A Modern Day House Raising On Still Hill Road

By Nancy K. Crevier

Normally a quiet, rural road, Still Hill Road off Sherman Street in Sandy Hook was somewhat more raucous Thursday morning, October 22, as tractor-trailers rumbled down the street and an enormous crane from Healy Crane of Bethel lumbered onto the scene. General contractors and crews arrived, neighbors gawked, and in what could be called a modern-day house raising, Doug and Roxann Monaghan watched as their dream house was assembled before their eyes.

By midafternoon, Steve Paletski of Morris Modular Home Builders in Morris, Conn., was giving out some final directions for the day to his crew. The giant crane towering over the house on Still Hill Road was swinging loads of shingles to the rooftop, where two men grabbed the pallets and set them into place.

“By dark, we should be all buttoned up here,” said Mr Paletski. Where once had sat the 600 square-foot, 100-year-old ranch-style home of Doug and Roxann Monaghan, a two-story, 1,870-square-foot Colonial home now rose from what had been just a cement foundation when workers arrived at 8:30 that morning.

The new home is a modular house from Excel Homes out of Pennsylvania. Four sections, prewired and preplumbed, arrived on trucks in the morning, were situated on the foundation, and fastened together to form the complete home.

“Modular homes are very popular now,” said Mr Paletski. “They are more affordable, and quicker to put up. We’ll be out of here in five to six weeks, instead of the five to eight months it would take with a ‘stick built’ home.”

Mr Monaghan agreed that it was the affordability and speed with which he could replace his home that convinced him to go with a modular home.

“We have a full basement and cement foundation now, instead of just the dug dirt basement and crawl space we had with our old house. It was an affordable thing to do in this economy,” he said.

The real driving force behind the larger home, said Mr Monaghan, was his growing family. Eighteen-month-old Connor needs his own bedroom, he said, and the small house they lived in could not accommodate that. A modular unit seemed the smartest road to take to get what they needed.

Morris Modular Home Builders will spend the next few weeks connecting the plumbing and electricity, tightening up the home, shingling the roof, and placing the siding. The walls inside the home are primed and ready for the family to paint.

“We’ll be excited to get in. We’re staying in a tiny little apartment now. So we’ve gone in the last few weeks from our small house, to an even smaller place, and then we’ll go into all this,” Mr Monaghan said, gesturing at his new Colonial. “It’s great.”