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I heardabout Holly from a mutual friend from her Bozeman days, who suggested I reach out. As the Cosmic Concierge would have it, the morning we talked, Hereabout and B.PUBLIC had just announced their latest collab, called The Nest. It’s the third of Holly’s designs to be offered by the panel manufacturer out of New Mexico, but the first that was drawn to be panelized from the original sketch. Her earlier collabs took a plan that already existed and custom-engineered it onto panels after the fact.

Holly runs Hereabout out of Vermont and New York. She sells a collection of pre-designed plans, stylish houses already drawn that you buy off the shelf instead of commissioning from scratch. I was initially interested in the option as a path to affordability, not realizing she already had deep connections to the world of panels.

None of this is exactly new. Most of the companies I’ve covered on this platform offer some version of this. Collective Carpentry offers three models, Croft has four kit sizes with a fifth on the way. What makes this interesting is the collaborative effort to foreground design and optimize the process for maximum efficiency, affordability and beauty: the holy trinity at the core of Assembled Home.

I also got on a call with B.PUBLIC’s CEO & Co-founder Edie Dillman, and she was genuinely passionate about their commitment to affordability. She put the pre-designed program simply: it’s “to move the market. There are a lot of people who are priced out or timed out to do what they want on their property.”

Even with material costs going up, they’ve streamlined enough to bring their own costs down. “At the time that material costs were going up, our production cost went down 13%,” she said. “In a single quarter our output improved 30%, with the exact same crew, with the exact same equipment.” That’s lean manufacturing, not a bigger factory. A plan built to run through that line again and again is where the price actually comes down.

The Nest also comes with three tiers of windows, so you can dial performance against budget instead of taking one fixed spec. I’d separately been getting B.PUBLIC quotes on my own place, so watching a plan land built around the exact panels I’d been pricing was a bonus.

The Nest came in cheaper than my custom design. Mine quoted at $159,325 for an R30 wall. The Nest, at a higher R-35 and R-59 spec, came in at $139,522 on the panels, freight included. Design and engineering run $19,160 for the standard plan, up to $24,872 customized.

But cheaper on paper isn’t the same as right for me. The Nest package, as quoted, doesn’t include a garage, and its footprint is bigger than I need. My thinking lately has run the other direction: detach the garage, put an ADU above it, and shrink the main house to compensate. The Nest doesn’t fit that neatly.

What it did do is send me back through B.PUBLIC’s full catalog of collabs, with Holly and with other architects, the ones that do include a garage, and some of them are genuinely compelling.

Talking about the builders and partners B.PUBLIC chooses to work with, Edie said, “They’re interested in sneaking the spinach into the smoothie. To make it better. Healthier, stronger, lasting.”

Thanks for reading Assembled Home. Check out the cost matrix on AssembledHome.com

Assembled Home Cost Matrix

Last year Dennis Steinhauer did just that. The site was a wilderness inholding, private land inside a wilderness boundary, no roads in or out. Every stud, every screw, came in by helicopter or backcountry plane. The assembly looked a lot like site-built stick framing but rivaled panelized construction in speed and efficiency. He had the walls and roof standing in three days. His method illuminated an option for off-site preparation that doesn’t involve a full-on factory.

It looked like the compressed timeline I’ve been chasing from panel companies, and maybe the real-time value engineering I’ve been chasing too.

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Dennis is a general contractor and founder of Archer Construction, based in Bozeman, building houses here for 25 years. What got him to three days on a remote job site is something called BIM, building information modeling: planning the entire project down to the individual fastener in 3D modeling software before anyone picked up a hammer.

Every piece was cut and organized off-site, color coded, packaged, and weighed for the helicopter sling loads. The crew on-site assembled a known kit instead of solving problems in real time. Dennis’s shop fed the model straight into their saws for factory-level precision and an accurate parts list, no guessing at material counts on a site where a quick trip to the lumber yard wasn’t an option

Dennis had read Assembled Home. A mutual friend put us in touch, and we sat down for a beer. I figured I’d get the standard GC skepticism about prefab. Instead I got a nuanced take on passive house standards.

Years ago, he went through the full German Passive House training and came away certain it isn’t a silver bullet for our building climate, and in most cases isn’t worth the added expense or the design compromises.

He’s not dismissing it outright. He agrees there are more moderate climates where passive building is a practical solution, even against code-minimum standards. None of his clients have pursued full certification. They’ve gotten to net zero with renewables instead.

Dennis put me in touch with Lizzie Guerra, who does his BIM work at Lizzerds Architectural Consulting in Bozeman. I called expecting her to confirm everything Dennis had just told me.

Since I already have an architect’s model, what she’d actually do is take Andrew’s Revit drawing and turn it into an accurate materials report. Not the design. Not the engineering. Just what’s actually in the box.

BIM isn’t a separate technology. It’s a set of capabilities inside Revit, the same software a lot of architects already use to render your house. Whether a firm uses it to its full depth is a budget decision, not a technology-adoption one.

To get a real materials report out of a model, the model has to already be built with what Lizzie calls compound walls, every layer specified, not a generic slab standing in for a wall. My architect friend Andrew built my model months ago, back when I was still assuming panelized construction.

The framing question I actually care about, trusses versus rafters, doesn’t get answered by BIM. But it does let me swap those components in the model and watch the cost change in real time. It still doesn’t do the engineering. That’s still an engineer’s job.

What’s actually made BIM worth it in Lizzie’s ten-plus years of practice isn’t budget tweaking. It’s catching conflicts before they cost real money on site, mechanical clashing with structural, a beam where a duct needs to go. “We’ve caught thousands of dollars of mistakes. I would almost say millions,” she said.

Assuming the Revit file for my design has compound walls, Lizzie estimated the time to generate a BIM set at only 3-4 hours. Regardless of whether I keep my current design or tweak it to include an ADU, the BIM set seems like a no-brainer. I’m excited to see how it can potentially clarify the actual cost of some of the building methods I’ve been looking at.

P.S. The cost matrix at assembledhome.com/cost-matrix grew by two this week. MyCabin joined Tier 2, a $184K near-finished unit that shows up on a flatbed instead of a stack of panels. So did Masaya Homes, the most price-transparent listing in the whole matrix, kit through installed, though the installed number is California-only for now. Full writeups on the matrix page.

Assembled Home Cost Matrix

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Eleven manufacturers and builders, sortable by price, R-value, and what’s actually included. The cost matrix is live at assembledhome.com/cost-matrix, and it’s the first concrete foundation for a meaningful comparison of these systems.

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I’m sure I haven’t gotten every detail right, and I’ll hear about it from the manufacturers if I haven’t. But this is the start of a comprehensive resource for anyone working through these same decisions. As I learn more, new manufacturers and products will get added to the list.

Getting to this point took a surprising number of conversations and countless documents to sort through, because every quote I’ve collected defines their portion of the overall scope differently. Some include big-ticket items like shipping and labor. Some don’t, and then there are all the little things like vapor barriers and service cavities.

The goal was to create an apples-to-apples comparison, but this is more like an apples-to-apples and an oranges-to-oranges comparison, with probably some citrus fruits thrown in later.

I split it into two tiers. Six companies quoted against my actual design, a roughly 1,850 sqft two-story Scandinavian modern shoebox for my Livingston lot: Collective Carpentry, Timber Age, Croft, New Frameworks, B.PUBLIC Prefab, and the site-built bid from Stillwater Builders. The other five sell stock kits with their own footprints: Backcountry Hut Company, DEN Outdoors, Modern Alpine, Zook Cabins, Avrame. Comparing those two groups directly doesn’t make sense, so I didn’t.

This is obviously a narrow lens, not a full catalog. Every one of these companies sells more than what’s in the matrix. Different wall assemblies, different R-values, different home models, different levels of finish. For the Tier 2 companies, what’s listed is the model that’s roughly comparable to my design, not everything they offer. For Tier 1, it’s each company’s most affordable wall assembly that still gets close to what I need for this build, not their top-of-line system.

The single biggest thing the matrix showed me: the panel companies have the edge on install time, but they’re still not competitive on price with site-built framing. But what you get with a company like Collective Carpentry is a ton of value in terms of the design and engineering that happens on the backend and the quality of the product that arrives on site. I was also surprised by the value being offered by BHC, which includes high-end windows, skylights, and other high-quality finishes.

Shipping is the other one. Croft’s quote carries a $20K line for trucking panels from Maine. Stillwater’s shipping line is zero, because they’re down the road. New Frameworks has affiliate factories in Washington and Colorado that make their shipping more reasonable, and other companies won’t even quote the cost because it’s so unpredictable.

There are more companies I'm excited to add, and several conversations already in progress. If you know of other manufacturers I haven't covered yet, hit reply. The bigger question, which system I'm actually going to build with, is also getting closer (slowly). More on both in coming issues. This one felt good to publish.

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Last week I got a quote from my buddy Ben at Stillwater Builders, working with Ted at Larch Creek Builders. It’s the most complete picture I have to date of what the site-built option would cost, and it’s pretty close to my budget. $415k, site prep through drywall.

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My loose target has been $400k all in on the construction. This is a soft estimate from Ben, no construction drawings yet, allowances throughout. But it’s a real bid from a real local GC that’s not pushing a million dollars, and it’s enough to anchor the prefab comparison against.

The scope stops at drywall. Appliances, fixtures, cabinetry, finish work, all the things that turn a dried-in shell into a home I can actually move into, are another chapter of costs the $415k doesn’t touch.

That number is the anchor my cost matrix has been missing. Full breakdown next issue.

Ben’s bid also clarified the three main value engineering considerations I should be focused on.

Each one is a way to close that $15k gap. Read in isolation, they’re the kind of pragmatic tradeoffs every custom build runs into. Read in the context of these highly engineered systems, they’re something else.

Item one: the wall. The double-stud assembly we’d been planning (dense-pack insulation, airtight layer, all of it) runs about $155,000. Roughly 37% of the bid. Ben’s suggestion isn’t a full pivot to standard 2x6. It’s to delete the interior 2x4 cavity. A partial step back from the full system. “It would still make for a very comfortable home,” he wrote.

I’m sure it would. But every panel company I’ve talked to leads with the wall. B.PUBLIC’s “pretty good wall” is R30. Collective Carpentry’s Net Zero Wall is R25 to 30. BHC’s panels are R24 with continuous insulation that minimizes thermal bridging at the timber frame. The high-performance envelope is the headline feature.

Item two: the windows. Swapping the triple-pane euro-style glass for Andersen 100s or another production line means reducing U-values from around 0.15 to 0.30. That’s roughly twice the heat loss through the same opening, but saving ~30%–40% of the cost.

BHC is the only panel company I’ve talked to that actually includes the windows in the kit price (Loewens, plus Velux skylights). Collective Carpentry will spec a window package but you pay for the glass separately. That’s the more common pattern.

But across all of them, the design assumes high-performance glass. The wall assemblies, the air-sealing details, the U-value math, the whole envelope is engineered around the kind of window the rest of the system deserves.

Item three: the ceiling. Ben’s current scope includes a vaulted space in the kitchen and common room. His suggestion is to put a flat lid on it instead.

This is the one I stubbornly won’t compromise on. The vaulted area is the room I’ll spend the most time in, the room that does the most work for how the whole home actually feels. I’d rather reduce overall square footage than flatten that ceiling.

Taken together the three items ask me to give back the key design features the panel companies have been quoting me on. Better-than-code walls. Premium windows. Architectural volume. Which ultimately changes the comparison.

The question isn’t “site-built vs. prefab.” It’s what Ben’s $415k actually compares to. The panel companies design around the better wall, the better glass, the architectural volume, whether or not those things are included in the headline price. For an honest comparison, I have to figure out what it would cost to put Ben on equal footing, and what it would cost to bring the panel quotes down to Ben’s spec.

That’s the comparison the prefab landscape doesn’t currently offer. It’s the one I needed for myself, and the kind of thing I wish had existed when I started looking.

So for the next issue, my goal is to publish the cost matrix I’ve been working on since Issue #2. Not as a final verdict, but as a reference.

Two tiers, because comparing all of them on one axis turned out to be deceptive. Six envelope quotes against my actual design: five panelized (Collective Carpentry, Timber Age, Croft, New Frameworks, B.PUBLIC), plus Ben’s site-built bid as the anchor. Five stock kits or packaged systems with predetermined footprints: Backcountry Hut Co., DEN Outdoors, Goodway Homes, Zook Cabins, Avrame. Eleven companies, eleven different definitions of “what’s included.” Most of the spreadsheet is footnotes.

The plan is for it to be a living document. New quotes will land. Old quotes will get sharpened. The version that goes up next week is the starting point, not the final word.

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I teased them in Issue #9. They’re based in British Columbia, they build a prefabricated timber frame system called the System 02, and they’re one of the few companies in this space that publish completed build costs. Their most-cited project is on the San Juan Islands: $263K for the kit, $467K all-in. That was 2021. The current kit price for a 3-module + deck configuration is $293K.

BHC was also the first kit home I came across that actually captured my imagination, with the asymmetrical gable and black exterior. That was several years ago, and at the time I wrote them off as too expensive

.

Going in to these convos, I assumed BHC was expensive for what you got. The wall spec is R-24, which looks low next to Collective Carpentry’s R-41 panels or even B.PUBLIC’s “pretty good” R-30 wall. But comparing R-values across companies misses the point of what BHC is actually selling.

Collective Carpentry’s preliminary quote for my project was $234K supply and install. That covers a high-performance envelope: R-41 insulated wall panels, R-61 roof panels, all structural connections, and a 7-day, 5-person installation crew with crane. It’s genuinely impressive. But it stops at the building envelope. Windows, doors, roofing material, and siding are yours to source.

The BHC kit ships with standing seam metal roofing and siding, high-end Loewen windows and Velux skylights, the Douglas fir T&G ceiling on the first floor, and the staircase. Western Red Cedar lines the interior of the gable ends on the porch. It’ll get you to a dried-in structure with luxury fit and finish, which changes the comparison considerably. What you’re not getting that’s included with a lot of these other panel manufacturers are the interior walls and the utility chases. The BHC panels are rock wool sandwiched between OSB sheeting, so the chase is created by nailing one-by strapping to the interior.

The real special sauce, according to Pete, is the architecture. The system was designed by Michael Lecke, a custom home architect who is also one of BHC’s owners, and Pete made a point of flagging it: the whole pitch is award-winning design without having to commission a custom house. BHC’s structural elements are visible on the interior, doing actual work. As Robbie put it: “How elegant we can make the interior by having the structural elements visible. Not like clad styrofoam beams we’re packing on to the interior of a traditionally stick-framed home.”

On the building science side: BHC keeps all the structural members on the interior of the panel, achieving a version of continuous insulation and minimizing penetrations and thermal bridging. Robbie, BHC’s COO, described it as “passive adjacent.” Not a Passive House certification, but a meaningfully different starting point from a code-minimum 2x6 wall.

The Douglas fir timber frame sequesters carbon. And BHC commissioned a study with E3 Environmental modeling the carbon difference between slab-on-grade and helical pile foundations: switching from a slab to piles is equivalent to eliminating 60 years of operational carbon emissions. On my flood plain lot 100 yards from the Yellowstone River, piles are probably a good call anyway.

As sexy and sensible as that all sounds, it still doesn’t include a garage.

BHC has a garage module in their catalog, the only System 02 layout still under development, and the only one that has never been built. The existing layout is 871 square feet: a garage bay on the ground floor, one bedroom above, and a small sleeping loft at the top. That’s the absolute minimum for what I need. Kit price: $234,500. BHC is willing to take me on as the first build and absorb the engineering overage.

On the second call we started sketching something more ambitious: a deck module above the garage, with vehicle entry underneath. That would make the garage a more workable size and add some outdoor space, but add nothing to the living area. Pete and Robbie found the concept interesting. What we don’t have answers on yet: whether adding depth to the garage is structurally feasible, and whether the garage floor needs a concrete slab or can sit on helical piles like the main home modules. The architect and engineer still need to weigh in.

After the second call, BHC sent a detailed project estimate. The 2x multiplier you hear from most companies is shorthand. They broke it down in actual line items, which is more useful. Here’s what they projected for a 3-module + deck build, and my honest reaction to each number:

Kit: $293K. That’s the price. Shipping to Livingston adds roughly $13K.

Pre-construction design and city approvals: $25K. This is probably high for my project. I’m hoping to land closer to $10K depending on how much of the design work I can carry forward from what I’ve already done.

AHJ fees: $15K. This covers local impact fees and the building permit. My numbers are actually a bit higher: roughly $12K in impact fees and another $5K for the permit, so I’m budgeting closer to $17K.

Site work: $100K. This is where BHC’s estimate diverges most from my situation. My actual quotes for site prep have come in around $20–$30K. The lot is relatively flat and already serviced. I don’t know where the $100K figure comes from, but it doesn’t fit my project.

GC full scope (kit assembly and interior finishes): $167K. This covers everything from setting the kit to finishing the interior. I’d like to think I can do this for less, maybe half, depending on how much interior work I’m doing myself or managing directly.

If my estimates hold on design, site work, and GC scope, the real all-in for the home is somewhere in the $440K to $460K range. Not $600K. It’s getting close to the right number, but with some significant compromises.

Robbie mentioned that BHC is still figuring out what kind of company they are. The kit is a product. The coordination, permitting, and contractor relationships are a service. The included project management covers getting the right kit spec’d and shipped. As he put it: “It’s project management for us, not for you.”

And then there’s Ben.

Ben is a buddy and local GC who quoted my project at roughly $400K, dirt to drywall. It would likely be a two-by-six wall with trusses, pretty vanilla in the context of the other methods I’ve been looking at. But it would likely be affordable and having an all-in number would feel pretty good.

With my more optimistic read on BHC’s estimate, those numbers are close enough that the answer isn’t obvious. Which is where I am.

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Well, building housing in 2026 is stupid expensive. But that’s not news. What I’ve been working out is how the scrappy, DIY approach has to extend to financing, not just construction, if I’m going to avoid a sisyphean mortgage and still hit the goal: something energy-efficient, design-forward, and actually affordable.

Last issue I teased a conversation I had with Wayne Conger, the founder of HUTS, a Brooklyn-based design and development firm that represents a different layer of this landscape than the high-performance panel companies or the packaged kit homes. Bozeman, he said, is like Martha’s Vineyard or Sun Valley: markets where it’s almost collusionary that everyone has agreed it’s expensive, and it benefits everyone to agree. Realtors, architects, contractors, existing homeowners. “It’s still commoditized materials,” he said. “Still concrete and wood. There’s no reason it should be 4x what it is 100 miles away.”

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HUTS doesn’t build anything. They’re method-agnostic (about 40% of their projects are panelized, 60% site-built) and they work across 20 states. What they sell is a process where you understand the cost of each design decision before you fall in love with it. I’ve been trying to reconcile what I want to build with what I can actually afford to build, and that sounded useful. So I asked for a scope of work.

It arrived last week. $48K–$67K. Non-refundable deposit: $9,600.

HUTS breaks their services into five phases, 14 line items at $150 an hour. A lot of them feel like things within my capabilities, or already decided. The parts of their pitch that really sound valuable are the value engineering and creative financing strategy. But these weren’t well fleshed out in the document. What I could identify: permit drawings and value engineering, $11,000–$16,000 combined. Everything else assumes I’m starting from zero.

HUTS is built for a specific customer. Their own testimonials say it plainly: “As a couple with no experience in this field or idea on where to begin, HUTS made something like building a home a reality for us.” Their fourth operating principle is called “Better Decisions, Not More Decisions.” The whole product is designed to reduce overwhelm for first-timers who want to hand off the process.

That’s a real service. It’s just not designed for someone who’s sourcing their range from the scratch-and-dent aisle and getting fixtures from their electrician buddy.

The prefab space attracts the opposite type. People who want to understand the wall assembly. Who see a panelized system as a way to stay more in control of the process, not less. Or who at least don’t mind getting their hands dirty. That tension is kind of the whole premise of this newsletter.

But Wayne’s scope surfaced something I hadn’t fully worked through.

He titled my project “Livingston Hybrid Home.” HUTS has a whole customer segment by that name: live here, rent there, build equity in the background. Their pitch is that you don’t have to leave your current life to start building a future.

I’m lucky to have a great rental in Bozeman. But I want to own something, and I’ve been treating the Livingston lot as my eventual primary residence without seriously asking whether it could carry itself as a rental first. So I ran rough numbers. A well-designed two-bedroom near the Yellowstone River could net around $50,000 in a good year after operating costs. Debt service on a construction-to-permanent loan in the $525K range runs about $44,000. The base case roughly covers itself. Barely. Montana’s regulatory environment around rentals is tightening, so that cushion could shrink fast.

That’s not a money-maker. It’s a self-financing path to a home.

There’s a question this math doesn’t answer. My personal borrowing ceiling with rent in Bozeman on the books is around $210K. This project requires $525K. That gap is real.

One potential bridge: investment property lenders sometimes underwrite based on the property’s projected cash flow rather than the borrower’s personal income. If the rent covers the debt service, the qualification math changes. HUTS gestures at this (“financing that flexes,” “creative ways to use existing equity”) but it didn’t make it into the scope, and their website doesn’t go further than the phrase. I’m following up with Wayne to find out if that’s what they mean, and whether it comes at $150 an hour.

One more thing: a quote from my local GC buddy landed today. Dirt work to drywall, around $400K, with four value engineering suggestions. I also had a second call with Backcountry Hut Co. that filled in a lot of gaps on scope, shipping, and what their all-in number actually looks like in Montana. More on both next issue.

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Every company I’ve covered in this newsletter since then leads with performance. New Frameworks and Croft talk straw fill and airtightness. B.PUBLIC and Collective Carpentry talk cellulose density, vapor management and publish R-values for all of their wall assemblies. The wall assembly isn’t a footnote. It’s the pitch. These companies assume their customer cares about reduced waste and embodied carbon, and wants to know what’s in the wall.

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DEN launched their panelized prefab kit in March 2025. Having followed them from the beginning, and knowing what I now know about high-performance wall systems, the product is surprisingly basic. I spent some time looking at DEN alongside four other design-forward prefab companies to understand why, and whether the pattern held across the category.

The most responsive company on this list is one you probably haven’t heard of. Zook Cabins is Amish-built in Pennsylvania, ranked #100 on the Financial Times’ fastest-growing companies list in 2024, and when I asked for a quote on their A-Frame Lodge — a 1,960-sqft, 2bd/2ba — they sent one the next day: $648,900, delivered and installed, excluding site prep, foundation, and utility hookups.

The pattern runs in the opposite direction of what you’d expect. The companies with the most press are building for a buyer who isn’t asking many questions. That’s a legitimate customer. It’s just a different one than the companies I’ve been writing about are after.

DEN has over 200K Instagram followers and has been featured in design mags like Dwell and Dezeen. Their own homepage says it plainly: “Thousands of plans sold. Hundreds of DENs built.” Plans are the volume product. The prefab kit is the editorial story. And the wall assembly is described as “steel and closed-cell foam.”

That is the most specific public description they offer. No R-value. No steel gauge. No discussion of thermal bridging, which matters, because steel conducts heat roughly 300 times faster than wood. Closed-cell foam in the cavity helps, but doesn’t eliminate the problem unless there’s also continuous exterior insulation. DEN doesn’t say whether there is.

Avrame, the Estonian A-frame kit company with a devoted following, doesn’t include insulation in any kit tier. Buyers source it locally. Their Trio 120, a 1,400-square-foot 3bd/2ba, starts at ~$115,000, before doors, windows, insulation, foundation, or any mechanical systems. A third-party review puts the contractor-finished number in the US at $339 to $596 per square foot.

Backcountry Hut Company, a Canadian company with designs as striking as anything out there, also leads with sustainability language: recyclable materials, locally sourced components, zero waste philosophy. It could easily be marketing cover for a spec-light product. But they actually publish R-24 walls and R-38 floor and ceiling, name every major component brand, and include real-world all-in cost data from a completed build, which almost nobody in this category does.

Their San Juan Islands case study is a 2bd/2ba, 2-story, 999 sqft cabin kit listed at $263,500. That’s just the shell without delivery or assembly, exterior but not interior finishes. The total project cost in 2021 was $467K. A lot has changed since then. I’m going to see if I can get some current numbers from them this week.

Goodway Homes, a small modular builder in Revelstoke, BC, names SIGA and Soprema as their envelope component brands on their main site, uses dense-pack cellulose instead of foam, and targets 0.6 ACH, which is Passive House airtightness territory. They have almost no press coverage and a fraction of the social following of any company above them on this list. Their Model 202 is a 1,139 sqft, 2bd/2.5ba, priced at $330K with everything included minus the site work and delivery.

The deeper I get into this space, the clearer it becomes that “prefab” isn’t one category. It’s at least three: the high-performance panel manufacturers I’ve been covering since issue one, design-forward kit companies like the ones above, and a middle ground still figuring out what it is.

I talked with a Brooklyn, New York-based company this week called Huts that operates in a different layer of this market entirely. They stay agnostic on wall assemblies and construction methods. In addition to pre-designed plans, they offer facilitation and the closest thing to value engineering that I’ve seen yet. More on them next week.

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I haven’t signed a contract with a panel manufacturer. I haven’t locked in a plan with a GC. At this point, it’s safe to say I’m not breaking ground this spring or this summer, and I’ve stopped pretending I know when I will. I’ve also accepted that it’s not a failure of planning. It’s the process doing what the process does.

Removing the urgency of breaking ground this year has provided a useful pause: room to ask whether the design I’ve been working toward is actually the right one.

As financing and material costs come into focus, I’ve been thinking more and more about adding an ADU. Specifically, a garage with a small apartment above it, separate from the main house. Two structures instead of one.

Obviously two structures costs more than one, full stop. But a rental unit that covers a third to half your monthly mortgage payment changes the math considerably. And removing a garage from the main structure simplifies the main house and opens up opportunities for phased construction.

There’s also a wrinkle I haven’t resolved. I was granted a setback variance based on my existing design. If I change the design substantially, I don’t know whether I’d need to resubmit, or whether the changes would slide under the radar. I need to find that out before I get too attached to the new direction.

So I’m back at the drawing board. Not because anything went wrong, but because the time is there and the question is worth asking.

For this newsletter, the pause is actually useful. I have time to do deeper dives on panel manufacturers and explore that landscape further — new panel companies are popping up on my radar every week. And the simpler footprint changes the calculus on pre-designed solutions in an interesting way.

A main house without a garage attached is closer to the kind of compact, efficient program those systems are optimized for. Some options I’d ruled out might actually pencil now, including some of the stock designs from panel companies I’ve been in conversation with.

I’ve found myself coming back to a quote from the Sufi teacher Elias Amidon, about the question that guided his design process when he was an architect in his younger life:

What matters here? What is the life that wants to happen here? How can this design be faithful to that? Finding what matters isn’t only something that is active in the details of our lives. It can also guide us in their larger trajectory: what work we turn to, how we determine our life’s priorities. —Elias Amidon

It’s a great question to ask at decision points, big and small, and it’s a reminder I apparently needed. The ADU question isn’t really a real estate strategy question. It’s a question about what I actually want this property to be, what kind of flexibility matters to me, and how it will shape the way I live.

There’s a whole tier of companies worth examining in that light too. Koto, Den, and others are selling design-forward packages aimed at making homes feel like consumer goods. Slick marketing, strong aesthetics, and a lot of questions I haven’t answered yet about R-values and included scope. That’s coming.

I don’t have answers yet. I have my little pizza-slice lot in Livingston, a variance that might not survive a redesign, and a spreadsheet I’ve been adding to for months. More on that spreadsheet soon — it’s the closest thing I have to a cost matrix on panel systems, and I think some of you will find it useful.

Still working. Still not done.

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So you get preliminary prices on a preliminary design, realize the number doesn’t work, and start pulling at threads: what if I change the roof, what if I cut square footage, what if I add an ADU. Except you can’t price any of those changes without going back through engineering first.

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Last issue, I landed on a hybrid approach that felt promising: site-built walls with CLT roof panels from Timber Age. The $28k roof line item was real. The vaulted ceiling was still alive.

But I haven’t been able to move that forward. Tracy Thomas, the structural engineer I’ve been working with, had some value engineering ideas she was going to explore. I need her input on the assembly details before I can get numbers from Ben and Ted on the envelope cost.

So I’ve been thinking about the other variables.

I could shave square footage here and there, but there’s a point of diminishing returns. Foundation, permitting, mechanical, site work: those costs don’t scale down the way framing does. Cutting 200 square feet doesn’t move the budget number in any meaningful way.

The mechanical system is a version of the same problem, in reverse. A tight envelope lets you size down your HVAC significantly, and that’s real money. My friend Nathan at Arctic Heat Pumps designed what felt like my ideal system: radiant in the slab, one high-performance heat pump, two hydronic fan coil units upstairs. Equipment alone around $15k, equipment and installation closer to $30k. Two mini splits instead, I’m probably in for a third of that.

But the envelope decision and the mechanical decision are linked. If I downgrade the wall system to save money upfront, I lose the mechanical sizing advantage. I save on panels, spend more on equipment, and pay the difference in utility costs for the life of the building.

To weigh these tradeoffs, I need dollar figures on a spreadsheet. To get those, I need detailed engineering drawings. Which I don’t have yet.

What I’ve learned is that value engineering isn’t something you do before you build. It’s something you do iteratively, as each layer of the design gets more resolved. The gap between the budget you need and the budget you have doesn’t close in one conversation. It closes through a sequence of small, informed decisions, each one dependent on the last.

The hope is that it’s a spiral moving upward, not a loop. But not an endless one. The design phase is on a budget too.

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Lars Doucet summed it up in a piece I’ve been sitting with: “housing can be affordable, or it can be an investment, but not both.” The system isn’t accidentally broken. It’s working as designed for people who already own. I’m finding this out firsthand.

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The last issue ended on a hard number: $210k was all my local lender could offer. But just after apologizing for crushing my dreams and before she hung up, she mentioned that if I weren’t carrying a rent payment, the calculation would look different. Living on the lot during construction could close the gap.

Which brings me to my Sprinter van. It’s a cozy camper that I built out almost 10 years ago, but I never thought I’d live in it.

Drop the rent from my DTI and things get a lot more workable. She’s comfortable at a $440k loan on a ~$568k total project. Still tight, but not dead. Living in my van for the nine-month term of the loan isn’t ideal. But it’s the first version of this that actually adds up.

The financing wall is what pushed me toward a different question about the build itself. If the budget ceiling is real and fixed, what changes in the design and the assembly?

Natasha at B.PUBLIC was prompt in getting back to me with a revised estimate for the pretty good wall. The lower-spec R30 wall system came in at $159,325 (down from $184,825 on the R35 system). It’s a real reduction. But still more than Ben and Ted’s site-built quote for a similar scope.

Going over my estimates and spreadsheets for the 382nd time, I noticed that the line item from Timber Age for their roof panels was $28k (roughly half the cost of the other manufacturers) and wondered: can we Mr. Potato Head this thing?

What if I site-built the walls using a high-performance double stud assembly, combined with CLT panels for the roof only. The roof is where you get the most performance bang for your panel buck. It’s also where the CLT’s structural properties and finished interior surface (no drywall) create the most value.

I reached out to Chris at Timber Age and he confirmed that number. Part of the savings comes from reducing the roof pitch slightly, which brings the total panel count from 30 down to 25. It also doesn’t include a ridge beam.

Of course, the roof-to-wall intersection would require some careful engineering. But Chris mentioned they’re designing a nearly identical building right now and exploring cables and straps as a way to eliminate the ridge beam entirely.

Last issue, Ace made the case for a shed roof. Simpler, cheaper, easier to build. It’s exactly the kind of call that can make or break a budget. But my dreams of a big open vaulted space are a core part of my vision for this home. And this CLT roof is keeping them alive for now.

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I still don’t have an answer. But this week clarified just how complicated the question is.

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I had a call with a local construction lender. In addition to telling me she wouldn’t know how to evaluate a panel-built home, we ended up talking debt-to-income ratios. With my income, my current rent payment, and today’s rates, the most she could offer me was $210K. That’s the ceiling. Half of what I’ve been budgeting for the build alone, before the lot, before my sweat equity, before anything.

Last fall I had a conversation with a national lender offering a one-time-close product. The number I walked away with was closer to $500K. I’ve followed up asking what I’d qualify for at today’s rates. If that option has changed I might need to start looking at habitable garden sheds.

This all led me back to first principles this week. Re-examining what I’m trying to accomplish and where I’m willing to compromise helped reframe how I approached a couple of conversations with panel manufacturers. Namely, with an eye toward cost cutting.

The first was with Ace McArleton, co-founder of New Frameworks, a Vermont company that specializes in straw-filled panels. He told me something I didn’t expect: the full-envelope panel system most people picture is often not the right answer. The more accessible path, he said, is wall panels with a flat ceiling, trusses, and blown cellulose in the attic. “It’s heartbreaking what everything costs right now,” he added. “I’m so with you.”

He showed me photos of a customer in Minnesota who built this way. Jack Sloan built a single-story with shed roof trusses. He raised the walls with one friend and a hand truck in eight hours.

My current design has a 12/12 roof, a vaulted ceiling, a deck over a conditioned space, and a garage integrated into the thermal envelope. Ace, gently but directly, pointed out that each of those decisions adds complexity and cost.

My conversation with Natasha Ribeiro, lead designer at B.PUBLIC Prefab in New Mexico, covered similar ground. Their full-system estimate for my project came in close to $200K with shipping, before site work, labor or finishes.

When I told her I wasn’t going for Passive House certification, just something pretty good, she mentioned a lower-spec option they actually refer to as “the pretty good wall.” It’s an R-30 assembly using 2x8 framing, still better than code, 25-30% cheaper than the mid-tier panels she initially quoted.

Collective Carpentry, the British Columbia company whose quote first got me excited about panels back in August, has a similar option they call their Net Zero Wall. It uses standard 2x6 framing with 1.5 –3” of continuous exterior insulation, landing anywhere from R-25 to R-30 depending on how thick you go. Tanya and the team there have been consistently responsive throughout this process, and I’m following up to see what that lower tier does to their numbers for my project.

Another option is to revisit the pre-designed plans that almost all of these manufacturers offer. I looked at one company this week listing a 534-square-foot kit home starting at $325,000 with finishes, but not including foundation, site work, or utilities. When I asked about it, the response was essentially: I wish we could get that number down. We’re trying.

And even then, Natasha at B.PUBLIC confirmed what I’ve heard a few times now: most clients start with a standard plan and end up with a custom project anyway. The minute you move a window or change a roofline, there’s a cascade through the engineering drawings that dissolves whatever cost advantage the pre-designed plan was supposed to deliver. The kit is an appealing starting point, but not a solution.

I still don’t know what I can afford. I’m waiting on revised panel numbers, a full GC quote and a callback from a lender. The financial realities are sobering and have prompted some soul searching. But I’m still optimistic there’s a path that will work. I’m not ready to lop the second story off just yet, but I will likely need to adjust my design, settle for a less-than-passive envelope, and potentially postpone the build until next spring.

So can a person with a modest budget build something affordable, reasonably efficient, and design-inspired? I don’t know yet. But I’m not done looking.

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Quick update on my build: after last issue’s conversation with Andrea at Love Schack, I sat down with Ben and Ted again. Their $155k framing bid has evolved into something bigger. They made a compelling case in favor of GC-ing the project from dirt work to drywall in order to maintain quality control over the building envelope.

Which brings me to the question of whether I can afford to hand off that responsibility. The first few contractors I talked to just punched in the square footage, multiplied by $400, and added their 15%. That put me over $900K. I’m trying to do it for roughly half that. I told Ben and Ted I’m willing to be flexible on the wall assembly and even the overall design if that’s what it takes to make this project actually happen. And if it’s just not possible, I need to know that too.

In the meantime, I’m still learning about the systems that got me excited in the first place.

I also promised you a cost matrix. I’m still waiting on final numbers, so that’s not ready yet. But the conversation I had with Chris Hamm, VP of building systems at Timber Age, is worth its own issue.

Timber Age specializes in a panel that uses cross-laminated timber — glued, perpendicular layers of lumber. The outboard insulation is like a modified Larsen truss system with I-joists filled with cellulose. On the interior, the CLT itself is the finished surface. Three inches of solid wood. No drywall.

I love the wood look and skipping the drywall step, but I was having trouble wrapping my head around the electrical planning.

The answer, it turns out, is that they CNC-route channels directly into the CLT for wiring and outlet boxes. A trim piece pops into the groove to cover the conduit and can be removed later for access.

It’s a clever solution, but very committing. You have to know where every penetration goes much earlier than you would with conventional framing. They’ve formalized this as a “manufacturing lock” that aligns with permit submission. After that point, small adjustments, like shifting a window a few inches, can still happen during shop drawing review. But you’re not moving outlets on site

The alternative is to surface-mount boxes and conduit instead, which provides a lot more flexibility in the field, but I don’t think it’s an aesthetic I would choose.

The carbon footprint of CLT sometimes gets criticized because the trees would have been sequestering carbon if left standing. But these guys source theirs from fire mitigation thinning — trees that were coming down regardless and would likely have burned.

When I told Chris about the education gap that led me to create this newsletter, he laughed. “That basically describes my life right now,” he said. Defining where their scope ends and the GC’s begins is a constant negotiation. They’re building a new platform called Timber Age Homes with stock designs at fixed prices, trying to get to 70% repeatable production and 30% bespoke.

The more manufacturers I talk to, the clearer a trend becomes: most of these companies are moving toward either pre-designed homes or multifamily. Stock designs remove so many of the variables that make custom projects so expensive and unpredictable for everyone involved.

The bespoke single-family custom panel home is not going away, but it’s increasingly a niche within a niche. If you want to go that route right now, you either need a very committed architect or a willingness to educate yourself deeply.

If you’ve worked with CLT or looked into it for a project, I’d love to hear what drew you to it or what held you back. Hit reply.

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A lot happened this week. I got a bid from my buddy Ben that reframed how I’m thinking about this whole build. More on that below. I also sat down with Andrea Michael at Love Schack Architects in Bozeman. Her firm has completed seven panelized projects across Montana and Wyoming using different systems including Collective Carpentry, Croft, and New Frameworks. She’s seen enough to have opinions about all of them.

I told her about how my early enthusiasm about panels stemmed in part from the competitive early quotes I was getting, but the sticker shock of the latest round had me questioning the process.

She wasn’t surprised. “We’ve had that same issue where we get one number and then they sharpen their pencils and it goes up,” she said. “But at the same time, we’ve built panelized homes for comparable cost to site-built. I think that we have the same problem with contractors. They say one thing, and then once they really get their head wrapped around it, it’s different.” It’s a universal problem, not a panel problem.

So if it’s not about price, is it speed? Kind of. Yes, a panelized shell goes up fast. Her most successful project went from delivery to walls, ceilings, floors, framing, insulation, air barrier, and watertight envelope in less than a week. But the rest of the build still takes as long as it takes. Subs, finishes, mechanical. Panels don’t speed that part up.

For Andrea and her colleagues, the performance of the system is the priority. In areas where she can’t find a contractor who knows how to build a high-performance wall assembly, panels take that variable off the table. The insulation, the air barrier, the vapor management. It arrives engineered and built.

The other reason is design integrity. She’s had contractors agree to complex assemblies during design and then start second-guessing them once construction begins. “Oh, we don’t do it that way.” With panels, the assembly is locked. There’s no on-site negotiation about whether the architect’s wall detail is worth the trouble.

She’s also seen the engineering disconnect I’ve heard about. Structural engineers and panel companies can have a dynamic where nobody wants to own the engineering. The structural engineer says “it’s your product, you tell me what it needs.” The panel company says “we just build it, you tell us the structure.” It's a good argument for working with an engineer who already understands these systems.

And she corroborated the shipping complications the GC I spoke with last issue experienced. On a Croft project she did locally, it was the first time the company had shipped that far from their factory in Maine. The lag between shipments caused staging issues and contributed to moisture problems on site

Which brings us to a bid I got this week from my buddy Ben. He and his business partner Ted both have experience building with panels. Their quote was for something different: a high-performance wall system built entirely on site. No panels. $155k. Site-framed double stud walls insulated with Hempitecture hemp fiber. R44 walls. R70 roof. That price includes wall and roof framing, insulation, air sealing, interior partitions, and stairs. No cross-country shipping costs. No crane.

The numbers are pushing me somewhere I didn’t expect when I started this newsletter. I haven’t made a decision yet. After talking to Andrea, I’m still a big believer in the technology, but I might have to face the reality that I can’t afford it for my own project. Even if this part of the story doesn’t end with my own panelized home, it will end with a better understanding of when panels make sense and when they don’t.

That’s still worth documenting. Maybe more so.

The cost matrix is still coming and I’m excited to add the site-built framing to the comparison. I’ll share it when the remaining numbers from Timber Age and Croft come in.

If you’re an architect or builder who’s gone back and forth between specifying panels and site-building a high-performance envelope, I want to hear what tipped your decision. Hit reply.

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That conversation didn’t make me want to abandon panels. But it did make me ask a question I probably should have asked earlier: what am I actually trying to accomplish, and are panels the best way to get there?

Right now I have quotes from three panel manufacturers, a verbal number from a fourth that still hasn’t turned into an official document, and two local builders who sat across from me last week and said they could stick frame the whole thing for less.

They’re probably right.

The numbers I’m working with: Collective Carpentry came in at $210k, with full install crew option that can push that higher. Timber Age quoted $160k for CLT panels. New Frameworks — a Vermont company I reached out to by filling out a contact form last week — came in at $170k. And I have a verbal from Croft at around $195k, no formal quote yet.

These are not comparable numbers.

New Frameworks’ $170k doesn’t include vapor barriers or strapping, so the wall isn’t ready for siding or drywall. But their shipping number was shockingly low, and they do offer an interesting plaster coat on the interior. The verbal $195k from Croft doesn’t include $20k in shipping or $3–5k in design time. Collective’s number is more inclusive but priced accordingly. I’m not just comparing bids — I’m comparing philosophies about what a “panel” even is.

Then I had a conversation that reframed all of it.

A former neighbor of mine was the GC on a project last year using straw panels. He had a lot to say, none of it glowing. The process of staging and sequencing the panels on site while keeping them dry in wet spring conditions proved to be a massive headache. A crane sat on site for over a week. He ended up having to open the moisture barrier on several panels and let them dry out before they could go up. When one rough opening turned out to be wrong, cutting into a finished panel to correct it was a significant operation.

His takeaway: panels demand a level of pre-construction coordination that traditional framing simply doesn’t. Architects love the hard stop on design revisions once panels are in production — but the flip side for builders is that the cost of correcting mistakes in the field is higher.

None of that makes panels the wrong call. But it does make the comparison more complicated than a price-per-square-foot spreadsheet.

I sat down with my co-GC Carl and he asked me a seemingly simple question: what’s my goal with this building envelope? That forced me to think about what I’m actually trying to accomplish — thermal performance, build speed, cost certainty — and work backward from there. We talked about double stud walls, Larsen trusses, and continuous exterior insulation as site-built alternatives that can hit similar performance numbers. It’s a fair challenge.

Finding the sweet spot between performance, speed, and price is more complicated than I thought. But at least I feel like I’m asking the right questions now. And I can’t answer them without a real apples-to-apples comparison of what each quote actually includes.

Next week: a matrix showing all the numbers and what’s included in each package — delivery, installation, panel assembly. I’m also tracking down an architect who has spec’d several of these systems and I’m hoping to include their perspective on how they make the call.

If you’ve navigated a decision like this — panels versus site-built high performance — hit reply and tell me how you thought about it.

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I looked at prefab kit homes and realized what I actually want is custom panelized construction. But it’s nearly impossible to find clear information about how these systems work, what they cost, or how to actually navigate the process. This newsletter will document my real build—the decisions, the surprises, the actual numbers.

Whether you’re getting quotes from panel manufacturers, exploring alternatives to stick-frame construction, or just daydreaming about building your own place someday—if you’re curious about a better way to build, you’re in the right place.

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Three years of shopping over-priced sh*tboxes

I spent three years looking at houses in Livingston in the $500K range. Most of them were 100+ years old with cracked foundations and sketchy wiring. Twice I made offers on houses I thought were actually worth buying, but they were quickly snatched up for well above asking.

I suspect I’m not alone in balking at making the largest purchase of my life (by orders of magnitude) on a structure that represents antiquated building methods and lifestyles.

Then last August, I closed on a funky-shaped vacant lot just 100 yards from the Yellowstone River. It’s at the end of a dead-end street with some beautiful old trees on it. Due to its pizza-slice shape and an aggressive front setback, it was passed over by many potential buyers, and I was able to get a deal on it.

I was initially thinking I would put a prefab kit home on the property. But when I started looking around, I realized that none of the kits I was seeing really fit the unique lot or my garage requirements.

That’s when I learned that many of these prefab companies will build custom designs with their prefabbed panels. This felt like a bit of a hallelujah moment. The promise of having my own design translated into super-efficient, sustainably-produced wall and roof panels, flat-packed on a truck, and shipped to the site seemed too good to be true.

Since I will be trying to take on most of the GC duties and will be using a construction loan, the simpler and faster the build the better. And these panel homes can potentially go up in two to five days(!?!).

On the advice of a builder buddy I designed a home that is basically scandinavian-modern two-story shoebox. I was told this is the most cost-effective design and it turns out this is also well-suited to panelized prefab.

Three weeks ago, I sent these architectural plans to three different panel manufacturers:

Collective Carpentry (British Columbia) — cellulose insulation, all-timber systems
Croft (Maine) — straw insulated timber panels
Timber Age (Colorado) — CLT panels with exterior cellulose insulation

Each uses different systems. Each has different strengths. And each will probably give me very different numbers.

Here’s where we’re at today:

Last summer Collective Carpentry gave me a ballpark estimate of around $100k for walls and roof panels delivered and installed. The quote I just received came in at $210k for the same package.

Timber Age quoted around $160k.

Croft gave me a verbal estimate of roughly $120k but hasn’t sent the formal quote yet—and has gone quiet for the past three weeks despite follow-ups.

So I’m sitting here trying to understand: How did Collective number double since their initial estimate? Is Timber Age’s number more realistic? Should I keep waiting for Croft, or is the silence telling me something?

I’m still super excited about the potential of building with panels, but starting to wonder if any of these three companies are viable for my project or if I need to keep looking.

Next week I’ll break down what differentiates these companies and what they actually deliver. I’m also hoping to have a number from Croft and some answers about why these numbers vary so wildly.

If you’ve gotten construction quotes (panels or otherwise) that came back wildly different than expected, hit reply and tell me what happened. I read every response, and your experience might help me figure out my next move.