approximately 3,200 square feet, not counting the garage.
To prep for installation, a foundation was built on site, and a two-car garage was erected because it is wider than any module allowed to travel on roads.
As is, one mishap happened during transit. In Oregon a corner of one module snagged a cable. That damage was repaired in minutes the old-fashioned way, with a couple of guys on a ladder, a hammer and nails, before the module was lifted into place in Ketchum.
Installation took all day, and there’s still lots of work to be done to complete the house, such as building a staircase, adding a roof, finishing a steel exterior on the first floor and wood cladding on the upper floors.
Prentice calls the exterior cedar finish a big game changer because it’s pre-stained, thermally treated to resist dry rot, and could last a lifetime.
The floors and ceilings need to be filled in, but they are already fitted with wiring, tubes and cables that will be connected to get the utilities up and running. Tile is hung on the bathroom walls, awaiting grout. Cabinetry is in place’ yet the walls need painting.
The family hopes to be in by Christmas and is thrilled, after coming to Sun Valley for decades, to be able to call it home soon.