How to get started with Flexi
So you want to build a new home. Ambitious! In today’s market with prices skyrocketing and material shortages bringing uncertainty and delays, you’ve got to have your wits about you.
You haven’t found a standard plan that takes your fancy, and you’re unsure about engaging a design professional.
Imagine if you could figure out exactly what you wanted before even engaging with a designer, get live pricing and then order the prefabricated components of your new home to be delivered and assembled on-site as soon as consent was granted…
At Flexi, that’s what we’re building towards. We’re streamlining the design and manufacturing of Kiwi homes to make the entire process easier for everyone.
Designed for Offsite Manufacturing
Flexi makes it easy to build houses by having standard components that are repeatable and scalable, designed specifically to be manufactured offsite. While other prefabricated houses are often designed and then rationalised to be prefabricated, Flexi Panels have been optimised for offsite manufacture and interchangeability. This enables us to streamline the design process, standardise documentation, and ultimately achieve a weathertight structure in a matter of days.
Flexi utilises a principle called Platform Design for Manufacture and Assembly, or P-DfMA. This approach enables you, the customer, to configure a wide range of unique design outcomes from one ‘kit of parts’. You can read more about P-DfMA in our blog post here.
Currently, Flexi produces panel drawings for each project. These are given to our manufacturers who build the panels and ship them to site. In the future, we see panels being fabricated in advance of the customer even ordering, so we can fill orders with existing stock. This would streamline the entire manufacturing pipeline and ensure panels could be delivered to site as soon as consent is granted and site works complete, ready for install.
Streamlined Design
It starts with an idea. Imagine designing your own home and ordering your Flexi panels online from the comfort of the couch. That’s our goal. Currently, our Online Design Tool helps to encourage prospective clients to engage in the design process, so they can come to us with an idea of what they want in their home and experiment with what’s possible.
Our current Concept Design Process involves taking clients through a familiar architectural workflow from Concept to Consent. We start with a chat with you to understand what you’re wanting to build so we can create a design brief and then quickly and cost-effectively generate some concepts using the Flexi House system. We then take your concept and turn it into a 3D model and drawing pack so you can get a feel for your new home.
We’ve got capacity for 4x Concept Designs in March… Click Here to reserve your spot!
As we grow and establish a library of common components, we will be able to give the client more control over the design and offer live pricing, so you can make really informed decisions during the design process or even before meeting with us. The easier we can make this initial engagement with our product the better for everyone!
Standardised Documentation
Flexi aims to accelerate the consent process. We see a future where Flexi Panels could leave the factory certificated to bypass consenting. Promisingly, despite not having such a certification, our prototype build in Cromwell achieved Building Consent in just 3 weeks. This will only get faster as our system becomes more familiar to local consent authorities around the country.
Manufacturing offsite allows for documentation of critical tasks during the manufacture of Flexi Panels, reducing the number of on-site inspections. We’re already well on our way to making the consenting process as easy as possible.
Weathertight Fast
Finally, Flexi makes it easy to build a house by being really fast! By utilising offsite manufacturing, we are able to reduce time onsite. This lessens the impact on the site and means all trades can get to work inside a weathertight structure as soon as the install is complete, meaning the fitout is unhampered by rain delays. These choices help to ensure the smooth running and timely delivery of a Flexi House project.
Having completed the install of our prototype build in Cromwell in 13 working hours, and with plenty of room for improvement, we are already moving in the right direction. We expect our install time to drop even more as we perfect the process with our builders and build more houses. Likewise, we expect the timeline of the interior fit-out to condense as we implement our learnings project by project.
A Flexi Future
Flexi is addressing many of the problems facing housing and construction in New Zealand today. We’re striving to make it easier for Kiwis to design and build homes that are good for people and the planet.
At scale, our system has the potential to be manufactured in advance so customers can design their own homes and then order panels that have been manufactured in advance.
Our streamlined design, documentation and manufacturing process aims to help Kiwis build better homes that suit their lifestyles, and has the ability to scale the supply of housing across Aotearoa.
So what’s next?
Get in touch and let’s create a concept design just for you!
We’ll then be able to obtain a price estimate and provide additional information to help you make informed decisions.
