Puyallup-based Specialty Structures Inc. is working to change that – and adding a green building component.

Specialty Structures’ homes come in traditional-style home designs. The company can also design custom homes. These structures don’t look like a manufactured home. You might not be able to tell the house wasn’t built on-site.

The advantages of a prefab home are clear to Erin Manners, a director with the company.

“Our home design and construction process has been formulated to promote clean and effective green principles,” she said. It’s an approach that works for both commercial and residential construction.

“One of our goals is to create very green, regularly designed homes which are recognizable and livable to today’s standards and in which the green technologies are transparent. This means that using the green features does not take any extra effort on the occupant’s part but still delivers better resource use, less waste, and healthier living environments than standard homes,” Manners said

Technologies include not only green materials, but also passive and active solar heating combined with biofueled appliances to reduce emissions and carbon footprint. Designs also feature rain catchment for domestic water usage, solar and wind power generation, gray-water filtration and recycling for use in the garden and landscaping, low water usage fixtures to reduce public water usage, composting and recycling stations, daylighting distribution systems and low-water landscaping.

Specialty Structures is also working to make its homes affordable.

One design starts out small – around 1,000 square feet – and grows with you over time. You don’t have to move – you can add to your home as your family grows or needs change. This reduces the need for new land and development, material waste, and provides deeper community involvement as the owners put down roots.

“Since everything we do is custom and prefab, it is very easy to design an addition and set it down on your site later in life and have it mate to what you started with. We are also designing a prototype home, which will start small and then have several phases to be added over time, in lieu of the custom-designed route,” Manners said.

The structures are manufactured through Blazer Industries in Aumsville, Ore., or Transform Industries in Burlington, Skagit County. They have less than 1 percent waste.

One of the biggest selling features is the lack of site disturbance. Because it’s all prefab, the only thing that actually happens on-site is the site preparation, utilities, foundations and exterior finishes. The house shows up and is set in place in one day after site-work and foundations are complete. Then a small crew of workers ties it all together and finishes it in two weeks to a month, including the landscaping. Compare this to a standard building site where there’s machinery, noise, materials, trucks and radios, trash and dirt, and neighborhood congestion for up to a year.

Current projects under way include one with five-star green technology for a client in Des Moines and a custom home in Pacific.

Learn more at www.specialty structuresinc.com.

Chanel Studebaker, a freelance writer who lives in Puyallup, writes twice-monthly about East Pierce County business news. Reach her at 253-770-8995 or chanel@brightideamarketing.com.