How long does the whole thing take?

This is one of the questions where our system genuinely changes the answer — but only if you understand which number you are asking about. Because “how long” has two very different answers, and mixing them up is where disappointment comes from.

Let me give you both, from start to finish.

The number we quotes: 10 to 14 days

You will hear that a SIP house shell goes up in 10 to 14 days. That is true — but it is only one stage, and on its own it is misleading. So let me put it where it belongs in the real timeline.

The real timeline, stage by stage

Foundations and site preparation — roughly 3 months. This depends on the plot, of course — the slope, the retaining walls, the ground conditions all change it (that is the whole subject of an earlier article). But on average, preparing everything takes about three months.

And here is the part that matters: those three months are not wasted waiting. While the site is being prepared, your house is being manufactured in our factory at the same time, built from a BIM model.

A word on BIM, because it is the heart of why this works. BIM — Building Information Modelling — means your house exists as a complete, precise 3D digital model before anything is cut. Every panel, every opening, every dimension is defined in that model down to the millimetre. From it, every component is machined and cut in the factory in advance. When it arrives on site, it is not raw material — it is a numbered kit. A jigsaw puzzle that only fits together one way.

Assembling the shell — 10 to 14 days. This is the number you heard. Once the panels arrive, putting the shell of the house together — walls, floors, roof — takes about 10 to 14 days. No improvisation, no waiting for anything to dry, no weather delays. The kit goes together.

Windows, façade, roof, interior — about 2 to 3 months. From the moment the shell is up, finishing all the surfaces — installing windows, executing the façade, the roof, the interior — takes roughly another two to three months, depending on the size and complexity of the house.

Total: around 6 months from start to finish.

Why the windows don’t make you wait

This is the detail that separates our timeline from how it usually goes on Madeira, and it comes straight from building through BIM.

The normal sequence here is: build the shell, then measure the openings, then order the windows — and then wait months for them to arrive. The house sits half-finished, open, waiting.

We don’t work that way. Because the entire house is designed in BIM, we know the exact size of every opening down to the millimetre from the drawings — long before the shell exists. So the windows are ordered from the drawings, not measured on site afterwards. They arrive in the container, together with the shell, and go in immediately after the shell is assembled.

And it is not just windows. The roof, the tiles, all the sheet metal, the gutters and the flashings — everything is ordered from the drawing set, because we already know exactly what the finished house will be: its shape, its dimensions, its heights. Nothing waits to be measured. Everything is defined in advance, and the only thing left is to assemble the components, in planned phases.

How we hold six months

Six months only works because we keep several projects moving at once — usually four or five — rotating our crews through the different stages, so no single client is left waiting while one team finishes one task. While one house is being assembled, another is being finished, another is in foundations.

And there is a deliberate choice inside that. We subcontract the concrete, but we keep the things that actually determine whether a house lasts — the waterproofing, the final surfaces, the window installation — in our own hands. Those are the parts we will not lose control of, so we do them with our own people. That is what lets us hold both the speed and the quality at the same time.

Why speed is not just a nice-to-have

On Madeira, a standard build takes anywhere from a year and a half to three years, depending on the company and the size of the project. Cutting that to around six months is not just convenient — it has a real economic effect for the client, and it is worth spelling out.

If it is an investment property, every month saved is a month closer to rental income. Finishing a year earlier can mean a full year of earnings you would otherwise have lost to a construction site.

If it is a home to live in, most clients are paying rent somewhere else while they wait for their own house to be built. A shorter build means fewer months of that rent — money that simply stops leaving your pocket a year sooner.

Either way, the speed is not a marketing line. It is one of the largest hidden savings in the whole project, and it does not show up on any quote.

Where this leaves you

So — how long does it take? The physical build is around six months, and it is genuinely six months, not a shell in two weeks and then silence. The permitting that comes before it is a separate matter, and it runs on the same clock for everyone on this island, which is the subject of the next article in this series.

But once we start building, we build. The house arrives as a kit, the windows arrive with it, and nothing sits half-finished waiting for a delivery that should have been ordered months earlier. That is what BIM and a dry, factory-built system buy you: not just a faster house, but a year of your life — and often a year of rent or rental income — back in your hands.