Episode 204: The Truth about Home Building

The construction industry hasn’t embraced building for performance, due to the nature of feast and famine, and hurry-up-and-wait.  The Lunsfords share lessons learned being the designers, builders, and labor crew all on one project, and guide viewers into a healthier relationship with contractors.

Featuring quality control and testing experts Carl Seville and Abe Kruger, apartment builder Christopher Troy, Habitat for Humanity veteran Thom Phillips and high performance builder Matt Risinger.

DIVE DEEPER WITH THESE RESOURCES:

TRANSCRIPT:

Whether or not you've been following Home Diagnosis for the past two seasons, you might have experienced the distrust that exists between homeowners and building contractors, a distrust that goes both ways.

So as we expose the root causes of many of the home health, comfort, durability and efficiency problems that are so common today, it's important to step back and look at the culture of the home improvement and construction industry, that might explain how we got here.

Let's look into the daily work of being a contractor, the ups and downs that have made it challenging for builders and tradespeople to think of the home as a system- to consider the invisible dynamics of home performance, much less help you control them.

Imagine if cars were built and bought like houses...

If cars were built like houses, each one would be built outdoors, exposed, in the middle of a muddy field.

If cars were built like houses, each car would be slightly different than all others, and would be built under different laws, depending on where in the country the muddy field was located.

Each part of the car would be put together and installed by a different company, with different workers, guided by different supervisors, on different semi-dependable schedules, if cars were built like houses.

Sometimes in the rush to finish the car, the battery or steering wheel wouldn't arrive in time, so we'd just put it on the punchlist and get to it later.

If cars were bought like houses, no part of the car would be tested by anyone except the buyer, who'd just make sure the paint looks nice and the seats feel good.

If cars were bought like houses, car shoppers would never drive the car before they bought it,

and no one would ask about the mileage per gallon since no manufacturer ever bothered to measure it.

Also, I forgot to mention that these cars would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars- the biggest thing you'll ever buy.

If you hate this story, the next time you shop for a home, look for home performance testing and quality control checklists.

Proof is possible. Ask for it.

Now, having designed this house and then brought structural engineering in, and the architect, and also keeping performance goals in mind, this whole process has given us such empathy for contractors.

On this project we are the GC, but I can just imagine on another project and dealing with another set of homeowners...

Getting handed a set of plans like this, that I did not design, would maybe raise a bunch of questions.

'Are you sure you want this? Are you sure you want that?'

And there's just not a lot of communication in the building industry.

Also, subcontractors are very busy in a boom period and very desperate for work in a bust period.

So you either have people who don't need to return your call because they've got plenty of work, or they're taking calls while they're doing your work so that they can fill the next week of their schedule.

And both of those ways- it's just not a very healthy industry to work in.

And it's a lot of detail and there's a lot of feast and famine. So I think we, as homeowners, need to bring a lot of patience.

So the first thing to understand when you're talking about home building, contracting, renovation, home improvement is: it's exhausting work and it's dangerous.

So be patient with them. Also, the things that we're dealing with on a build like this, or in your building, because it's the same stuff, is coming from a factory.

And it's supposed to be technically straight and square and level and plumb.

The pieces of wood, for example: a two by four, which is called dimensional lumber.

And this is an I-joist which is an engineered product made in a factory to be 'perfect.'

Both of them are going to be a little warped, a little twisted, might not be the exact same depth and thickness all the time.

And that is something that the people who work on your house are having to deal with all the time.

They're chiseling out, and they're having to fix things that kind of didn't show up perfect.

So creative thinking is very important.

Now there are three big things that any contractor is going to be worried about.

Number one is weather. If they're working inside, then it doesn't really matter.

But anybody who's working outside: every time it rains, every single job they have gets put on hold.

No one makes any money in the construction industry when it rains. It's incredible.

Second thing is change orders.

You and I both know that we're going to walk in here, maybe, and say 'ooh, wouldn't it be cooler if this was moved over there?'

Or 'we could put the refrigerator'... because we didn't take enough time to think about it.

Again, really take your time planning a house, an addition, a renovation, because once you're in the middle of it, it's a lot harder to change these things.

General rule of thumb is it costs one unit, $1, let's say, to plan something into your project.

It takes ten times as much to change it when we're at this stage that you see around us.

And it costs 100 times as much after the house is finished, to be able to cut into the wall or the ceiling and really start changing the way that the structure is going.

So we don't want to be doing a lot of change orders.

That being said, come visit your site because being here and seeing the stuff where it's only ten times as expensive as it was in the design phase to change things around, they're going to be much more relaxed.

Their nightmare is that you walk in when they're putting up drywall and you say, 'Ooh, really?!?'

The last thing they're afraid of is lawsuits.

It is possible, over the course of the year or more that it might take to build your house, or do an addition, if you're doing one that's really fancy...

that you might turn on them. And whether or not you're the kind of person who's going to do that, they're afraid that you might be.

So make sure that you try and spell everything out upfront. Have a good relationship, and use this, and try and see things from the builder's perspective.

I think the main obstacle that keeps contractors from of evolving or changing their business from kind of standard construction to a higher level of performance is really just getting stuck in the rut of the daily grind of just making sure they they feed their families, to be totally honest.

If you've been building standard houses and you haven't had problems with those houses, problems like wet basements, or a mold claim, or some other bigger type of problem, if you haven't had those problems, you're building single-story ranch houses with two-foot or three-foot overhangs,

you know, those houses are pretty bulletproof. You know, you can even build them like we do in Texas, with 1970's construction methods, and you're not going to have a big issue.

Your energy bills may be high. You may be uncomfortable.

You may not have great indoor air quality, you may have bugs coming in your house.

But none of those issues are something you're going to, you know, sue your builder over.

Building's not an easy business. I mean, contracting... you're not entering this business as a get-rich-quick scheme.

Clients have high expectations. And also, generally speaking, money is a hard thing to come by. You know, for the most part, most builders out there are making 2% to 3% at the at the bottom line when it's all said and done.

So you think about a million dollar house, but if you're making 2% or 3% on that at the end, that's a lot of liability.

That's a lot of moving parts and pieces to make, you know, $50,000 a year.

And there's a lot of builders out there that are that are making that- $50,000 a year in their business.

While the title of our show is Home Diagnosis, the word 'home' comes in many different forms.

And not everybody lives in a house. Lots of us live in multifamily buildings.

This new building is actually a mix of affordable and market rate housing.

And just like the home is a system, the building becomes a system, so tuning the performance of a multifamily building is much more interesting.

Let's talk to the people who are responsible for the tuning of this project's performance.

Carl and Abe, all right! Good to see you.

Yeah, this is a beautiful project.

Congratulations on bringing another one home.

Yeah, right- almost.

Home stretch. And I'm glad that we get to see it like this, before the furniture goes in.

Because I think that people, it's important for them to understand that if they want quality control over performance, they need people like you to come in and just look at stuff, right?

So you're here, inspecting and testing multifamily buildings all over the place, right?

So what are you seeing across state lines, just as a kind of trend that needs to be kind of steered in the right direction in multifamily buildings?

Well, what a lot of what we do is we're inspecting the quality of installation. Insulation work, air sealing, HVAC systems, water management.

And what's interesting is that most of what we're doing is enforcing codes and manufacturer's recommended instructions.

So really, what we're doing is we're enforcing a base level of quality. And when you design a building well, you know, sort of consciously, and follow all those things and do them correctly, you basically have a green building.

It doesn't take that much work, right? The challenge is, is that the trades tend to not do a good job consistently with those things. So we're constantly pushing them to do those things correctly.

Mm-hm. I think part of the issue, in the projects that we've worked in, is that people just don't talk to each other.

Like, these people might all work on the same buildings, but they literally never have a meeting where they're like, 'Hey, can you not do that because it screws up my plumbing' or whatever it is.

Do you find the same thing?

We do. And I would say integrative design, bringing all those trades and all the designers to the table together is, one, a struggle, but it has a huge payoff and really helps a project turn out better.

You get donuts or pizza, and you invite them...

Bribes always help. There's a little bit of the carrot, you know, to go with the stick. That's right.

One of the challenges in construction is it's such a challenging business from a financial standpoint. Everybody's trying to do a low bid. Like, do we want low bids on our cars and our doctors and things?

So you're struggling. They're not paying people as much as they should be paid to do work well, and then you're trying to coax better quality work out of them.

So in multifamily buildings, because you're dealing with not just the pressure of the one home, but of all of them stacked next to each other, the ventilation and the fresh air flows, especially when you have things like elevators in the building, become a big conversation.

So how do you guys put your head around the idea of ventilation with outdoor air in a multifamily setting?

One of the big concerns in multifamily, you never want to smell what your neighbor is doing. Right?

So you want a tight unit, or a compartmentalized unit, and then you want to make sure that you're ventilating within that unit.

So there's ventilation in the bathroom, exhausting any moisture, any odors. Ventilation in the kitchen, exhausting to the outdoors.

They're trying to make these units as tight as possible, but also providing adequate ventilation.

These affordable units tend to be built better than most market rate buildings, which which we find really interesting.

That is interesting. I've actually been to some states where the affordable housing people say that their subcontractors keep giving them pushback, like 'You're the only people who make me do this stuff.'

Which means that in the entire state, this is the superior, scientifically superior housing stock.

It absolutely is.

We build really, really good houses and people say yes, but this is affordable housing. Why are you building such good houses?

If it's supposed to be affordable, shouldn't you do the worst house you can possibly legally build? Which is, of course, a code home...

We say, 'Well, no.' I mean, if anybody needs a better house, it's a low income homeowner, right? Because they can't afford to come in later on and fix all the things that we screwed up when we designed and built the house.

So yeah, they're super high performance.

And that's the beautiful thing about being part of a nonprofit is that, you know, nobody's telling you you can't do this stuff. And so we're proving that we absolutely can.

A lot of people think that low income housing is some kind of a giveaway for people.

And if you tell somebody that you can spend more money upfront to build a better performing home and actually save a low income family money, they're going to say you're washed up.

That can't happen. You can't possibly spend more to build a home and show a positive cash flow to a low income family.

Here's why: all they think of is the upfront per-square-foot cost, right?

I mean, that's somehow that's the metric that we use for our housing.

How much does it cost per square foot? I get that question all the time.

You know, when you bought your car, did you ask how much it cost per pound?

No, that's a terrible metric. Buying and selling houses by the square foot- also a pretty terrible metric.

Unfortunately, that's the only language, though, that the real estate market tends to delve into.

How much does houses in that neighborhood cost per square foot on a resale?

But when you build a new house, there's so much more that goes into it than just cost per square foot.

Educating people in understanding the kind of correlation between a well-built house and what it takes to build that well-built house is something that I've dealt with for years now.

Every wall, floor and ceiling, potentially, in your house is a cavity. It's not actually a flat thing, right?

So you might have some mystery rooms in your home.

This is a mystery room that is high performance.

This is the central service chase that we planned for a couple episodes ago, and you can see what it looks like now.

It's basically a tunnel that runs through the center of our building so that we can run all the stuff that runs inside of your walls and floors and ceilings, electrical, plumbing, ducts, through a very accessible, easy place to get to, where there's lots of room to work with.

The nightmare generally, on the HVAC side is when the duct installer shows up and looks around and says,

'Well, where am I supposed to put these ducts that I so carefully designed in a computer? Now that I'm looking at this, you didn't leave me any room.'

Well, we had to add extra wood because of blah blah blah.

And that's kind of what we're dealing with.

So when you design a central service chase into a house, you're taking away that variable, and you're allowing the people who have to come and put all the stuff that's going to work inside your house where it belongs.

Remember all of the dirt issues that we had with our foundation in the last episode?

It's no wonder, now that we're $25,000 over budget and three months behind schedule, that people don't want to focus on the invisible stuff that you might not be able to sense.

That you might not care, you might not be willing to pay more for it.

So of course, it's going to be difficult to get builders and home improvement contractors to pay attention to, and wants to deliver these invisible elements.

Because it's so hard to just get a house out of the ground.

On every build site, a builder who's honest will tell you that things are going wrong every single day.

The question is whether we find those mistakes and then fix them, or whether we hide them behind drywall.

Hey, how are you doing?

Good, good.

Thank you very much for having us.

Thank you for coming.

So you are the project manager, superintendent, boss of this entire project.

Yes, thank you.

And you've been a builder for a long time.

But this is one of the first performance-tuned buildings that you've built, where you had to go through inspections and testing and all that stuff.

Correct.

What's your experience been, as a builder?

Well, actually, the processes we've got, and the improvement in materials has really made it very friendly for the installers.

Now, we do meet and we show them the performance criteria, how we want it installed, and how it should be on an end product.

And we stay with them daily, and after a while, after they get it done two or three installations, you're getting in a rhythm.

Then all of a sudden it just continues on in a very consistent pattern throughout.

When you first heard that this project was going to be high performance...

You just never know, every time you start hearing some of these things, 'oh no, what do I gotta do now.'

But no, it's been good. It's been interesting.

Everything has gone quite well and everybody seems to chip in and no real pushback.

It's been a happy surprise. Yeah, the performance on the interior of the the units itself is much more comfortable.

Would you want to go back to building the old way?

Oh no, no. This is much easier. You're taking a number of steps out.

It's a much more thorough process, and a much better performing operation.

What's this test called?

Blower door test.

That's right. Yes.

Four year old knows how to run a blower door test. Should you be afraid of this test?

No.

Are you afraid of this test?

No.

No, she's not afraid. Why are grown men afraid of this test?

My relationship to testing is an interesting one.

Because, you know, when I first got into high performance construction almost 20 years ago now, I remember my very first blower door test.

And I thought I was building a good house at the time, and I got this piece of paper back saying, Wait a minute, this isn't anywhere near what I thought it was going to be.

What do you mean, I have a hole in my building this size? Like, is that possible?

I mean, I was there, it looked like a pretty good house to me.

So then I started delving into, well, how do we build a tighter house?

How, what? Maybe we should use spray foam?

Maybe we should do this or that?

And I remember getting again, my test results back, specifically the blower door and being like, what?

I thought this was going to be a lot lower! Dang it!

So then the next house I built, I do a couple of things differently.

Now that's got to be the problem. Totally.

We're going to crush this one. And I get it back... what?

Dang it! I thought that was going to be better!

And honestly, it's taken me a long time to get below 1 ACH50 on my blower door.

I mean, like, 15 years worth, frankly.

And these days, now you're seeing builders across the country posting some of their scores on social media.

It's a whole different world out there, but testing is key to that.

If you don't test, if you don't measure, you have no idea what you built.

Home Diagnosis isn't aiming for homes to be built higher performance.

That's actually happening now whether we like it or not.

The energy codes of today are making it state law across the U.S. that new homes be built more airtight, and tested to prove it.

They must have more insulation than ever before, and the HVAC equipment must be tailored to fit the home with a computerized load calculation.

So what happens when energy efficient targets are enforced? Less energy is wasted, which is good.

But energy efficiency and home performance are not the same thing.

New homes are in danger of developing moisture and indoor pollution problems if builders just aim to conserve energy by meeting code.

We're also building with new materials like foams, plastics and adhesives.

And these have much different impacts on moisture flow and chemical emissions than older homes experienced.

All this to say, in the 21st century, it is virtually impossible to build 'like they did in the old days.'

So we need to wise up to the new dynamics of home performance.

That is the goal of Home Diagnosis.

Every year in Kalamazoo, Michigan, we would 'blitz build' a house in 24 hours.

We would start with a foundation because you're not going to watch concrete cure while you're getting ready to go.

We had the foundation poured and a little, you know, rough landscaping, and we'd start at 7:00 in the morning.

And 350 people, roughly, would would be a part of this.

And they had it down to the minute. I mean, you know this, you talk about a build schedule and you're looking at, you know, it could be months and months. It could be years sometimes.

And everybody says, 'Oh, I would never want a house that was built in 24 hours.'

You know, it's like there's got to be all kinds of flaws and shortcuts and everything else.

And I was working with that affiliate for, well as a volunteer for 20 years and as an employee for about five, and we never had more problems with those houses than we've had with any other houses.

Remember, a lot of our houses are built by volunteers.

You might have heard the myth that 'homes need to breathe.'

Which implies that you don't want to build too airtight.

This is completely wrong if you want to control home performance.

Build tight and then ventilate right.

Here's the mistake we make if we depend on accidental air leakage through the cracks in a home.

First, you can't control where the air your family breathes comes from, or where it goes.

You might be breathing polluted air from a crawlspace.

Or you might be pushing warm, moist air into a cold building cavity where it'll condense and grow mold.

Second, a house that breathes through the cracks depends entirely on the weather outside to drive circulation.

When it's very hot, cold or windy out, you'll get way more accidental ventilation than you need, which makes it overly dry or humid inside.

And when the weather is mild outside every spring and fall, that's when it gets really interesting.

Imagine you have a week of lukewarm weather with cloudy skies.

If the temperature outside and inside is the same, then you'd get virtually no accidental ventilation at all.

The whole goal of The Indoors is to give us a refuge from the weather.

So why would you want to depend on it for your accidental ventilation?

Plus, now more than ever, we know that when a builder hands over the keys and a family moves in, they need systems in place to control the indoor chemistry.

Every time that family cooks or uses cleaning products they can make the indoor air exponentially more polluted than outdoors.

So aim for as much air tightness as you can get at home.

And then get the right amount of fresh air, from the right place, with your ventilation system.

Sometimes I wonder why I bother weeding, and I think it's because I don't trust weeds.

I think weeds are 'out to get' my tomato plants, and often the same is true in construction. There's a big lack of trust.

Homeowners are fearful that contractors are out to get them, and contractors are afraid their customers might turn on them.

But construction and improvement projects are susceptible to all kinds of things that can cause a project to take longer and go overbudget.

While touring the country, we hit a few building industry conferences where the attendees were, you guessed it, mostly men.

And we passed around our baby, and these gruff construction dudes quickly became a sweet bunch of uncles and grandpas ready to make her laugh.

Babies can melt any heart, and it's also important to remember that the houses we build are going to hold our most precious cargo.

We have a great responsibility to build well, and it's going to take trust from both sides to do it right.

So contractors: please smile, so you don't seem so scary.

And homeowners: give them the benefit of the doubt.

I mean, most of their days are hard ones.

We just continue to do things the same way over and over and over.

And part of the problem is that it's hard to educate people, right?

For the most part, even clients that are well-educated, or maybe have even built a couple of houses before, they still ask the wrong questions often, or focus on the wrong things.

And oftentimes it's strictly a bottom line thing, when the rubber meets the road and it's time to actually talk about the budget and what their project is going for.

Often times, what they're saying and what they're doing don't seem to mesh.

And there's way more jokes, you know, at the party when people are talking about their terrible building experience than the opposite where people go,

'Oh, my builder is amazing. No, my builder was unbelievable. You should hear about him.

He's so fantastic. He did all my punch list perfectly and I don't have any problems with my house.

Wouldn't it be awesome if that's the world we live in, right?

A career as a plumber or an electrician? That's a fantastic career.

'I'm so proud of your son for forgoing electrical trade school.' Now he's a master electrician.

Can you believe that? That's so fantastic!

That's what we need, and that's what it's like in a lot of countries.

You know, when I traveled through Switzerland and Germany, the plumber would show up to the job on a full uniform.

She's there to make it happen. They're a plumber.

I mean, that's the way it should be in America, whereas we're like, 'Oh, it's the, you know, my son isn't doing anything.'

'He's a dummy. So now he's a builder. Whatever.'

We're doing things that are going to be around for a long, long time.

How long is that attorney's case that he worked on going to be talked about? Maybe a year?

Whereas the things that we build people are going to live on for generations.

Now that's a big deal.

Yes, today's new and old homes often have performance problems that can cause comfort, moisture and health issues.

It can be easy and short-term-satisfying to point fingers and assign blame.

But the fact is, we all got here together and we need to get out of it together.

You can help change the culture of the home improvement and construction industry by asking the right questions about home performance, and using the right language to describe it.

To learn more about it visit HomeDiagnosis.TV

Home Diagnosis is made possible by support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation,

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