News Lindal Kit Homes
The Enduring Popularity of Lindal Kit Homes
A Leader in Custom Kit Home Design and Delivery
With hundreds of floor plans and home styles available, Lindal Cedar Homes works with clients to design the home of their dreams at a price they can afford, and built to last a lifetime. The Lindal kit home package offers efficiency, flexibility, and unlimited options in terms of design and floor plan layout. Lindal kit homes are delivered to build sites worldwide and can be engineered for any site, environmental conditions, or location.
With help from his local Lindal dealer, Bob Andreasen built a 7,000-square-foot Lindal kit home as a vacation house for his family.
LINDAL BUILDS ON PROMISE OF ORIGINAL KIT HOME COMPANIES
The kit house has a long history as a convenient, cost-effective way to build a home on a private lot. Over 100 years ago, the Sears Roebuck Company sold its first kit homes through North American catalog sales.
Sears discontinued its catalog business in the 1940s, and Lindal Cedar Homes essentially picked up where they left off. In 1945, Lindal began shipping home kits to eager home-buyers worldwide. During the years following the end of WWII, Lindal secured a coveted position in the kit home business, catering to the huge demand from young families for efficient, affordable, and quality housing. Today, Lindal continues to lead the kit homes market in terms of quality, scale, and options.
Andreason said the cost of building his high-quality Lindal kit home cost less than the price of building a custom home.
What is a Kit Home?
A kit home consists of pre-cut materials for a home, either chosen directly from a catalog or customized for the home-owners’ build site and lifestyle. The home kit package is delivered to the build site and assembled there. It includes the exterior materials for the home, but not the interior finishings, plumbing, or electricity.
The continued popularity of kit homes such as those offered by Lindal is due to several factors:
- A huge selection of styles and sizes.
- The relative ease of shipping to any build site worldwide in a compact container.
- Competitive pricing compared to building a custom home.
- The end result: A beautiful home that holds its value over time.
Lindal materials are pre-cut and delivered to your building site in containers. During delivery, your Lindal dealer will take a careful inventory to ensure they meet the high quality standards expected of Lindal materials, and the correct quantity of material has arrived. In the unlikely event something is missing or damaged (we try our best to avoid this!), the matter is promptly corrected by the Corporate Office, and if replacement materials cannot be supplied in a timely manner a refund for local purchase is issued. Your home is then constructed on-site, usually utilizing a general contractor and experienced builder familiar with the Lindal home construction process, orchestrated by your local Lindal dealer.
Endurance and Elegance in a Kit Home
In a recent Wall Street Journal article on the history of kit homes, Nancy Keates writes: “Once purchased, all of the parts—lumber, windows, cabinets, nails, paint and more—were shipped across the country for assembly on the customer’s lot.”
Keates acknowledges Lindal’s position as one of the largest and most successful kit home companies in business today:
“Lindal Cedar Homes, based in Washington state, has sold about 50,000 kit homes since 1945. The models start at about $100,000 and range in size from 700 square feet to 25,000 square feet. What has changed is that the younger clients now want modern instead of traditional designs. And most customers hire contractors to build their kit homes rather than doing it themselves. Bob Andreasen worked with Atlantic Custom Homes to build a 7,000-square-foot Lindal kit home as a vacation house for his daughters and grandchildren in Sheffield, Mass. He says the quality of the materials was better than he could source himself and the cost, at $220 a square foot for the finished product, was lower than a new custom home. The house took about seven months to build.”
Lindal’s post-and-beam construction allows for open, airy interiors with walls of glass.
Predictability and Efficiency
Author Sheri Koones, who specializes in books on prefabricated homes, often includes Lindal’s kit homes in her books. She recently wrote an article on kit homes that was published online in Forbes. Lindal was at the top of her list of various kit home companies.
“The modern prefabricated kit homes came along in the mid-1900s post WWII. Lindal Cedar Homes, one of the companies at the forefront of this type of construction, began operations in 1945 delivering do-it-yourself (DIY) prefab exterior home material packages. Today they ship much more sophisticated homes locally and internationally, most often constructed by professional contractors,” she wrote. “The kit homes of today, in general, are beautiful, more diverse and way more sophisticated than they were in the earlier days.”
Koones spoke with former Lindal CEO Michael Harris, who currently owns two independent Lindal dealerships, on in Washington State and the other in New York.
“Michael Harris of Lindal Cedar Homes, one of the companies at the forefront of kit house construction, says the company can ship a 3,000-square-foot house on one truck,” Koones wrote. “Their houses are shipped from Washington State by train to the East coast and cargo ships to Japan and other parts of the world. Harris claims that with kit homes consumers have more flexibility and predictability than with other types of construction.
Sig Benson, former VP of Marketing for Lindal, was interviewed in the Forbes article on the Lindal custom home kit. She emphasizes the great versatility and customization options of a Lindal house kit.
“We are a system-built post and beam home, and delivery system, that enables our homes to adapt to any building site in all climates and topographies and flexible enough to be designed in any size or style.The system utilizes an efficient and predictable kit of highly refined and sustainable components that allow for easy design changes including windows, doors, walls, roof design and more.”
Links and Resources:
Read more about Lindal’s history >>
Register to view Lindal’s online floor plan books >>
Contact a Local Lindal Representative >>
The living room of the Lindal Countryside kit home offers a panoramic view of the water.
-By Josefin Kannin
Marketing Director, Lindal Cedar Homes