Factory-built convenience

Even upon close inspection the bathrooms at the North and South Valleys Sports Complexes in Reno look like they were built at the same time as the rest of the park.

Instead the buildings were fabricated at a warehouse on Western Road in Panther Valley.

Restroom Facilities Ltd. has supplied prefabricated restrooms to sites primarily in northern California and Nevada for more than 15 years. The company has been under new management since late 2002, when President Penny Mello took over day-to-day operations of the business owned since 1991 by her father, Russell Hawley.

A newcomer to Reno (Mello and her husband still live near Jackson, Calif., on the weekends), Mello got a fast education in the world of prefabricated buildings, where each project contains a multitude of design challenges and shipping constraints.

Shipping usually poses the biggest problem in prefab construction. To legally fit onto a truck, each module cannot exceed 12 feet in height, 12 feet in width or 27 feet in length.

Buildings with larger dimensions, such as those found at Reno's newest sports complexes, consist of several modules, each weighing anywhere from eight to 25 tons.

Every module is shipped ready to hook up to power and water.

Setting buildings can be time consuming and extremely challenging: For jobs in Yosemite and in the Grand Canyon, the company used helicopters. At one golf course, where old oaks formed majestic canopies over the cart paths, the company unloaded its buildings from its interstate haulers onto smaller rigs capable of maneuvering the course. Workers trimmed branches from the overhanging trees for hundreds of yards.

"It was an all-day project," Mello says.

Building designs usually are determined by the size of the site, as well as the projected use. Many times what a customer wants isn't exactly possible and elements of the design are tweaked so the module will fit the truck, salesman Carl Hackney says.

"A lot of times architects don't know restrooms. They don't know how to design in maintenance, or vandal resistance. We have to because those are problems," he says.

For facilities headed to California, buildings and plans must pass inspection by a structural design engineer as well the state's Department of Housing and Community Development. "We are regulated by them because we are commercial coaches: We fit on a truck," Mello says.

At any time Restroom Facilities has half a dozen buildings under construction at its 64,000-square-foot warehouse. Each building's concrete base is poured at one section of the plant and moved to the main production area.

The buildings usually are framed with concrete blocks or metal studs, while exteriors can be wood siding or stucco. Tile roofing materials often are incorporated into a design, but tile is installed onsite and not shipped with the building due to its weight and fragility.

"When it is going down the road, it is as though it is in an earthquake," Mello says. "It has got to be able to hold together just getting there, not to mention being lifted off the truck with a crane and being set into place. When we put them together they better still be in good shape when they reach their destination."

Prefab construction has several inherent benefits no weather delays, fewer problems with vandalism and job safety during construction, a singular point of contact for a client who otherwise would deal with numerous subcontractors.

The biggest benefit, though, is time.

"If they are just adding a building to an existing park, (it takes) a week of prep time, a week for our building, and a week for finish (sidewalks and other hardscape)," Hackney adds. "In three weeks they are done, whereas with site-built, it can take four months."

Mello says another challenge is trying not to make the buildings too comfortable because city planners don't want people camping in them at night.

In one instance, Restroom Facilities designed a building with a half-roof so that the toilet area was covered from the rain, but the rest of the facility was open to the elements.

"Once we had a customer ask if our buildings could resist a Molotov cocktail," Mello says. "They have everything happen to them because they are in public locations."

"We put a lot of thought into these things," Hackney adds. "We don't want to build just a box with four walls and a triangle on it like you used to draw in kindergarten. We want people to actually use our buildings instead of having to go home or be inconvenienced."