How to Build a Home in 34 Minutes

From 1941 - 1945, roughly half a million Americans moved to the San Francisco Bay Area to work in war-related industries.* Local communities struggled to meet the demand for housing.

No wonder, then, that Life Magazine came to El Cerrito in 1945 to chronicle a young builder’s accomplishment: the construction of a house in 34 minutes.

Marvin Belfils, who witnessed the feat, reminisced about it twenty years later, recalling that due to the war, “material was hard to get, so one of the sofas in the building was made from the seat of a Lincoln Zephyr automobile, and the other from a Cadillac automobile, and they were very comfortable.”

*Johnson, Marilynn S. 1994. “War as Watershed: the East Bay and World War II.” Pacific Historical Review. 63 (3): 315–331.