Milton blog

Ron Cauchi, president of Mattamy Homes’ Stelumar Advanced Manufacturing plant, shows off the enormous facility, which can handle the construction of 10 houses at any given time.

Weather problems don’t affect construction since these houses are assembled indoors

It’s a bitter and blustery day on the western edge of Milton; with the wind chill it feels like -18C.

But Brent Bennett is without hat, coat or gloves as he works to install windows and doors in a house under construction.

That’s because Bennett and his co-workers at Mattamy Homes’ Stelumar Advanced Manufacturing plant are building homes indoors, for the nearby Hawthorne Village on the Escarpment site.

Bennett, the lead hand in back framing, has worked in construction for 21 years all over Canada and has had to contend with a variety of conditions, such as “being up to your knees in muck one day on site and then having it all frozen over the next day.

“And we all have to deal with shovelling our driveways, but just imagine having to shovel out a construction site.”

In comparison, he says, building a home in a factory is heaven.

“There are no rain days, no snow days. It’s climate controlled. There’s an advantage to working with dry lumber.”

The cavernous Stelumar facility on Tremaine Rd. south of Derry Rd. produces a new house a day and 10 are in various stages of progress at any one time. Each day at 4 a.m., the moving production line advances the houses – 600,000 pounds worth – to the next work station.

Since it was launched last summer, more than 60 houses have rolled off the Stelumar line and on to waiting foundations. As many as 220 houses a year will be built there over four years.

“Six months ago, this was pretty hot-off-the-press stuff. We didn’t even know if we could do this,” says Stelumar president Ron Cauchi.

There were a few bugs to work out. Initially, the skidding system that moves the homes down the line wasn’t able to handle the weight of 10 houses and needed adjusting, and the roof-hoisting mechanism, which allows for roofs to be fully assembled on the floor and then lifted into place, needed to be developed.

While factory-built homes aren’t a new phenomenon in North America, this facility is a breed apart. Unlike modular builders, which build their homes in sections, then ship the pieces to the site for assembly, the Stelumar homes roll off the line in one piece, with cabinetry, light fixtures, electrical and plumbing systems, and even paint already in place.

“This has nothing to do with modular,” Cauchi says. “These houses are extremely architecturally complex with multiple roof lines, dormers, wraparound porches and lofts.”

Then, there’s the way they are shipped, on a specialized, motorized transporter.

“There’s another difference from modular homes, which are put on a flatbed truck and shipped to a site,” Cauchi says. “This is a pretty complex piece of machinery. It’s like the platform that carries the space shuttle to the launch pad.”

For the one-kilometre, 15-minute journey from factory to building lot, the homes are shipped on a private road within the Mattamy site. The houses could be sent along public roads, Cauchi says, but it would require permits, police escorts and disruption of traffic to accommodate the wide, slow-moving load.

About 200 of 300 homes slated for 36- and 46-foot lots at Hawthorne Village on the Escarpment are being built at Stelumar, and the designs are identical to the homes being built on site. (Homebuyers don’t get to choose whether their homes will be site-built or factory- produced.) Eighteen different models are being produced, each with up to six different elevations.

“There are three, first-floor layouts typically and three choices of second floors, with options like bay or bow kitchen windows and second-floor laundry rooms,” Cauchi says. “It’s pretty darn close to custom building. The choices buyers have are mind-boggling. It’s not at all cookie-cutter manufacturing.”

Cauchi says there are various reasons why Mattamy, the province’s largest builder, has taken to factory building, as well as continuing to construct the conventional way. (Cauchi is quick to add that the site-built homes are of comparable quality.)

“The primary driver is customer satisfaction. It’s (Mattamy CEO) Peter Gilgan’s passion,” Cauchi says. One of the biggest issues with consumers is reliability of closing date, he says, and the factory approach means construction is not affected by weather conditions that cause delays on conventional building sites. “You can keep building even in a blizzard.”

There’s also the issue of quality – in a factory environment, building materials aren’t being exposed to the elements, which may cause lumber to warp. And timing is dead on. Because temperature and humidity can be controlled indoors, drywall mud, for example, dries exactly when it’s supposed to.

The factory approach shaves 70 days off building a house the conventional way – a new home can be turned out from the factory every 11 days. Another two to five weeks are allotted to complete the on-site work, such as bricking the house, steps, porches, hooking up utilities and landscaping. (Building code regulations and weight issues require bricks to be installed on site.)

At the plant, workers have a safe, comfortable environment, don’t have to worry about losing income or making up time due to weather and their tools are in the same location, day after day. The problems of construction site theft are eliminated. And because the workers (100 building crew and 15 office staff) are Mattamy employees, the builder doesn’t have to rely on outside trades.

Currently, it costs more for Mattamy to build the houses indoors than on site, but Cauchi says Stelumar’s mandate is not to cut costs – it’s about improving customer satisfaction and serving as a research and development lab for new technologies and products.

“Today, it operates at a premium but tomorrow, the plan is for a customer satisfaction at neutral cost; to produce the homes at the same cost as on site.”

Mattamy launched a pilot factory in Cambridge a few years ago where homes were built inside an old aircraft hangar.

Those houses were built exactly as they would have been on-site and finished only to the drywall stage before being shipped out. The line didn’t move and trades had to be scheduled, rather than working simultaneously at designated work stations.

Mattamy continues to operate a manufacturing facility in Cambridge, which supplies Milton’s plant with prefabricated wall and floor panels.

The walls are built on 24-inch centres rather than the usual 16, but are stronger because of the rigid polyurethane foam insulation. Value engineering (designing products at the lowest cost while maintaining quality) and computerized design and manufacture allow for optimized load bearing through aligned floor joists, studs and roof trusses, Cauchi says. The timberframe structure itself is more than strong enough to meet requirements. The rigid foam adds a structural strength bonus.

The engineered design also maximizes heating and cooling efficiency as ducts from the basement furnace can be lined up to run straight up to the attic, cutting the distance hot or cool air has to travel.

Rigid foam insulation is usually found only in high-end custom homes, Cauchi says. It would be cost-prohibitive for Mattamy to hire people to spray foam in site-built homes, but the prefabricated panels used in the plant are cheaper. Fewer wall studs and tightly controlling waste mean the Stelumar homes use 25 per cent less lumber. Over the factory’s four-year life span, producing 800 to 900 homes, an estimated 40-hectare woodlot will be saved, Cauchi says.

When Hawthorne Village is finished, the factory will be recycled, disassembled, then set up at another Mattamy site.

Several such factories are in future Mattamy plans, though locations have not yet been announced. Cauchi says they will be large sites with hundreds of lots.

All Hawthorne Village homes are built to Energy Star standard. “In fact, these are better insulated than Energy Star,” he says.

BY THE NUMBERS

220
Number of houses the Mattamy factory can produce annually. Ten are in production at any one time, with one new house produced every 11 days.

76,000
Factory size in square feet.

115
Employees at the plant.

70
Number of days shaved off conventional site building.

1
Kilometre between factory and building lots.

600,000
Weight in pounds of a fully loaded production line.

25
Percentage of lumber saved over site-built homes, due to tight control of waste and reduced need for wall studs.

5
Similar plants Mattamy is considering for the GTA over the next five years. Milton plant will be disassembled and moved to a new site.

Written By: Tracy Hanes of the Toronto Star

WHIZ KIDNEY: Locke survived a bullet thanks to his missing organ

Chute First, Ask Questions Later: As Locke flees with his rebel tribe, four crew members from the freighter land, each with a mysterious past and dubious motives

I have been told by people who also received preview screeners that they thought last night’s episode of Lost, ”Confirmed Dead,” was flawed. The opening-sequence flashback — in which the wreckage of Oceanic 815 was found on the ocean floor — was a narrative cheat because it relied on perspectives not known to its character. Similarly, the moment when sisterless secret agent Naomi recalled receiving her Island infiltration orders from castaway-denier Matthew Abbaddon played fast and loose with flashback logic because…well, because Naomi was dead. (Maybe consciousness seeps out slowly on Soul Trap Island.) If Frank Lapidus really landed the freighter chopper as he claimed, how come he woke up so far away from it? (Maybe there’s a story to be told there.) And come on: Isn’t the whole business of Ben manipulating Locke with the promise of Island secrets getting just a little bit old? (Maybe…nah, you’re right about that one.)

Bah! Mere quibbles. For me, ”Confirmed Dead” was downright alive with fascinating new characters, mind-blowing new possibilities, and exciting new theory fodder. Like this one: I am utterly convinced Charlotte Staples Lewis has been to the Island before. Maybe it was her giggly delight as she splashed about in the Island’s inland waters. True, the would-be freighter savior (or devil) could have been celebrating the mere fact that she had survived her harrowing arrival. But there was something more to her reaction — something that reminded me of another fantastical tale about an enchanted homecoming. The book is Prince Caspian, by C.S. Lewis, the sequel to The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. The story starts with a chapter called ”The Island,” in which the Pevensie kids return to Narnia via a mysterious island marked by ancient ruins and odd creatures. First thing they do: play in the water. Maybe I’m just fishing again. But if you think I’m wrong, then you owe me a better explanation why Charlotte Staples Lewis has been assigned a name so conspicuously similar to the author’s unfurled handle, Clive Staples Lewis.

(Don’t roll your eyes at me — especially since we’re only getting started! I spent 90 minutes researching Apocalypse Now and by extension the complete canon of Heart of Darkness author Joseph Conrad for Lost resonance thanks to Sawyer’s snarky ”Colonel Kurtz” crack. I found some, too: Check out The Shadow-Line, Chance, The Inheritors, and The Secret Agent. And for those who want to take me up on my C.S. Lewis challenge, consider investigating The Space Trilogy. C’mon, people! Support your local library!)

But for the more casual, less geeky Lostophiles who’d rather not engage the show with their English degrees (what else are they for?), the episode was equally worthy of watercooler kibitzing. For example, it looks like a monster more troublesome than Smokey might be setting its sights on the castaways — a certain green-eyed bugger named jealousy. The Jack-Kate-Juliet love triangle began to simmer anew. Ben mercilessly taunted Sawyer by poking at his I’m-not-as-good-as-Jack sore spots. And Locke was quietly rocked by Hurley’s disclosure that he, too, could dial up Jacob’s ghost shack. I don’t think Mr. Mystic likes having to share the office of Island high priest with anyone. Hurley’s recent flash-forward hinted at a looming rift with Locke; might a disagreement over properly interpreting Jacob be the cause?

But topping the talking points list: that WTF? opening sequence, in which remote-controlled cameras belonging to a salvage vessel called Christiane 1 stumbled upon Oceanic 815 — plane, passengers, and all — in the Sunda Trench of the South Pacific. (The backstory for Christiane 1 — which was actually hunting for the Black Rock — was recently told in an online story called ”Find 815.”) Does this wreckage prove that powerful forces are trying to hide the existence of the castaways — or does it prove that we’re dealing with alternate-reality theory?

Then there’s the Freighter Four, whose imminent arrival in last week’s season premiere divided the castaways into two tribes: the Jack Pack, cautiously confident that the freighter is their ticket off the Island, and the freighter-fearing Locke Lot. (Or the Ben Bunch, if you share Sawyer’s belief that the seemingly leashed Other is still pulling the strings. Killer line: ”It’s only a matter of time before he gets us, Johnny. And I bet he’s already figured out how he’s gonna do it.”). The Freighter Four fell to earth, like the castaways [or Icarus? Lucifer? David Bowie? Pick one — we're interactive!]; they had to bail after their helicopter encountered electromagnetic turbulence in the airspace around the Island. Lost has sometimes fumbled the needle when injecting new blood into the narrative. (See: the Tailies in season 2, Nikki and Paulo in season 3.) But here, the show has seemingly scored some primo plasma. The casting of Charlotte (Rebecca Mader), Lapidus (the Lawnmower Man himself, Jeff Fahey), Daniel Faraday (an appealingly quirky Jeremy Davies), and Miles Strom (Kenneth Leung, making a strong impression) totally worked for me, while their intriguing backstories left me jonesing for more. And did you notice that each one corresponded to a member of the Fantastic Four, another quartet of curious characters who fell from the heavens after bumping through a weird-science squall of cosmic rays? For purposes of both analysis and recap, let’s take each of them in order of appearance:

Name: Daniel Faraday
Island introduction: Discovered by Jack and Kate in the jungle shortly after Strom shoved his chicken butt from the chopper. (”Hey, genius! Go!”) J&K were clearly puzzled by Daniel’s jittery quirkiness — and deeply alarmed by the poorly hidden pistol on his belt and the gas mask in his luggage.
Occupation: Socially awkward physicist, though ”physicist” is too small a word for the eccentric egghead. ”I guess you could call me a physicist,” he later told Sayid. ”I don’t like to be pigeonholed.”
Fantastic Four analogue: Reed Richards (Mr. Fantastic), socially awkward physicist, whose body is as elastic as Faraday’s view of himself.
Name game: Daniel was an Old Testament prophet who survived the lions’ den and interpreted dreams for Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon. Michael Faraday was a pioneering scientist in the fields of electricity and magnetism. Remember when Daniel noted how the sunlight ”doesn’t scatter quite right” on the Island? Exactly the kind of anomalous phenomenon Michael Faraday might have noticed.
Backstory intrigue: According to Naomi, Faraday is a ”headcase.” We got a taste of that in his flashback. While watching news coverage of Oceanic 815’s (faux?) discovery, Faraday, dressed in jammies and robe, began to tremble with emotions he couldn’t explain — as if experiencing a deeply disturbing bout of déjà vu. It reminded me of ”Flashes Before Your Eyes,” when Island Desmond projected his mind through time and left Flashback Desmond feeling seriously discombobulated. Is Daniel destined to dance the time-warp shuffle, too?

Name: Miles Strom
Occupation: Ghostbuster + hustler = Ghosthustler! Miles can commune with the spirits of the deceased; he vetted Jack and Kate by psychically interviewing Naomi, whose mortal remains he dismissed as mere ”meat.” I wonder what Miles is going to make of the holy trinity of Island spectral entities: Jacob, Christian Shephard, and Ghost Walt.
Island introduction: Found on the windswept rocks near the shoreline by Jack, Kate, and Faraday. He appeared to be unconscious but was playing possum and popped up with gun drawn. Remember Naomi’s dying words last week? According to Strom, ”Tell my sister I love her” was code for ”Ugh! They got me! Bring weapons!” Hence, Strom’s haughty guardedness.
Name games: ”Strom” is an anagram for ‘’storm,” which befits his blustery personality. But ”Miles Strom” sounds very close to ”maelstrom,” a wickedly strong whirlpool. (Shall we plum Edgar Allen Poe’s ”Descent Into the Maelstrom,” about a whirlpool that destroys a fishing vessel?) (No, we shall not.)
Fantastic Four analogue: Johnny Storm, the hotheaded Human Torch, as fiery as Strom’s temper and wit. When Sayid suspiciously inquired as to why Miles and Daniel weren’t surprised to find the castaways alive if the outside world considered them dead, Strom sarcastically responded, ”Oh my God! You guys were on Oceanic 815! Wow! That better?” Even Sayid seemed to smirk at that one.
Backstory intrigue: Strom was hired to scare away the ghost of a murder victim (a drug dealer, it seems) who was haunting his grandmother’s house. The eerie exterminator plugged in a portable cold generator (chilled air flushes out lurking spirits, according to poltergeist lore), meditated himself into a twitchy state of mind, and then shook down the specter for his secret stash of cash. Surely Dr. Stantz would not approve, though Dr. Venkman might. Creepy, hilarious, so very cool. (Is Scammy Strom greedy enough to resort to grave desecration if Nikki and Paulo blab to him about the diamonds buried with them? Would Lost risk provoking our N&P-hating wrath to tell us that tale?)

Name: Charlotte Staples Lewis
Occupation: Cultural anthropologist.
Island introduction: After her splash-about, Charlotte was discovered by Locke’s crew as they were hiking to the old Dharma barracks. She was stunned to find them alive — or at least pretended to be — but then grew weary of Locke’s third-degree and bossiness. ”Me Tarzan. Me survive Ben bullet because of missing kidney, convenient plotting, and Magic Healing Island. You White Devil Freighter Woman come to ruin my good thing. You be prisoner and clean the Dharma latrine.” Then Ben grabbed Karl’s gun and shot her. So much for the homecoming party!
Backstory intrigue: Bribing her way onto a hush-hush archaeology dig in the deserts of Tunisia, Dr. Lewis discovered a polar bear skeleton (!) and a Hydra Station collar buried in the rocky soil. Charlotte’s face lit up; clearly, she had a hunch — and perhaps feverish hope — about what she was going to find. (My skeleton theory: Dharma was using the polar bears as guinea pigs for teleportation and/or time-travel experiments. Why? To invalidate the God-killing theory of evolution by planting false evidence in Earth’s fossil record, of course!)
Fantastic Four analogue: Susan Storm, the FF’s token female, whose ”hard light” powers were handy for conjuring bullet-repelling shields and making herself invisible. Wanna bet Charlotte is hiding something about herself — something that’s right in front of us but we can’t see? Something besides a bulletproof vest? More on this in a minute.

Name: Frank Lapidus
Occupation: Pilot; also ”a drunk,” according to Naomi. And since he sports the required accessory for spiritually wasted TV boozers — a scruffy beard — she must be right. (But since it’s only a small beard, maybe he’s only a little boozer.)
Island introduction Found by Jack’s crew. Despite the electrical storm, Lapidus managed to land the helicopter, the sight of which caused Jack, Kate, and Sayid to beam like kids on Christmas morning.
Name game: Lapidus is a type of granite.
Fantastic Four analogue: Ben Grimm, who piloted the team’s ill-fated spaceflight through a storm of cosmic rays and was transformed into the sad-eyed, rock-encrusted Thing for his trouble.
Backstory intrigue: While watching coverage of the Oceanic 815 salvage, Lapidus became convinced the corpse in a pilot’s uniform couldn’t really have been the plane’s pilot because he wasn’t wearing his wedding ring. Of course, we have reason to know he’s correct. After all, we saw the pilot get eviscerated by the Monster in the first episode. But how could Lapidus be so certain? Because he used to work with Capt. Seth Norris (Heroes’ Greg Grunberg in a still-photo cameo) at Oceanic Airways. Lapidus, in fact, was originally scheduled to sit in Oceanic 815’s captain’s chair. (Did you try calling the number on Lapidus’ TV screen? It’s 888-548-0034 — and it works.)

Clearly, the Freighter Four have more secrets to spill, not to mention their own private agendas. But we were told their primary common objective for coming to the Island. Their job — initiated by Abbaddon, the creepy suit who last week harassed Flash-Forward Hurley at the mental hospital — isn’t to rescue the castaways but to abduct Ben. (”Their mission is a man,” to borrow the tagline from Saving Private Ryan, which featured a brilliant performance by Jeremy Davies as a courage-challenged soldier.)

While the Jack Pack wrapped their mind around that revelation, the Locke Lot was on the verge of screwing things up for the Freighter Four by assassinating their quarry. The über-Other begged for his life by pulling the old I’ll-tell-you-secrets trick, but Locke called his bluff with a dead-serious question encoded with a slight wink at the audience: ”What is the Monster?” Ben looked baffled, then said, ”I don’t know.” Locke cocked the gun, and with no choice but to come clean, Ben blurted out Charlotte’s complete résumé. How does he know so much about Freighter Girl? ”Because I have a man on their boat!”

So who could it be? The safe bet would be ex-castaway Michael: If you’ve been reading the press about the new season of Lost, you know that at some point Harold Perrineau will be returning to the show. But what if Ben’s lying? What if his spy isn’t a man but a woman — the same woman he just tried to kill? What if he and Charlotte are in cahoots and that shooting business was all a ruse — another move in Ben’s 20,000-steps-ahead-of-everyone Island chess game? Theories! I have tons more of them, including the logic-tortured argument that Charlotte is the daughter of Ben’s Dharma-days gal pal Annie. (Do the research — they look a lot alike!)

But it’s time for me to turn the space over to you for your thoughts and quibbles. Did you dig Superhero Jack as much as I did? (”I don’t know, Miles — how stupid are you?”) Do you think something dark is brewing inside Sawyer? How did you like Locke’s disclosure that he’s taking orders from Ghost Walt?

Your thoughts, Milton?

By Jeff Jensen

The following post is by Mark Ihnat. Please visit Mark Ihnat’s Smart Home Research Blog here:

In Canada, Bell has jumped on the smart home bandwagon offering smart home safety and security. Targeting families and the aged, Bell’s system is based on motion detectors, sensors, keypads and notification through wireless and the internet. An interesting system and although rather simple (it sort of reminds me of a basic X10 security system package) it seems Bell has beaten other telecommunication companies to the punch…

To continue reading this column, go to Mark Ihnat’s Smart Home Research Blog.