What is a Blue Sky Homes house? Our homes are built with innovative materials and improved processes to create a timelessly beautiful, modern custom architectural home on your own property in a turnkey fashion without the frustrations that typically come with designing and building such a home.
Our homes are highly resistant to fire, mold, dry rot and termites, and they are all but maintenance free. At their core is a frame that consists mostly of cold-formed, light-gauge galvanized steel that is factory fabricated but rapidly assembled at the house site. Our homes are far more green and sustainable than a traditionally built home, feature clear open spaces, high ceilings and embrace indoor-outdoor living.
You can move into one of our homes within weeks, not months (or years) from the time construction begins. And finally, our homes cost about the same as a similarly sized traditionally built custom home and come with a fixed-price promise.
Are your homes prefabs? No, not as that word is commonly used. Most people, when they talk about “prefab” homes, are talking about entire homes or large modules of homes that are completed in a factory and then shipped as a finished box on a large truck to the house site where they are set in place with a large crane.
Our approach is very different. Most of the elements of our homes are factory fabricated but shipped flat and assembled at the house site. We believe that this gives us the best of both worlds. We benefit from the many advantages offered by working in a factory setting including the lack of weather delays, access to a highly trained and reliable workforce and precision tools and processes.
Our shipping is very efficient because the majority of our materials are packed tightly together on a truck (and in the reverse order they will be required at the site). Once the truck gets to the site the material is rapidly set in place with minimal lift requirements.
Many rugged or steep properties cannot accommodate a prefab house very readily – if at all. Our approach gives us much greater flexibility in terms of where our homes can be built.
Are your homes “kits” that buyers can assemble themselves? No. While our homes are designed around a standardized set of material dimensions in a modular scheme they are not kit homes in the same sense that, for example, IKEA furniture is kit furniture. Licensed professionals following standard governmental building codes are required to construct our homes.
Will you sell me the assembled frame only? No, at this point we do not sell finished frames only. We sell only turnkey finished homes complete with appliances. It is important to us that each of our homes be completed down to the last detail in a manner that is consistent with what Blue Sky Homes stands for.
Are your homes available where I live? At this point we offer our homes only in the United States. We expect to be able to offer them elsewhere in the future. We are accepting expression of interest from companies outside the United States that may wish to represent our products. Please contact us to get more information.
I see that you are based in Palm Springs, California. I live in North Carolina. If I purchase a house from you how would you build it here? Our design-build team here in Southern California will take the lead on your project. This team, working with you, will identify the right licensed general contractor in your area.
What are the steps I would go through to have one of your homes built? Please contact us and we will explain our process and provide you a list of the background information that we will need to prepare a bid.
How much do your homes cost? Our pricing is similar to traditional building techniques and will vary based on design; the finish level you select and whether the house is to be built on a flat or sloping lot. Please contact us for exact pricing.
You refer to even the pre-designed homes in your catalog as “custom” homes. What does that mean? The Blue Sky Homes Building System creates homes that can be nearly infinitely customized. Once you select the size of home that you want you will be able to choose, among other things, the floor plan, the location of doors and windows, the interior finish package, the exterior cladding material, the mechanical equipment and whether to build your house on or off grade. You will essentially have a custom home.
Why do you say that your homes are all but maintenance free? Because most of the elements in our homes are selected to minimize the amount of upkeep they will require during their lifetimes. Our galvanized steel frame never needs painting. We offer exterior siding materials that also do not need to be painted. Other than the standard mechanical equipment and appliance servicing requirements your home should require the least amount of upkeep of any home you’ve ever owned.
Is financing available? Blue Sky Homes does not directly offer financing. But banks and other lenders are ready to lend to qualified buyers. As site-built homes our products are embraced by the lending industry and traditional financing is available.
What do you mean when you refer to your offerings as being “turnkey”? By turnkey we mean that we seamlessly handle all of the steps required to build your home. The closest parallel would be the process you would go through to purchase a completed tract home in a subdivision. Only with Blue Sky Homes you are getting essentially a custom home built on your own property.
Building a dream home can be one the most daunting experiences anyone will encounter in a lifetime. The process is often complicated, labor-intensive, agonizingly slow, expensive and almost always downright infuriating.
And all of this is exacerbated if you are trying to build your home in an area remote from where you live now or if you desire to build your home in any ways that are not traditional (such as making the home very sustainable).
Indeed, for most people, building a custom home is simply beyond their capacity. That’s why the vast majority of home sales are for existing homes – either pre-owned homes or new homes that were built on spec by builders.
At Blue Sky Homes our professional design-build team handles everything and completes your dream home very quickly and for the agreed-upon price. True turnkey service.
What if none of your existing designs suits my requirements, will you design a custom home for me using your system? Yes. Because our system is built upon a common set of dimensions and standardized components we can quickly design homes in a wide variety of configurations to accommodate most requirements. This means that even a very custom design can often be accomplished much more rapidly and less expensively than is possible when an architect “starts from scratch.”
What is the Blue Sky Building SystemTM? The Blue Sky Building System combines innovative materials and improved processes to allow us to build better homes more quickly. At the core of the system is light-gauge steel framing, factory fabrication of materials combined with site assembly, flexible design and high sustainability.
What kind of roof do your homes have? For our single-slope roofs our preferred roofing material is a standing-seam metal roof. For flat roofs we specify a FiberTite single-ply roofing membrane.
What unsupported distances can your framing system span? Up to 40 feet without additional reinforcement, but larger spans are possible.
How many floors can be created? Our current engineering allows us to build up to three stories high.
How strong is your system? Extremely strong.A bi-directional moment-resisting frame is exceptionally strong. The structural integrity of the system is provided both by the materials and by the bolt connections we use to link beams to columns. Our moment connections are comprised of eight bolts arrayed such that they can withstand the lateral and vertical shocks of a severe earthquake.
The system performs well in conditions that far exceed the minimum requirements of the American Institute of Steel Construction Seismic Provisions of 2002. Very soon our system will be referenced in the California Building Code.
What do you mean when you say that your walls are not load bearing? Traditionally built wood-frame houses use the walls of the house to support the entire structure. Because we use a moment-resisting frame a few upright columns bolted together with beams provide all of our structural support. Our columns are placed in the corners of the house or, in larger configurations, along perimeter walls as well. This means we have much greater flexibility in configuring our homes because we can essentially move walls as we please. For example, our exterior walls only need to be strong enough to resist the forces of wind and to hold windows and doors in place. And we can place our doors and windows almost anywhere we want them to best capture views or for optimal traffic flow.
Our interior walls are even more flexible since the only purpose they serve is to create and divide living areas. And if for some reason you wanted no rooms other than a bathroom we could configure your home as one giant open space.
What are your exterior walls made from? We use rigid-foam panels that come pre-cut from the factory with light-gauge steel studs already embedded. These are what is known as steel thermal efficient panels (S.T.E.P.) and they carry the brand name accel-ETM. They are made by Accelerated Building Technologies of Pennsylvania and consist of expanded polystyrene extruded with light-gauge steel upright studs that are thermally broken and which have holes to accommodate wiring and plumbing.
How high are your ceilings? Our typical single-slope shed roof creates interior ceiling heights ranging from 8-feet 6-inches to 10 feet.
Your system sounds technological superior but is it somehow experimental and as such likely to get bogged down in my city’s permitting process because of their lack of familiarity with it? No. Our system was designed to meet or exceed uniform building code requirements. We provide all of the engineering and design details in our comprehensive plans that are required by each municipality. We do not anticipate any problems with our system during a building department plan check.
How many homes have you built using this system? We have completed one home. A number of other projects are now in various pre-construction stages.
The land that I own is very steep and I’ve been told that it will be prohibitively expensive to build on it. Are there advantages with your system in such locations? Yes. One of the key advantages of our system is that we do not require a flat pad for building. We can anchor our steel columns to virtually any terrain and then “float” the house off of the terrain. Doing so can save thousands – even hundreds of thousands – of dollars by avoiding costly grading, cutting, compacting and retaining wall requirements.
The land I own is completely flat. Would it be overkill to use your system on such a lot? Not at all. Where we can build what is called slab-on-grade we can save you money because we do not require as much steel in our framing structure.
Do you offer garages or carports? Yes. Rock Reach House in Yucca Valley has an elegant “matched” carport. This design and others are available.
How quickly can your homes be built? We completed the 1,000-square-foot Rock Reach House in Yucca Valley in eight weeks. We believe that we will be able to build subsequent homes in about six weeks given a long list of process improvements we will now use. That six-week number begins when we start bolting our frame to a slab or footings and stops when we install the last appliance and wash the windows.
It intentionally does not include any work that is unique to a particular piece of property since the time it takes to accomplish site-specific items will vary widely. Site-specific items include surveying, permitting, any grading, utility work, and installation of slabs or footings.
You say that your frames are fabricated mostly from “cold-formed, light-gauge galvanized steel”. What does that mean to a layman? At the risk of over simplification there are really two types of steel commonly used in buildings. Structural or heavy steel is the material that you associate most often with, for example, large skyscrapers where builders typically weld elements together to create the skeleton of the building. Structural steel is hot rolled – meaning that is shaped by roll presses when it is very hot and malleable.
Cold-formed steel is, as the name suggests, formed into desired shapes using steel that is “room temperature” by using machines to slowly shape it. Typically the steel is a lighter gauge (thinner) than structural steel, which allows it to be shaped without the application of heat. Additionally, almost all cold-formed steel is fabricated using steel that has been galvanized. That means that it never has to be painted or otherwise treated to prevent rust, unlike most structural steel.
Most structural steel is welded into place. This requires highly skilled welders and specialized inspectors to ensure that the welds are sound (often including x-raying). We bolt our cold-formed steel elements together without need for specialized torque tools.
Isn’t steel more expensive than wood? Both wood and steel are commodities and as such are subject to price fluctuations. And while steel historically has cost more than wood on a “stick-by-stick” basis our homes require much less steel than if they were built of wood because steel has a higher strength-to-weight ratio.
How do you prevent the steel in your homes from introducing unwanted heat or cold into the structure? We do this in several ways. We provide more than enough insulation in our walls, ceilings and floors – just as must be done for all wood-frame homes. In most of the places where there would be an uninterrupted steel “pathway” for heat or cold to penetrate the structure we add what is known as a thermal break. For example, where our aluminum sliding glass doorframes sit on steel base plates we insert strips of a half-inch thick material called high-density polyethylene (HDPE) to provide a thermal break.
All of our external walls consist of steel thermal efficient panels. These panels offer high levels of insulation. They consist of high-density polystyrene foam that has been married with light-gauge steel studs.
In temperate climates our thermal calculations tell us that the amount of heat or cold that will enter the structure is negligible. In colder climates we mitigate these issues by way of additional insulation strategies.
Are your homes suitable for areas where there are heavy snow loads? At this time we do not have a heavy snow-load-capable structure but we are working on it.
I own property on the ocean. Is there any concern that your steel frame will rust? No. All of our framing steel is galvanized at the highest quality level. The most that may happen in a heavy salt-spray environment would be what is called white rust. White rust can create a slight discoloration but it does not degrade the integrity of the steel itself.
Most residential homebuilders are experienced in wood construction, not in steel construction. Does that pose a challenge for you? No. We use our own teams – alongside carefully selected local resources – to ensure that the homes we build meet the high standards we have established.
What sort of warranty do you offer? Our homes are eligible for a new home warranty from the contractor that is standard for your area.
I see that Rock Reach House is partially clad on the outside with corrugated steel. I prefer a more traditional look. Is it possible to clad a house with materials such as wood? Absolutely. We offer a range of exterior siding materials.
How energy efficient our your houses? Our houses are designed to be very energy efficient. For example, in Rock Reach House the photovoltaic solar electric panels on the carport roof will likely generate more electricity than the owner will use if the house is used as weekend home. This surplus energy is sold back to the electric utility and goes to use in the electric grid.
In addition, there is no combustion in the house because no natural gas or propane is burned. Our solar thermal rooftop panels are used to create hot water and for space heating. Given the number of cloudless days in the California desert it is likely that our electric back up systems for heating water and the house itself will never be activated.
You assert that steel is a greener product than wood. The timber industry suggests otherwise. How do you respond? Looked at side-by-side, steel has many environmental advantages over wood as a building material. It takes 25 old-growth trees to build a 2,500-square-foot house. We can build that same house out of steel using seven recycled automobiles.
Indeed, the steel we use in our homes is manufactured from no less than 70 percent recycled steel. The process we use to turn this raw steel into framing elements for our homes produces almost no waste because we use computer-guided equipment to form, cut and punch pieces to exact specifications. Any waste that does occur in our factory is captured there and recycled. At the job site there is virtually no waste at all since each element that is shipped to the site is pre-engineered right down to the holes that are pre-drilled for bolt connections. And at the end of its useful life, a house built of steel is 100 percent recyclable. Steel is the world’s most recycled material.
These days wood is typically harvested from second- and third-growth commercial forests that themselves often create substantial damage to fisheries and other elements of the ecosystem. When finished lumber is delivered to a job site most of it is cut on site, creating substantial amounts of waste that must be hauled away. By most estimates only a fraction of the wood waste from a typical house under construction is every recycled. Building the average wood-frame home generates approximately 50 cubic feet of landfill waste.
Is lightning an issue with a steel-frame house? No more so than with any home. And there is some evidence to suggest that a steel-frame house is better than a wood-frame house in a lightening storm because steel helps conduct the energy directly to the ground and because steel is highly resistant to fire.
Do cell phones get reception inside a steel-frame house? Yes.
Can your system be built atop a basement? Yes.
Why do you use steel instead of wood in your homes? The positive attributes of steel over wood as a building material have been well chronicled. They include:
Fire resistant. While not entirely fireproof – it melts at high temperatures – steel is far more fire resistant than wood. A fire that starts in a steel-framed house is more easily contained to its initial location and spreads more slowly than one in a wood-framed house.
Pest-proof. Steel frames are impervious to termites and other wood-eating pests. Termites are an even greater source of damage to homes than fire. For example, residents of Hawaii spend $100 million to prevent, control and repair damage from the Formosan termite each year. Wood treated with chemicals won’t necessarily dissuade the bugs from eating it. And as homeowners are becoming more environmentally and health conscious they do not want to live and raise children in a house constructed of materials that have been treated with suspect chemicals. Moreover, a home weakened by unseen termite damage may well be more susceptible to the destructive forces unleashed by earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes, and floods.
Mold-resistant. Wood acts as a food for mold. In the right conditions it proliferates in wood houses. Problems with mold in houses have become the bane of the home insurance industry. Mold does not grow on steel. And because steel framing members are straighter and fit together more precisely, the home’s interior finish work offers fewer cracks and holes for mold spores to penetrate. By resisting the sagging and twisting that comes with a wood frame as it dries out and absorbs moisture, the steel-framed building envelope is likelier to retain its ability to prevent water infiltration.
Long life. Steel framing materials used in residential construction are normally galvanized to protect them from corrosion. Steel galvanized with molten zinc has a life expectancy of as much as 1,260 years and a minimum of more than 200 years.
Very “green”. Steel can be recycled countless times. In fact 64 percent of all steel products are recycled, more than glass, paper, plastic, and aluminum. In general, light-gauge steel framing contains at least 25 percent recycled steel. The steel used in the Blue Sky Homes’ projects contains 70 percent to 90 percent recycled material. Builders who use steel products can win points for environmental effectiveness under the LEED rating system sponsored by the U.S. Green Building Council. In addition, steel has less job site wastage because its quality is more consistent. The Steel Framing Alliance cites 20 percent wood wastage from quality concerns, vs. 2 percent for steel. While steel incorporates higher embodied energy content than wood, due to the heat needed to manufacture it, its inherent strength and durability mean it will likely outlive the building it’s a part of. Because it is cheaper to recycle steel than to dig up new iron ore and push it through the energy-intensive manufacturing process, there will always be a natural market for recycled steel.
High seismic performance. In earthquakes, the earth’s lateral movements shake a house side to side. This induces a twist, or racking, of the structure, as inertia delays the movement of the upper part of the structure. Thus the points of connection in the structure – beam to column to foundation – must be extremely strong and rigid enough to hold the building steady as it shakes. Earthquakes also produce up-and-down movements that put enormous sudden loads on vertical members. Steel is much better able to bear these sudden compressive shocks than is wood – in part because it is a more stable material. After its fabrication, steel doesn’t change in consistency or quality or shape. By contrast, the properties of a piece of wood begin to change as soon as it is cut from the tree. It shrinks, it bends, it twists, and it has inconsistencies in its fabric from knots or holes. It may crack and split. All these weaken its structural properties, leading to a certain amount of redundancy being added into the building processes. It’s common to use more wood members than would be strictly necessary, because of its unreliability. In addition, a building’s performance in an earthquake depends on the quality and rigidity of the connections at the joints. Steel frames typically use a screw connection to hold studs in place, or a weld at a junction in the case of heavy steel. A wood frame connection uses nails, which rely on friction and bending. As the wood shrinks and warps over time, the connection may weaken from loss of friction.
A precision product. Steel is manufactured to exacting tolerances. Wood, on the other hand, is an inconsistent material due to its very nature.
High strength-to-weight ratio. Steel can be used to cantilever dramatic wings and balconies. Where wood sags, steel holds its shape. Thus it’s the perfect material for creating the wide-span interior spaces that modern consumers prefer. A typical house from the 1950s or 1960s feels cramped to us because it comprises a warren of small rooms. Today, people want not only more spacious rooms; they want more dramatic living spaces. They prefer a great room, with a high ceiling and a 20-foot span, to a separate and formal living and dining room, with a kitchen behind a wall. Changes in family life and social relations have moved the kitchen front and center, into the same arena with the dining space, the lounging space, the TV-watching space, and the entertaining space. Wood can’t easily frame such a large room.
Adding to wood’s disadvantages is the fact that the quality of wood products is declining as old-growth forests are wiped out and second-growth harvests are inferior in grade. More substandard pieces are being introduced into building construction, meaning more redundancy is necessary, adding weight and cost.
Growing environmental awareness has underscored the sustainability problems of wood. While wood is promoted as a renewable resource, in fact the clear-cut mountainsides of Oregon and Washington are scarred for decades. The forests do not regenerate on their own, and the lumber industry’s commitment to reseeding and controlling soil runoff is questionable. At the end of the structure’s life, wood treated with chemicals won’t biodegrade and may have to be handled as hazardous waste. Most old wood is hauled to a landfill or burned. Steel is sold to the scrap yard and retooled into new productive uses.
Environmentalists are increasingly focusing on energy consumption of buildings over their entire lifespan. Through oil price hikes, spot shortages of gasoline and heating oil, the California electricity crisis, Al Gore’s movie about global warming, and now the notion of a “carbon footprint,” the public has been freshly sensitized to the complicated calculus of energy consumption.
All of this is not to say that steel as a residential building material is without its own challenges. While making the steel in a 2,000-square-foot house consumes an estimated 53 million BTUs, and making the wood requires 42 million BTUs, the combined heating and cooling load will be an estimated 48 to 90 million BTUs a year – every year. Thus the real energy efficiency of the home depends on its climate control system and its insulation.
Here, designers must pay close attention to the thermal properties of steel frames. Wood, a natural insulator, doesn’t have to be designed around so carefully. Steel, an almost perfect conductor, will carry cold or heat from outside the structure into the living space, a phenomenon known as thermal bridging. It is highly problematic to allow steel members to cross from the outside to the inside of the building envelope. It can drive up heating and cooling costs, and create condensation on the warm side of a wall. “In areas with significant heating or cooling loads, the energy penalty from using steel studs in exterior walls may be the single most important environmental factor to consider,” noted BuildingGreen.com, in a 1994 article comparing steel and wood framing. The thermal bridging problem can be solved for through a variety of methods, but architects and builders must take those into account when considering a steel structure. [Environmental Building News, July/August 1994, on buildinggreen.com web site]
Steel is more expensive than wood on a per-unit basis. However, because of steel’s higher strength-to-weight ratio, builders need less of it for a comparable floor area. “You do steel an injustice whenever you try to compare it stick to stick, because cold formed steel would never use as much material as a comparable wood frame,” said a spokeswoman for the Steel Framing Alliance, a trade group. “Wood studs would be 16 inches on center, we recommend 24 inches on center for steel,” she added. Further, “Steel studs are shaped such that they are mostly hollow; wood is a solid.” The Steel Framing Alliance does not make generic price comparisons for steel and wood, because price relationships vary by region and because steel is always going to be an engineered structure.
Wood’s economy compared to steel has made it the material of first resort among residential builders. Yet there is another reason the market leans toward wood by default: People are reluctant to give up the materials and techniques they are most familiar with. Architects know how to design wood houses. Builders know how to cost out wood houses. And carpenters know how to assemble them. No one is out of his or her comfort zone when working with wood.
