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PASCAGOULA -- Having an entire customized home built in one day is a homeowner's dream come true, and two families along Beach Boulevard saw it happen Monday. Pelican Bay Custom Homes, along with New Era Construction, were at two sites along Beach Boulevard constructing high-end modular homes. The homes are built with 2-by-6-foot boards, and they feature a hardwood wrap and cement siding. They are engineered as well as a "stick home" and can be built to match or exceed hurricane building codes, Pelican Bay Construction Manager and Vice President Bob Smith said. "They're made to withstand 140 to 160 mile-per-hour winds," Smith said. Carl Megehee smiled as he watched construction on his new modular home, which was going up on the same spot his old house stood before Hurricane Katrina destroyed it.
A fire that destroyed at a house under construction in Hamiltonban Township was "definitely É suspicious," because the modular home had no electricity and other utilities weren't turned on yet, Adams County Fire Marshal Glenn Herring said this morning. Neighbors discovered the fire at 10 Scotch Trail about 12:35 a.m. Tuesday. "(The house) was totally involved when we arrived," said Fountaindale Fire Co. Chief Dave Martin. "We went on defensive mode from the start and surrounded and drowned it." It took firefighters from nine fire companies in Pennsylvania and Maryland 25 minutes to control the blaze, Martin said. Herring and a Pennsylvania State Police fire marshal from Chambersburg were expected to begin investigating today. But rain may delay the start of the investigation, which will take several days, Herring said.
EVERYBODY has pictures on their walls. Even if it is only posters stuck with Blu-Tack, art is part of the furniture in every home. But if you bought Nathan Coley's Lamp of Sacrifice, 286 Places of Worship, you would have to move out to make room for it. Cardboard scale models of all the places of worship listed in the Edinburgh Yellow Pages for 2004, all jumbled together, completely fill the floor in two large rooms at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (SNGMA). Yinka Shonibare's Sun, Sea and Sand, several hundred paper plates decorated with brightly coloured patterns from African textiles, fills the floor of another room. It leaves only a narrow passage, but Martin Creed's Work no 370, Balls - several hundred balls of conceivable, kind, size and pattern scattered across the floor - fills the big central room so completely, you have to walk through the middle of it.
Many people hear the word modular and think trailer or mobile homes. This stigma may be part of the resistance about embracing techniques for constructing quality homes that also honor our natural resources. Nearly 40 percent of the nations housing is provided in some form by the production or home manufacturing industry. When Kenneth Czarnomski, department chair of construction management technologies at Asheville-Buncombe Technical Community College, looked at projects his students could create that contributed to the community, he saw this situation and determined that just more traditional houses were not the answer. .
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