While fourteen apartments for Amsterdam are being finalized, the entire factory hall at Barli in Uden is soon cleaned for King Willem-Alexander. He will open the new factory hall. The company builds a house in the factory in six weeks and the house is on location within a day.
An example house with three floors is located next to the new factory hall. “We set these up on location in a few hours,” says director Andries Peters with pride. “If you paint it and decorate it, you can live in it after two weeks.”
The house and the new factory will be opened by King Willem-Alexander. “We hope he feels at home here,” says Peters. “We have put pictures of the king’s family here. Also with a wink to the princesses who will soon be leaving home and these homes are ideal for starters.”
Eight hundred ready-made homes now come out of the factory in Uden every year. That number could rise considerably due to the high demand for new construction. “We have doubled the capacity. We can now make five houses a day. The demand is huge, but the procedures at the municipalities are often very slow.”
In the factory they are now working on homes for Amsterdam, Schaijk and Nijmegen. “Here we make the walls of the houses in several steps,” says employee Jos van Gaal. “They are completely insulated here and the pipes are incorporated into the walls.” This way, fourteen walls can be made per day.
In the hall next door it seems as if you are walking through a new neighborhood. Fourteen homes are being built in the factory. Painters ensure that the walls are neatly finished, roofers are busy with the finishing of the roof and the exterior walls.
“Seven of these apartments will be in Amsterdam tomorrow. I’ve been working here for two years now, but it’s still crazy that this will be on the third floor of an apartment tomorrow,” says Van Gaal while the first apartment is put on a trailer.
Meanwhile, Andries Peters shows that a house from a factory is ‘an ordinary’ house. “Only it is sometimes a bit narrower because we have to be able to transport it. But everything is in it, from a kitchen to three bedrooms and a bathroom.”
During Prinsjesdag, the king said in his speech from the throne that it is important that there are good and affordable rental homes so that the housing shortage will decrease. “That’s why we asked him to open the new factory. The fact that he said yes shows how important it is to society what we are doing. We supply sustainable and cheap rental housing for social rent,” says Peters.
And how expensive is such a factory house? One with three bedrooms and two floors is on location for 100,000 euros.