© Not exactly the model that the article is about. Rocio Romero

One of my favourite twitter feeds is The Times is On it, "Because sometimes stories in newspapers are just *that* obvious." Their pick from the Home and Garden section this week was "GUYS, what little kid doesn't love building forts out of couch cushions? The Times is ON IT. They picked the wrong one; it should have been GUYS, Contractor lowballed a job and screwed the customer and the Times IS ON IT. Because in that story, titled A Prefab, Short on the Fab, Beth Greenfield writes about how a family bought an LVL kit from Rocio Romero, and found themselves $ 100,000 over budget and broke. From the article:

But there is a lot more going on here. For one thing,

Rocio says right up front that one is purchasing a kit of parts and a design.

That is a very small proportion of a house, that she sells for $ 28.13 per square foot. She describes the finished costs:

Modern design is expensive, and so are architects. Yet the Times notes that a contractor gave the client a quote of $ 120,000 to build an entire 1669 square foot (according to LVL website) modern house, from the foundations to roof, and minus only the exterior framing and the cladding. That's tough to do. Yes, I know people will say that production housing costs $60 per foot and so should prefab, but a) this isn't prefab and b) this isn't vinyl.

Sun Joo Kim writes at Smart Planet:

I first met Rocio Romero close to a decade ago, and she is still delivering what she promised then: simple, modern, green designs. She never said they were cheaper to build and she never called them prefabs.

Then when you look at the slideshow, I think anyone would have to say, it looks pretty fab. So whoever wrote the headline got it wrong on both counts. I think that the contractor did the clients a disservice, and that the author has done one to Rocio Romero.

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