New House Rules

Working in Colorado tract home developments in my early years in homebuilding, it appeared the knowledge and skills to accomplish the tasks were coarse and optional. Cowboy brawn prevailed. Good framing carpenters wielded 32 ounce hammers and could drive a 16d nail in two blows. They'd run their circular saws without blade guards and sling them like machetes, dispensing with sawhorses, holding the "stick" with one hand and making the cut with the other. Cut lines and layout marks were approximate and indicated with fat pencil leads. Layout was +- 1/4 in. and the stuff we built easily lost another 1/4 in. It was all "close enough," or " you can't see it from my house." We'd use 3,4,5 triangulation on decks, but walls would just be squared up with the sheathing. We mostly used trusses for roof framing, but when actual rafters needed to be cut, nobody on the site could do it. A friend of the boss would show up and make a template for our crew. All other roof work was figured out with strings and levels. From that distorted perspective, I had a low impression of the homebuilding trades. Given the pace and the standards, I took it to be a place where knowledge and safety considerations were a professional liability. Lots of fingers were missing.

Later, on the East Coast, I discovered there were still some craftsmen homebuilders, and that there was indeed such a thing as "builder literacy." Meeting real craft builders solved the mystery for me. I grew up in an excellent 1895 home my dad saved from demolition by having it moved a mile up the street. I knew the guys I had previously worked with weren't capable of the quality and precision I had experienced in that old home. I spent lots of time in the company of good construction and I often wondered what the guys were like who did the work. Who figured out how to frame up that complex roof? What tools were used to carve that mantle? Who turned those balusters, each one a little different? Would I get along with men like that? Would I want to be like them?

I still wasn't sure about that yet, but I was very challenged, which was enough at the time. For those guys, builder literacy had much to do with tools and technique. It turned out the framing square is a tool capable of providing answers to numerous complex geometric problems, from compound roof framing to spiral and elliptical stairs. How would you layout and cut a hip rafter for an octagon? The answer is on the framing square. They cared about keeping tools clean and sharp. They had stones for chisels and plane blades, and special files for the handsaws. Their toolboxes were often examples of their best work.

Certain tasks were exemplars of skills. Stair construction was such a task, as was building up door jambs and sills from raw stock, setting hinges, hanging the door, and installing hardware. There were lots of hand tools required for these tasks. Proficiency and efficiency required an efficient process and a facile ability with basic tools. It was also expected that good builders understood how to keep water away from the structure by using various overlapping wood strategies, metal flashing, and tar paper. Wood was very often used for the framing, siding, trim, flashing, and roof shingles. That was the case in the home I grew up in. I replaced the roof around 1990. The original wood shingle roof had lasted 95 years. Most of the original wood shingle siding is still on the house today.

How many carpenters and builders today have the knowledge and skills that were standard expectations of the trades before 1950? Who still knows how to use the framing square? How many carpenters can still hang a door from raw stock and door slab? The answer is pretty obvious: very few tradespeople know about those those skills and that knowledge because they don't need it and there's no training system to provide them with the historic skills of their trade. Therefore people just learn what they know from the people on the building sites from people who learned what they know from people on the building sites. With less and less tradespeople fortunate enough to come into contact with people who have good information and good skills, the generation-to-generation chain of trades knowledge has more broken links than connected ones. The connection to the past is nearly gone.

Since the fuel crises of the 1970's, there has been a scattered but deliberate development of the building knowledge and skills we will need for the future of homebuilding. It got started in the early 1970's and gathered momentum during the second energy crises and into the early 1980's. Builders lost their focus again when the federal tax breaks and subsidies went away and fuel became cheap again in the mid-1980's. By the 1990's and into the 2000's, the building community had mostly become stupid, with no knowledge of the past or the future. The growth in housing starts far outpaced the ability of skilled workers to keep up with the production, which meant that unskilled workers had to be pressed into service and the builders themselves often weren't builders at all, just project managers.

This, at the same time that consumers wanted their homes to be big, and gaudy with amenities.

With consumers willing to buy junk, the building community was more than willing to deliver it. What therefore happened for many years is now our shame and also the source of the current national financial debacle. It is one thing to have paid too much for a bar of gold; quite another to have not only overpaid, but to find out that that what you own is fool's gold, all glitter with little substance.

So here we are. This is the worst slump in housing starts since WWII. Fuel costs are high again. Those with the need, means, and courage to build in these very challenging times are demanding value and high performance. If they wanted less, there's much of that available for less money and hassle. Builders who are going to survive in these times need to perform at a very high level on every basis. Costs are expected to go down, quality has to go up. And quality not only means traditional craftsmanship, it also means high energy performance. In other words, builders now need many of the values, skills and knowledge of the past, along with all the building science progress of the present. Precision and craft in fit and finish still matter, but so does knowledge about moisture management, air quality, pressure balancing and all sorts of issues the master builders didn't have to consider in earlier times.

Builder literacy is now being redefined. All of the sudden, consumers get it. They want the home of the future and they want it now. It has to be affordable, super energy efficient, and still contain certain expected conveniences and amenities. The bad thing about the building recession is that so many people are out of work. The good thing is that the number of homes needing to be built is much more proportionate with the available knowledge and skills. Those who are still in the trades are hitting on all cylinders, learning what they don't know quickly and competing in an arena in which the bar is significantly higher.

In the midst of this, our company is in a good place. We've been very invested, all these years, in traditional building skills through timberframing. Its standards and demands were established many hundreds of years ago. But our company was also formed in the energy crisis years of the 70’s and we have been committed to energy efficiency and the development of better building systems for the past 35+ years. To keep up with these past and future challenges, we've been humbled on both sides. We still chase the temple and cathedral builders of 500 years ago for timberframe quality, and we are well aware that high performance in building construction is not a destination, but a path.

We know what we know and we know what we can do better. That's why we have always seen the need for both on-the-job training and classroom-oriented education. Moreover, we feel that builder training and education needs to be mandatory. Remember, the beginning of all literacy is self-awareness and humility. In his defining work, Walden, Thoreau quotes Confucius as saying:

"To know that we know what we know, and that we do not know what we do not know, that is true knowledge."

Learning only that is the very first requirement in Builder Literacy 101.

A passage I read in Chris Hedges' book, The Empire of Illusion, so stunned me I had to check his references. Sure enough, it appears to be true:

"Nearly a third of the nation's population is illiterate or barely literate--a figure that is growing by more than 2 million every year. A third of high school graduates never read another book for the rest of their lives, and neither do 42 percent of college graduates. In 2007, 80 percent of the families in the United States did not buy or read a book."

In summary, lots of people can't read and lots of people who can read, don't use that ability very fully. I don't believe we can be a great nation while this trend persists. It is surely the harbinger of our undoing. It undermines our ability to compete economically because ignorance is the bane of innovation and efficiency, but furthermore--and perhaps worse--the vast vacuum of individual learning is quickly becoming the black hole into which the legitimacy of our democracy is disappearing. Knowledge feeds real power and is the key to true freedom, while ignorance sucks the life out of both. Watching television is the replacement for literacy, but knowledge doesn't come via packaged messages over the airwaves. Those who can't get their information independently are easy prey to propaganda and lies. They push "truth" into the brains of consumers in the same way they push Viagra and hamburgers. Ultimately, it's actual beliefs, and eventually votes, that have been pressed into the informational vacuums.

One of the tenets of the Pythagorean brotherhood (a following of the mathematician and teacher, Pythagoras, who gave us the mathematical theorem without which we builders would be lost.) was that ignorance itself is not the problem, but ignorance of ignorance was to be considered a grave sin because it describes a personal abyss from which there is no escape route. When you don't know what you don't know, you therefore don't have the self-awareness that would motivate you to learn.

As a kind of religious doctrine, what Pythagoras (circa 500 BC) preached is that ignorance of ignorance becomes its own Catch-22, an avoidable condition that traps its victims in a vicious, dead-end cycle. For him, that trap was the equivalent of hell on Earth, and those in its thrall were to be avoided because they are generally unredeemable. On this point--and on his theorem), I too am a Pythagorean. I call the condition Compound Ignorance (or Ignorance², or just I²) and have made it the number one personal deficiency to ferret out in job interviews. We can coach, teach and train (which we want to do anyway with new associates) but it's pointless when individuals aren't interested in learning anything because they think they already know it. I guess I'm admitting to a particular hiring discrimination, and as far as I can discern, it's still legal: the Compound Ignorant need not apply.

Chris Hedges' writing about the American literacy problem got me to thinking about the literacy rate for those employed in the homebuilding trades. Is it more or less? I don't know the answer, but I do think there's a correlation between low literacy and compound ignorance, and there's plenty of the latter populating the workforce of our industry. The building industry is a pretty good place to hide out if you don't have an education and don't have the means or desire to learn. Most of the building industry trades have no learning requirements in one's past, and no specific learning expectations going forward. If you can physically accomplish the task at hand, that's generally qualification enough.

I suppose my attitude might sound a bit rough. I do understand that those who aren't literate or who are stymied by their own bullheadedness still need to have decent jobs. I also have great sympathy for those who didn't get a decent education, and I don't even mostly blame them. I give the blame primarily to us; to the priorities of our country. We're a democracy, after all, so apparently most of us don't think providing a good education for everyone ought to be a national mandate. How can we justify our low achievement in literacy rates among the industrialized countries? (#19, with Cuba #1 and Russia well ahead of us) All of this upsets me. But I don't think the solution is to dumb down our jobs as a response to our deteriorating educational standards.

And I certainly don't think the homebuilding industry is a good place for those without an education or learning potential. For most people, their home is their biggest financial investment, and for everyone, homes play too significant a role in our lives to allow the quality of this essential product to be diminished and compromised by low-performing workers.

For the past 60 years, the homebuilding industry has gone in the direction of accepting low education and skills in construction, using the excuse that it is a smart strategy for reducing costs. It's not smart. By allowing the uneducated and the compound ignorant to play such a big role in the building of America's homes, we've ultimately paid the price in a half-century legacy of low quality in our housing stock and paralysis in progress and improvement. The entire industry--including all the suppliers, equipment and fixture manufacturers, builders, developers, and designers--have acquiesced in ways large and small to the inevitable drag of ignorance and its demand for stasis.

I have been in discussions with executives and representatives of the manufacturers and suppliers to the homebuilding industry. When confronted with the gap between their own capacity for efficiency and quality improvements, and the final product in which their materials and equipment become a part, they always talk about the inherent inability to bring change or innovation to the homebuilding process. They always point to the fact that is too fragmented and under-skilled to be able to move or shift beyond a snail-like pace. Therefore, the vast majority of American homes have been designed so that mostly unskilled people can build them. Everything in the design and construction of the typical home has been oriented to the idea that innovation and improvements must be avoided because, essentially the problem is, "our guys can't handle new information or change."

Because of this built-in industry resistance to change and improvement, the homebuilding process and product is pretty much just as it was a century ago. We've substituted in some good new materials, more advanced equipment and fixtures, and tons of cozy-comfort amenities, but the underlying home itself is stuck in a time warp. Much of this is attributable to prevalence of low skills and compound ignorance.

If you can find one in this recession, walk up to a home construction site and ask the first worker you see how he knows how to do what he does. The answer will be that he learned it there, on jobs just like the one he is on that day. Ask him (there are precious few women--they are much less prone to I² and just might a part of the solution) if he ever took courses relevant to his trade, or even a seminar. If he's honest, the answer will almost certainly be no because he's not required to do so, and besides, there's almost nowhere to go to get that kind of education and training. And then ask him if he's sure he knows what he's doing. If he's typical, he lacks a lot of things, but not certainty of his knowledge and skills.

In my early carpentry experiences, I worked on job sites with the dumbest, foulest humans I had met up until then. I didn't know so many expletives could be strung together. I didn't know the wide variety of ways the F-bomb could be used in speech. Noun, verb, pronoun, adjective; whatever; it was hard to tell. I didn't know every lunch and break conversation could be x-rated. These guys had nothing to teach and nothing to learn because in their minds there was nothing they didn't already know. I cringe now at what I built with those guys back then.

Later, I was fortunate to work with crews where there were a few shining examples of true building craftsmen, people with real knowledge, deep skills, a love of their work, and a reverence for their trade. Just as ignorance tends to compound itself, knowledge does too (K²). The best craftsmen know what they know but also what they don't know and they spend their lives continually pursuing higher levels of trade excellence.

Having experienced both sides, I developed a conclusion about those in the homebuilding trades: The deeper the ignorance, the more you'll find arrogance, uncivil behavior, and incompetence; the greater the knowledge and experience, the more likely you'll find humility, civility and mastery.

When I founded our company, the primary goal was to create a model for better homebuilding. A key ingredient of that model was to somehow establish a true craft discipline and a learning culture. After more than 35 years of building, my proudest personal accomplishment is my role in helping to engender an atmosphere of learning and ongoing improvement. At this point, I can't take more than a small share of the credit for this. Good people draw in good people; good learning and skills draw in more learning and skills. I may have been a prime fractal for this kind of culture at the beginning, but I feel more like a beneficiary today. Surrounded by great people, good skills and deep discipline, my worries are few and my job is easier.

As we now launch the company renewal and reconfiguration I talked about in a previous blog, one big component is to give a more formal structure to our education and training. We're working on establishing a complete curriculum, with a full complement of courses and training opportunities. While we have always had in-house education and training, we feel it now needs to be ramped up as we ready ourselves for the challenges of trying to set the highest standards for 21st century homebuilding.

I'll say more about that curriculum as it develops. In the meantime, what top ten courses would you include?

News from Haiti is heartbreaking. It brings to stark relief the capricious tragedy meted out to those afflicted by the most persistent and awful pestilence to afflict humanity: poverty. Poverty's fate is extreme vulnerability made worse by invisibility. People who aren't also consumers don't matter enough to receive the benefits and protections our human world otherwise has to offer in the 21st century. The advances of the modern world don't seem so great when the images and stories from Haiti this very morning reveal their vile discrimination.

Most of the deaths in Haiti were senseless. Tens of thousands of lives were lost simply for lack of rebar. Most of the buildings would not have collapsed nearly so completely had the concrete only been reinforced with skinny little bars of steel. For want of rebar! Any first year engineering student could have told you exactly what would happen to those buildings in the event of an earthquake. It's not a guess anymore; there's plenty enough science and deadly hard evidence to know it as a promise.

It is wonderful that the world has responded to the emergency in Haiti with such compassion and urgency. Hundreds of millions of dollars are now being spent by dozens of countries in attempt to bring assistance--albeit late--to those victimized by this awful crisis.

But somebody, somewhere, is surely calculating how infinitesimally less it would have cost us to provide Haitians with free rebar and pictorial instruction pamphlets about how to use them. We could have given them away with the only requirement being the institution of a basic structural building code. In comparison to what we are doing today, this would have been easy and cheap. But their poverty didn't move us to act until the result of it caused their bodies to pile up like cordwood on the streets of Port-au-Prince. Rebar!

All this grim news is a reminder that good quality homes are one of greatest of advancements of our civilization and should never be taken for granted. It's also a reminder that the good quality that matters most is in the building shell and structure, not in its amenities and superficialities. Did you see the photos of the Haitian Presidental Palace before and after the earthquake? It's shining extravagance was clearly about pomp and illusion. Attention to construction detail wasn't much more than skin deep. When veneered quality matters more than substance, someday there will be a price to pay, as the pancaked rubble of the Presidential Palace made so obvious.

I cry today for the Haitians. At the very least, its lessons give me renewed resolve to never compromise building substance for superficialities. The fundamental purpose of home is a secure place to be in a sometimes hostile world. Our core mission as builders is to have the knowledge, skills, and integrity to first provide the fundamental secure structure. On a day sometime in the future, for a reason we can't know with certainty, building well could be the difference between life and death. Ask any Haitian.

Next day update:

Emotion affected my quick entry and I failed to give references for my lack of rebar assertion and its impact on lives lost.

The first came from Joel Aschenbach of the Washington Post who, like me, noticed that the fallen buildings revealed very little evidence of reinforcement in the concrete. This is from a post in his Achenblog, with my highlights:

Obviously the U.S. will send aid and relief workers, but we should do more than that: For a small fraction of what the United States is spending to bail out banks and auto firms we could help Haiti rebuild with reinforced concrete. Because that's what I keep thinking when I look at these awful pictures coming from Haiti: Where's the rebar? It's like the lack of mosquito nets in malarial Africa: Such a simple thing, and it would save so many lives. This is the 21st century -- and yet people around the world are living and working in buildings that are certain to crumble when the earth moves.

When I was doing research on earthquakes a few years ago, a geologist told me: "Earthquakes don't kill people. Buildings kill people." Meaning that these natural disasters aren't purely natural. The planet's crust is shattered by faults, and if you live near one, particularly one that is predicted to break in the near future, you need to live in reinforced structures so that the roof doesn't fall on your head.

David Brooks, writing in the New York Times on January 14, amplified Achenbach's point with a real-world example:

On Oct. 17, 1989, a major earthquake with a magnitude of 7.0 struck the Bay Area in Northern California. Sixty-three people were killed. This week, a major earthquake, also measuring a magnitude of 7.0, struck near Port-au-Prince, Haiti. The Red Cross estimates that between 45,000 and 50,000 people (now closer to 150,000. TB) have died.

This is not a natural disaster story. This is a poverty story. It’s a story about poorly constructed buildings...

Well reinforced buildings don't necessarily survive magnitude 7.0 earthquakes, but they do greatly increase the chances that the building occupants can survive. It's similar to the materials and methods we employ to prevent fire spread in buildings. The purpose is primarily to save lives in the event of fire. The building is a secondary consideration. With that in mind, even a minimal rebar schedule in many cases would have saved scores of lives, even when the buildings themselves might have been demolished.

A CNN reporter mentioned that looters were seen stealing rebar from the rubble because it's so valuable down there. They know about the reasons for it; they just can't afford it.

I've been doing lots of plotting, and not much blogging these past few months. It's been an intense period for our company and for me. Innumerable discussions, many different analyses, a series of company and group meetings and lots of personal dialog, have now led to a redirection and reconfiguration of our organization.

Our motivation for change did not come from intractable problems or economic difficulties. In fact, 2009 was a remarkable year for us. At the end of 2008, we decided to "opt out" of the Great Recession. Our strategy was to extend deeper into our projects and further into the homebuilding market by utilizing our broad capabilities instead of being restricted to our more narrowly defining specialties. Simply put, if there was work to be done, we wanted to do it ourselves if our quality and efficiency would advance the goals of the project. As a result, we not only survived, but thrived in the most difficult economic conditions for builders in at least 70 years.

We also learned something incredibly valuable. What we can do is much bigger, broader and better than what we historically have done. We're much more capable than we previously knew. Ironically, the robust (and often "irrationally exuberant") economy of the past 15 or so years kept us in a more limited definition of ourselves and our skills. It was the challenge of the recession that caused us to discover our deeper abilities.

I'm not suggesting we're exceptional or special in this regard. I assume our situation over the past 18 months has not been different than what millions of people and thousands of companies experienced. Hard times tend to tear away the superficial protective veneers--the cozy routines of habit and history--and enforce the otherwise difficult choice most people have in regards to change. We know from nature that adaptation is synonymous with survival, yet it seems we're still as a species wired to resist--until "change or die" is the well understood option.

Up until then there was no alternative to it: our company resisted change too. But when the time for choice came, it was like choosing between a dark alley with a dead end and a scary bridge with sunny prospects on the other side. We stampeded toward the untested bridge. But it was fear of the alley, not the courage to cross over that took us to the other side.

Now here we are, not even able to remember the reasons for our resistance not so many months ago. Here we are, doing things we didn't know we could do; getting more done in less time, with fewer people; improving quality and reducing cost. It turns out we were already proficient at what is most important in homebuilding: craftsmanship, building science, construction efficiency, communication, leadership, teamwork, and a culture of service. And so here we are, coming off a strong year in a weak economy, realizing we have come through this while still being more organized for our past than our future. It had come time to change that too.

Two quotes accurately bracket our intentions in the reconfiguration. Henry David Thoreau wisely pointed out that, "In the long run men hit only what they aim at." And celebrated 19th century Architect Daniel Burnham suggested that such an aim should be high. "Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men's blood and probably will not themselves be realized."

And so we are specifically reorganized to aggressively refine and perfect our Open-Built approach to design and building, and in doing this, we seek not only our own success, but to also have a significant influence on the way homes are built throughout the country. We aim to make a difference in this world.

Our commitment to our vision now has the full force of a new strategic plan and a reconfigured organization that will keep us on the path of achieving certain audacious objectives. Our competition is the status quo; the barriers are mostly in the accepted equipment, materials, process and technology of the conventional building systems, and the conventional wisdoms that feed its negative constructs and paralyzing paradigms.

We want to further improve, implement and demonstrate a better way to design and build. The traditional methods have run their course. Conventional building systems and processes are now an impediment to giving the American homeowner the quality they deserve in return for their investment. This calculation isn't just about money. In fact, the real issue is that homes don't provide security and comfort on a more visceral, emotional level because usually there's nothing of real quality in the home beyond the superficial amenities and the homeowners' own stuff. In the underlying building shell and structure, the American standard is no more than a miner's shack. By building its antithesis for the same dollars, we intend to make a mockery of this practice and product.

We are sure that homebuilding can and should be executed in a way that can give the consumer the same efficiencies and defect-free outcome as Toyota cars and Maytag appliances. Today's assumption is that homes are so complex and unique that they stand apart from every other type of product where quality is rising and costs are falling. The conventional assumption is that homes are best made with the same attitude and approach that has been used for millenniums. It's perceived to be somehow better because it's so archaic. It's the 21st century. We intend to prove that a high quality home can be constructed on site in less than 20 days, while also improving its beauty, durability, functionality and sustainability. Yesterday's processes need to be displaced, even while the 2000 year-old Vitruvian principles remain.

We reject the notion that those who can't afford to pay more therefore must suffer the fate of also being subjected to the added cost of homes that have the built-in financial burden of poor energy performance. It's a cynical irony that only the wealthy can afford homes that are energy efficient. We intend to innovate systems and develop strategies to give those who need the energy savings the most the opportunity to live in high performance, sustainable, healthy living environments.

Good design and aesthetic delight are essential attributes in quality building. Architects have abandoned residential design because their process is too time consuming and expensive for the average home. We believe we can use technology in both software and hardware to allow architects to apply their training and skills in a way that's affordable and sustainable. The key to homebuilding efficiency and affordability shouldn't be to first have to accept the bland and repetitious. Most of the homes built today are constructed by production builders with mind-numbing repetition; most of the rest are built without the benefit of good architectural designers. The bleak residential landscape is all the evidence one needs that architecture is nearly dead in the homebuilding sector. We can do better and we intend to prove it.

I've been on the same path to improve homebuilding for over 35 years. It's been a stimulating journey, marked equally by exciting achievements and humbling setbacks. In all, we're well prepared for what's next. We know what's possible and we know what we're up against. We know we can do it. It seems somehow appropriate that our renewed commitment and sharpened focus comes at the beginning of a new decade, in these very trying times. It seems like the appropriate moment to push the reboot button. It's the right thing to do when the system is malfunctioning.

So I have something new to blog about. This will be my forum to report about our progress. I promise to tell you about our problems and difficulties as well as our successes. In return, I'm hoping to get your ideas and opinions. What we are attempting will be very far from easy. All the momentum of an entrenched industry--along with the consumer mindset that has learned to accept its fallacies and shortcomings as inherent to the product we call Home--is against us.

If you are willing, please pay attention and weigh in when you get a chance. We could use your help.

Onward!

Reader James commented about my last blog with this:

Yesterday, I mean twenty years ago, I relocated to Colorado and began building "luxury" custom homes. Now don't get me wrong, the work has been good but more and more it seems that during the completion of these projects I get a sick feeling. How many 12,000 sq. ft. "cabins in the woods" do you have to build before our wealthiest clients will learn less is more and bigger isn't better. Hopefully, this recession has not only tightened up peoples wallets but made them think twice about building some trophy home that they only visit two weeks out of the year. I know this sounds a bit self destructive but the last project I finished was hanging doors, trim and building the kitchen cabinets for a small remodel. How satifying is that? It makes me long for the days of buying your Harley Davidson in a basket or spending a couple of hundred on your work truck.

What happened?

It reminded me of one of the big reasons I became a builder. I was one of those who very likely had my life radically improved by the opportunity to live in a good quality living environment. So I responded with this:

The only thing that gives me hope about some of those big, underused trophy homes is that I grew up in one. Our home was built in 1895 for a wealthy goldminer's sister. It's huge. When she passed away, it was turned into a rooming house because the area was in a recession. After that , it became an apartment building. After that, it was to be demolished to make room for a new bank's parking lot. But my father saw the situation and bought it for a dollar and had it moved to a lot on the north side of town. There, 13 rowdy Bensons made a move from a two bedroom tract home to a place where we could all experience space, privacy, security and an atmosphere exalted by quality workmanship. Somehow it all added up to hope and possibility. We were always sure the goldminer had built that place for us.

As a builder, the experience of my growing up has always affected my attitude about building homes that cost too much and make little sense. The original owners are only the patrons, so don't get sidetracked by the things that may bother you about their limited use of the building. Instead, imagine the Bensons of the future who will desperately need a better place to live and who will immediately give that home a higher purpose. What seems frivolous now might well transform lives later. I know it's possible.

I recently spoke at a conference for the New England chapter of the American Society of Home Inspectors (ASHI). My speech was on the second day of the conference and directly followed a lengthy and detailed presentation about inspecting plumbing systems and fixtures. After I spoke, there was a presentation about high efficiency boilers and furnaces. My talk therefore made up a sort of reverse sandwich. I was the bread between layers of meat.

I realized the role I was playing and opened my talk with an apology. I didn't apologize for the less weighty content of my presentation, but rather for the underlying implications of a professional builder making a speaking appearance before an association of home inspectors who were gathered primarily for educational purposes.

You see, ASHI not only requires testing and certification, but also continuing education. The attendees at this conference were getting credits for their continuing education requirements. What I apologized for, therefore, was this: if I was speaking to a gathering of New England builders, it is likely that less than half of them would be licensed in any manner whatsoever and none of them would have been formally getting continuing education credits because none are required.

I hadn't thought about this in advance of the conference, but as I sat through the lecture on plumbing inspection and learned some things I didn't know, I became increasingly uncomfortable and embarrassed. It's absurd that there are more requirements for the qualifications to inspect a house than to build one. In other words, the person who builds your house doesn't necessarily have to know anything, but the person who inspects it long after it's built is required to earn a license and maintain ongoing educational updates.

Houses have always been complex, but the complexity is increasing rapidly. "Building Science" is trying to improve the thermal performance and control moisture migration; structural engineering is attempting to overcome the tragedies of natural events like hurricanes and earthquakes; and mechanical systems have increasing sophistication to increase energy efficiency and improve air quality. But the builders and tradesmen who would supposedly implement all of these advancements have very few places to go to learn about any of this and absolutely no regulatory pressure to do so.

Until the homebuilding industry gets serious about raising the standards of knowledge and skill within the building trades, we can't expect good quality homes to be the American standard. Quality can't arise from a sea of ignorance and poor discipline. In that respect, the current homebuilding downturn is a blessing in disguise. My hope is that the housing recession will force much of the untrained, unskilled and uncommitted work force to find jobs in some other sector where less damage will be done.

I didn't go to the ASHI conference unprepared for the topic about which I apologized. In many ways it was my topic. Here is one of my slides, which speaks for itself.

Here's a random piece of advice. If you ever find yourself attempting to ride a mountain bike over the Alps with people who live there and think pedaling up a never-ending 15% grade is like a walk in the park, prepare to seriously suffer. With very little imagination, you can probably accurately picture me learning this lesson: I'm the guy hunkered over the bicycle in sheer agony, grinding in the lowest gear and only dimly cognizant of the grand and bucolic countryside he’s passing through. A need for survival caused me to develop some creative defensive strategies. It turns out, for instance, that you can slow down your fellow riders by asking them questions that require long, detailed answers. Let them talk and talk, while you focus on breathing...and keeping up. (You can see my view of my fellow riders in this photo)

In this comical way, I was recently doing some “research” about European homebuilding processes. In our biking group of about ten, my fellow riders included three builders, a finish carpenter, and the founder and owner of one of the premier automated CNC equipment manufacturers for the building industry. These guys have become good friends and this wasn’t our first Alps biking tour, so I’ve had some time to learn something about their philosophy and approach to the building process.

Before I say more and let it sound as if I think the Europeans are inherently better builders than we are, you should know they cheat. They sell their homes to people who care more about the underlying building structure and thermal efficiency than they do about superficial amenities. Obviously, this isn’t fair. Anyone could do good work in that environment. It is much more challenging to try to build high quality buildings in a society that tends to consistently choose short term indulgence over long term performance.

In both Europe and America, the characteristics of what is being built are a reflection of what homebuyers count as important, for good and ill, respectively. In both cases, you can equally applaud and blame both the builders and the consumer society in which they work for the outcome in their built environment. U.S. builders can and should do much better, but we do have certain cultural disadvantages. However, I’m not complaining because I think these are exciting times. Attitudes and priorities are starting to change here and we have a golden opportunity to be at the forefront of setting new standards for American homebuilding. What should those standards be? Listening to European builders talk on a long bike ride might be as good an approach as any to finding an answer.

Riding through the pristine forests of the German and Austrian Alps was a perfect context for our conversations about building as it invigorated our mutual enthusiasm for the natural benefits of wood. Wood was also our common language. As I listened to these guys talk and learned about recent changes in their building practices, I realized their dedication to wood has a somewhat different orientation than mine. For all its terrific attributes, I am prone to use wood judiciously, even sparingly. It's a precious resource, after all. Appreciating the same attributes in wood, they are motivated to use it in abundance. The more wood, the better. As the European fixation on green and energy-efficient building deepens, the use of wood as the primary construction medium grows.

Despite what you might think about Europe, their forests are healthy and extremely productive. Along with Scandinavia, they are the best managed forests in the world. The forests are preserved for their beauty, for recreation (our bike paths snaked through heavily forested lands), but also for the important resource. According to one of my comrades, their forests add twice as much fiber in annual growth as is harvested for use. "We should use more," said Hans Möst, whose company was close to where we were riding that day. "It's here, it's natural, and requires very little energy to get it from the forest to the new house."

As if on cue, we were soon riding through an area that was designated as wilderness. The forest seemed to thicken and the hiking/biking path narrowed, yet there was logging activity. We could see evidence of selective cutting because there were fresh piles of logs at the edge of our path every few kilometers. It was a beautiful "wilderness" area, but there was no apology for the fact that it was a managed forest that could be preserved and productive simultaneously. It's a different perspective, from a different history and ecological narrative, and given all that, it made sense to me. I'd also like to have access to those amazing logs.

Listening to these guys talk, I realized that they view wood building as the way forward, not just because it is natural and abundant, but because it is perfectly suited to high-tech building processes and to supporting modern lifestyles. As it is easily machined, it can be effectively utilized for a variety of structural situations and finishes. The Europeans are masters at laminating and engineering wood in a variety of ways to reduce waste and enhance its visual and structural characteristics. So this is another way in which they cheat. Anyone could make great buildings with those materials!

Karl Schafferer's company is in Austria, not far from Innsbruck. His website touts wood as the ultimate "high-tech building material" and everything about his company exudes a forward-looking modern enterprise. His buildings are often extremely contemporary. They are clean and simple, but are also sophisticated studies in the composition of wood and glass. Karl said his "high tech" promotion comes from all the facets of building with wood. Using modern machinery, it easily made into improved products, which are in turn easily machined with modern machinery into a variety of building components. In the completed construction, wood is durable, beautiful and is the best basis for comfortable, energy-efficient buildings. Wood isn't toxic and takes finishes well. When the building needs to be changed, wood is easily demounted and can be easily reused or recycled. Given Karl's unabashed evangelism for wood, I was surprised Karl wasn't riding a wooden bicycle. It's probably in the works.

With their abundant forest resources, their automated machinery, and their attitude about the role of wood in green building, it should have been no surprise to find out what these guys are up to now. If more wood is better, why not ALL wood? Indeed! They are making buildings that are almost nothing but wood. Solid wood floors; monolithic planks a foot thick or more. Solid wood walls and roof structures. Even the interior partitions are often solid and continuous planks of wood. Karl's company and that of another companion on the ride, Uli Hermann are both doing a lot of their building using this system. Karl's company is currently working triple shifts to fabricate and ship precut solid wood elements to the Abruzzo region in Italy to help build homes for those displaced by the April's earthquake. (If only we had responded like that for New Orleans!)

In some ways these new solid wood homes are a throwback to older forms of wooden building, but this isn't your great grandfather's log building. All the wood is dried and machined to improve its stability, moisture diffusion and even sound deadening characteristics. Every aspect of the building components and the buildings are highly engineered and automated. There may be a lot of material used, but most of the labor is either at a computer keyboard for manufacturing and shaping, or in the actual on-site assembly.

Solid Wall and ceiling: note the thickness

Wall section after machining, including routs for wiring and boxes

If this doesn't seem practical, take into consideration the European attitude about building. They tend to look forward as far as they can look back, and that is a very long ways, to be sure. When you are planning a building in terms of centuries, lots of things that would otherwise seem overdone or wasteful, make sense in that context. While the volume of wood is high, they are wasting nearly nothing by using low grade wood for the inner cores of the elements. They've essentially turned pulpwood into core-wood, which seems like a pretty good upgrade, given the comparative lives of paper and homes.

When I later visited Hans Möst's company, he showed me another method that is also all-wood construction. When they build Passive House homes, they use a wall system comprised of an inner and outer wood structure filled with wood fiber. That's right...wood fiber. It's a product that can come as loose fill, or dense-packed as a board product to be applied outside walls or roof systems for additional insulation in the same way that we typically use foam insulation products here. Of course, this product isn't available in the U.S. so we have a disadvantage here as well. I tell you, these guys cheat!

Wall thickness is about 18 in.; Wood is used for both structure and insulation.


Laminated structural wood has a built-in wood fiber thermal break. It also comes in 40 ft. lengths.


It is typical for even small builders to have nice shops and automated equipment. The joinery machine in this photo came from Hans Hundegger's company. He was also on the bike ride, but of course he cheats by living at the base of the Alps and riding up those mountains on a regular basis. Not fair!

I’ve been traveling in Germany and Austria this past week. I’m on one of my regular “study” trips overseas trying to get a view of the future of American homebuilding. When we come to our senses--and I have undying optimism that we will—we’ll finally have the humility to learn something from the societies and people who set better standards for housing quality. In homebuilding, America is perhaps ten years behind many other countries in process sophistication, and a complete paradigm shift behind in product quality. I’m here to see where we’ll eventually be when we wake up and catch up.

Here in the towns and villages at the base of the Alps, buildings aren’t even remarkably old at 300 years because there are so many remaining that are 400 and 500 years old, still standing erect and beautiful and in continuing use for shops, restaurants and residences. The European builders’ advantage comes from this tradition, this long history of building craft development. The bar was set very high, a very long time ago. In this setting, it would be seen as a bad investment for both the individual and the country to build to a lower standard today than they did yesterday.

In this part of the world, “green building” isn’t a marketing gambit; it’s the only way to build; it’s the ante into the game. As in the U.S., competition among builders can be fierce, but here it begins with a commitment to build durable, energy-efficient homes using sustainable materials and practices. Here, you don’t have to teach people that we live in a finite world anymore than you would have tell them that homes should be built to keep out the wind, rain and cold. Consumers demand homebuilding to be just as much about husbanding resources as it is about the fundamentals of shelter. Builders compete on how well they make buildings in the right way; then price.

In this part of the world, the quality emphasis in homebuilding is about the core building (structure, insulation, siding and roofing), not the amenities, appliances, and superficial finishes. Good quality isn’t free and people are willing to spend what is necessary to get quality where it matters. It is common for the core building to consume more than 50% of the total building budget, where the standard American home often is built on a budget that allocated only 20-25% for the same core structure and insulation. In effect, we have decided that what matters most is the stuff that lasts the least long. We pour most of the budget into the shorter term aspects of the building, like fixtures, appliances and surface finishes. Much of it won’t even last the length of the mortgage. But here in Europe, a new home is often spare, as the owners typically choose to get a good building over fine finishes, knowing they can eventually get the things they want. Priorities and patience are cultural keys to better building.

In this part of the world, “know how” in building means education, training, apprenticeship, discipline and certification. One gains the right to be a builder the old fashioned way: you earn it through education and training that often lasts more than ten years. People here choose the path of the building trades because there is pride in a profession that is committed to making a positive and long-lasting contribution to society. The opposite is true too. I have found it depressing to see homebuilding crews in America populated by workers who don’t know and don’t care and weren’t hired for their skills and attitude, but for their wage scale. This is the basis for the compound stupidity of American homebuilding: start with cheap materials, then use low-skilled and wholly untrained labor to shape them into a building. With that formula, we get what we deserve. The European standard, on the other hand, comes from a cycle of quality that expects the best from well-trained workers who are given great tools and entrusted with the very best of building materials. Funny how simple it is!

In this part of the world, technology and homebuilding aren’t mutually exclusive terms. As one builder said to me yesterday, “we no longer build like the holy Joseph, but he would be proud of what we do.” Craftsmanship doesn’t require regression and isn’t defined by a slow pace. Good builders have always been able to look both backward and forward, knowing what to take, what to leave behind, and continually finding ways to improve. Tradition demands excellence, not the exclusion of technology. Here is where I come to find software, advanced machinery, clever tools and better fasteners. We are grabbing whatever we can to make better buildings, built more efficiently. We have learned that technology stretches, rather than diminishes the skills of the tradespeople. In addition to all the traditional skills the European craftspeople are required to learn, they are required to become facile with computers, automated machinery, and a barrage of newly developed materials. It’s the way of the contemporary building crafts and leads to better, more sustainable jobs.

As a result of our company’s connection to Europe (including my many treks over here), our software comes from Switzerland, our two large CNC machines are German, and our processes would be far more familiar to a European builder than our colleagues in America. Over the last twenty years, we have also been able to hire numerous young interns and apprentices from the trade schools and training programs in Germany, Switzerland and France. As a part of their education, they are able to stay with us for up to a year, almost always resulting in a mutually beneficial exchange.

The criticism of European homebuilding is that it's more expensive, resulting in less homeownership. It’s true. But given the incredible difference in quality, it’s quite impressive that the cost difference isn’t greater. And given how poorly built and disposable the average American home often is, one has to wonder if giving people the opportunity to own such poorly built structures is in their best interest--or ours. From my current perspective sitting on a plaza outside a 600 year old cathedral, having dinner at a restaurant housed in a magnificent 400 year old building that also has 15 occupied apartments in the upper floors, it just seems wrong.

But I see a better future coming.

My last posts about building in a recession (#2 and #3) probably sounded a little extreme, but I really believe there’s a similar model that ought to be available to anyone. We need to give primacy to what truly matters in homebuilding and also find a way to give people an opportunity to get what they want and need in a way that suits their abilities and financial constraints. One of the problems our country needs to overcome is the prevalence of low-quality, poorly-performing homes that are also the biggest investment in the lives of most of our fellow citizens.

But first, why do people submit to living in junk?

It has probably always been so, but it’s still somewhat depressing that otherwise smart people can act so stupidly. Bernie Madoff’s victims were eager to believe that one genius guy had figured out how to continuously make money at a constantly generous rate, when all other investment possibilities fluctuate rather erratically. Hundreds of thousands of adult Americans were duped into buying homes they could not possibly afford, apparently happily jumping to the conclusion that it was their good fortune that the rules they learned in 4th grade math were no longer applicable in their personal case. Snake oil, in all its forms, sells well.

Cheery bunkum finds quicker believers than hard truths.

The people who build most of America’s homes are no different. Part of me has wanted to think they are devious characters, but I’ve come to the conclusion that most of them have made a similar leap of blind hope. When the framing lumber is dropped off on the building sites, they have convinced themselves that underpaid and under-skilled people will still work with enough motivation and care to make a decent building. They are sure that stick framing is so easy nothing serious could go wrong and if there are oversights or mistakes, the structures are probably over-engineered anyway. They have further convinced themselves that they are doing the right thing because low cost is the critical factor, not good quality.

Besides, America’s homebuilders have come to understand that consumers really only care about appearances and amenities. It’s cheaper to be fooled than to require authenticity and substance. Nobody wants to pay for mundane elements like foundations and frames and insulation, which are like the hard truths; boring and inconvenient. What people are willing to pay for is the cheery bunkum. Houses are all too often built to minimum standards under conditions that cause them to be even worse than that; defect-ridden underpinnings clad in faux siding and flimsy roofing, but with complex-looking fake rooflines, containing four-headed showers, plush carpets and cavernous, chandelier-bedecked entries.

In the end, though, the illusion of wealth and comfort can come at a very high price. The Wall Street Journal recently ran a story about serious problems in new homes built during the housing boom. The story, “Cracked Houses: What the Boom Built,” reports that “hundreds of thousands of people from California to Georgia say their almost-new homes need costly repairs because of construction defects. The furious pace of home building from the late 1990s through the first half of the 2000s contributed to a surge in defects, experts say. It caused shortages of both skilled construction workers and quality materials.” In some cases, the cost of repairs is more than the houses would be worth on the market, but it’s often the case that repairs aren’t practical at all because the defects are at the foundation level. One man said the losses related to his defective house were worse than his retirement income losses in the stock market.

In contrast to that story, a few weeks ago I did an informal assessment of an old house in a nearby town that is scheduled for demolition. I was asked to help determine how much of the building might have value as salvage. Often old homes have structural parts that can be used again, so it was a good question and an admirable goal. Due to some unusual circumstances, the house has not been occupied for 30 years. It is very weathered and is almost devoid of mechanical systems, as it doesn’t even have indoor plumbing. The new owner assumed its long abandonment condemned it, but I found that not to be the case. It is actually in great structural condition. Although it was built in the post Civil War years (1860-1870) and had been completely unoccupied for three decades, the original building is strong, straight and true. The roof didn’t leak; the foundation didn’t yield and the critter damage was minimal. So, one hundred and fifty years ago, they could build so well that a house could survive over 120 years of use, then fall into complete abandonment for another 30 years and still be structurally sound and secure; yet today, houses are being built and sold that are challenged to survive even their first 30 years.

These contemporary standard houses aren’t very different than a Bernie Madoff scam. In both cases, what appears to be a reasonable investment is actually missing the very essence of what it is supposed to be. A financial investment is supposed to be invested in something; a house is supposed to be a structure, not a teetering theater set.

When will we stop falling for cheery bunkum? Perhaps never, but at least for awhile, I think people will be more attuned to search for real value in their investments, whether in the markets, or in real estate, or in anything for that matter.

This, then, is a good time to promote what I think is the right way to build, whether in a recession or a boom. It begins with rethinking our image of what a house is and how homebuilding should therefore unfold.

As described by Stewart Brand in How Buildings Learn, a house appears to be one thing, but it is better understood as layers of elements that live in time differently. The right way to design and build is to acknowledge the different cycle times, allowing the building to be more easily upgraded and changed to meet its maintenance challenges and adjust to the needs and desires of its inhabitants. Stewart called the layers the "Six S's"

Seen this unique way, only the site itself is ultimately permanent, but the man-made structure which is attached to that piece of the earth ought to be proportionately durable. Therefore, the underlying building structure should be built to last centuries. Protecting the structure is the exterior skin of roofing and siding. This also should last a long time, but it’s likely to need maintenance or alteration every 50-75 years. The interior functioning of the building is defined by the space plan, which is the organization and partitioning that delineate and separate the public and private living areas. The specific plan and rooms are really just a prediction about what will work best and who will live there. Properly built, the space plan should be more mutable and flexible, allowing the occupants to adjust the original prediction more easily as the ever-changing dynamics of their lives suggest and require. Think of this as a 10-20 year cycle. Services are the various (and increasing) mechanical systems that deal with everything from low voltage entertainment systems to heating and cooling equipment. Some of this stuff is almost as permanent as the structure, but most of it should be designed to be upgraded and changed, allowing for new technology and shifting needs. Service systems should be considered to have a 1-15 year life cycle. Finally, there is the stuff of our lives: furniture, equipment, art, books, etc.; all the various baggage of our complex lives. Stuff churns daily, monthly and only occasionally sticks around for as long as the space plan.

Brand’s numbers and organization are a little different, but the concept holds. What we have concluded as we have embraced the truth of it is that long term elements and short term elements should not be entangled. Wires and pipes shouldn’t cut and worm their way through the structure. They should have their own space, which doesn’t affect the structure and gives access for inevitable changes. Similarly, the interior space plan shouldn’t also have long term requirements because it more likely needs to change in time. This kind of thinking has led to what we call “Open-Built,” which is a complete system of design and building, intended to give predominance to a high performance building shell, with interior systems and finishes and exterior cladding that can be installed or uninstalled as needed, as the life of the building plays out from its original construction through all its future mysteries and adventures.

We have based our business model on this concept. How does it relate to building in a recession? This method of building is perfect for owner-builders who hire us to design and build on their behalf. What we actually do in many cases is simply build the high performance building shell, giving our customers themselves the opportunity to manage or execute the exterior and interior finishes and mechanical systems. It also allows buildings to be finished incrementally, as owners can afford it. This is exactly what I did on my own house as described in How to Build in a Recession #3. I think everyone should have the option of building and financing slowly, if they so desire. It’s the best way to get what you need and want, paycheck by paycheck, rather than with the expense of a multi-decade mortgage. It also puts first things first and leads to the high quality buildings which are the ultimate blue-chip investment.

My blog droughts have been long, but I have something to show for it. When October 2008 happened, our near future looked extremely bleak. I stood up in an anxious company meeting to tell our associates that we would do everything and anything necessary in order to “opt out” of the impending recession. I meant it. Our team responded with an astounding effort…and for now, we have done it.

About seven months later, I can say with certainty that we have successfully fought off some of the worst effects of the bad economy. Last week, we even had a modest (honorarium level) mid-year profit sharing. Recognizing that in the business of homebuilding, big losses are the norm, Chapter 11’s are common, and thousands of homebuilders have simply gone out of business, we had a happy celebration over the good fortune from our efforts.

How have we accomplished this? “The old fashioned way” is an essential part of the answer. There has been an extraordinary hard work effort throughout the company for months on end, but there are other reasons too. We also responded with one of the most creative and innovative periods in our company history (36+ years). We turned ourselves around quickly; in months, not years, we have simply become much better at what we do.

We have long been adherents of Lean Production principles and strategies. Most of our associates have taken a course on the subject and in the past several years we have also held several Lean educational forums at our facility. Like many things, though, the ultimate success of Lean requires both knowledge and motivation. What we learned recently is that while we’ve had the knowledge, the critical level of motivation had to be thrust upon us by outside forces.

Waste has always been the enemy, but seeing its many facets with clarity sometimes requires a different perspective. A deep homebuilding recession cleared the scales from our collective eyes. There are now many fewer elements of redundancy, inefficiency or waste in our process and products than there were even a few months ago. We have done little things like reduced the steps taken to get a tool and the number of times a piece or element is handled, but we have also done big things, such as eliminating unnecessary construction documents and automating layout.

Sometimes it is necessary to literally invent ways to circumvent waste because it’s so embedded in how things have always been done. In homebuilding, wasteful systems and processes are the norm, not the exception. So we have been creating and inventing in software innovations, new tools, better work stations, and improved building system details. Only the quality goal at the end is unmovable; all else between the starting point and the end point has been fodder for improvement, upgrading and reinvention--whatever it takes.

As a result of intense company-wide efforts, we are already accomplishing highest quality work, with significantly increased cycle times. Better work; less time. It turns out that even in extremely difficult times for the homebuilding industry, a formula that offers the possibility that quality, time and cost can all be optimized simultaneously will draw potential clients like bees to honey. It’s not as if we didn’t know that before last October, but we had to be jerked out of our comfort zone to get there as quickly as we have in the last few months.

What is the definition of quality? This has long remained the same for us: finely crafted, high performance buildings with the features and amenities our clients need and want. We are building homes that range from the low $200K range up to several million. Each client gives us a unique quality goal that becomes its own “no plan B” target. We customize ourselves to fit them. We are also aware that people are looking for a life improvement that goes well beyond the physical aspects of a building. In all that we do, we aspire to improve the quality of lives, which is the ultimate reason new homes are built.

What is the definition of faster time? Through prefabrication and parallel processing, we can cut typical on-site construction times by two-thirds or more. Our off-site fabrication methods are the most creative and innovative in our industry. Our Open-Built systems allow us to take a unique approach in the fabrication of building elements that includes everything from rough framing to fine finishes, without submitting to the dull architectural constraints of modular boxes.

What is the definition of cost control? Our immediate intention is to meet or beat the cost of typical on-site construction. While we eventually hope to achieve costs that we expect to be much lower eventually, for now higher quality and much faster delivery are the primary goals.

As a result of these accomplishments, we now have the same backlog we’ve had in banner years in the boom economy. It would be foolish to say that we have become immune to the travails of this hard recession (actually a Depression in homebuilding), but our team is rightly proud of having “opted out” of the recession (at least for now), exactly as planned!

Next time: back to "How to build in a Recession"

Through human history, most people would have been unsurprised by the story of how I built our original cabin as related in my previous posting. Building a place to live without money, using one’s own labor and locally available materials was normal and common for several thousand years. It’s still true in many parts of the world. I’m not suggesting that we’d want to go back to the old, more difficult ways, but submitting to complete dependency on others and to a culture of endless, daunting indebtedness should also be considered situations to avoid, not accept.

Construction professionals are fond of saying that time, quality and money are the three factors in play that affect a building project’s outcome, and you have to choose among them because you can’t optimize all three. The supposition is that if high quality is the priority, it will require more time and money; if time is the priority, then quality and cost control will suffer; if saving money is the priority, then quality and time will be compromised. The reverse is true too. If the project is given a large budget, quality can be enhanced, but the time to achieve that quality may need to be increased too.

But the big consideration I want to point out is this: given enough time, it becomes increasingly possible to accomplish both high quality and decreased cost. As people are forced to complete every detail in their construction in an arbitrarily finite amount of time, they are forced into higher costs or quality compromises. The loss of the freedom to build incrementally, usually forced in the terms of the construction loan (or the personal desire for immediate gratification) is causing new homes to become simultaneously worse and more expensive.

Patience and perseverance are tools that can be employed by anyone to help make big dreams achievable and affordable. When building codes and lending agencies take those tools away from us, we should be fighting back, just as we would about any other personal freedom in jeopardy.

Were it not for my ability to defer gratification and finish my own home slowly, I would have had to choose between continuing with my still-fledgling business and properly housing my family. Here, then, is another way to build when personal or national recessions crimp the normal processes.

Big Need, A little Money
(Where we embrace a work always in progress)

We hadn’t intended to stay in the cabin so long. It was rustic but comfortable; small but debt-free. At 500 square feet, it was fine for two people and tolerable for a family of three (our first daughter, Emily). But when we knew our second child was coming (our second daughter, Corona), we knew we needed a bigger home.

By then (1979) our business kept us plenty busy, even if it was only occasionally profitable. I had an income and some savings, but I wouldn’t have met the requirements to borrow as much money as would be needed to build a new (and complete) home. So I did what had to be done: racing against a growing womb, I decided to ignore the barriers and made plans to build immediately.

Banks were typically friendly institutions back then. Local bankers were often trusted financial advisors as well as lenders. I know; it seems far-fetched, but it’s true. Anyway, the first thing I did was to make an appointment with my banker to find out how much I could borrow and how much information about the new home I would need to bring in to them to get a construction loan. On that visit, I had no plans or drawings with me because the drawings I had were still rough, and I really just wanted to understand my financial realities and the loan process. Despite having nothing on paper to show the bank officer, I left the bank after a short and casual meeting with loan commitment, which came in the form of a handshake. It wasn’t enough to build the house, but it was all I felt comfortable borrowing. I was determined to stretch it as far as possible and get my family into a larger home. With my personal savings and the bank loan, I had about $36K.

Unlike the cabin, I couldn’t do all the work myself. I had a business to run. Much of the work would have to be contracted. I would have real costs that were going to eat through most of the money. Therefore, we had to start subtracting from the big dream and distill it down to the essence. Our plan was a 30 ft. x 36 ft. story and a half cape, with primary living on the first level, three bedrooms and a bath on the second level and small loft spaces on the third level. We also wanted a south-facing solarium, a screened porch and an entry porch.

But we couldn’t do it all at once. With my sweat equity and the borrowed money, my goal was to build a high quality, energy-efficient enclosure and finish the first floor so that we could move in. The bedrooms, second floor bathroom, third floor lofts, and all the appendages would have to wait. We tried to not compromise the things that affected the long-term performance and durability of the home, while sacrificing and cutting back on things we might be able to change or finish at a later date. When we moved to the new house in1980, with our borrowed and saved money gone, here’s what we had:

• 10 inch, heavily reinforced poured concrete foundation
• Drilled well
• Septic system (real plumbing!)
• 3 in. rigid foam insulation under concrete basement slab
• 2 in. rigid foam insulation inside foundation walls
• Timberframe structure: oak and recycled timbers deemed not good enough for clients, but beautiful to us.
• R28 SIP wall and roof panels
• Fixed windows purchased for $10 each from lumber yard going-out-of-business sale. They were paired and mulled with operable windows, purchased for full price.
• Cedar clapboards
• Asphalt shingle roofing
• Brick chimney
• Plank subfloor on primary level was sanded, finished and used as a finish floor until we could afford hardwood flooring
• Kitchen cabinets: built from butternut trees from our land
• Second and third levels: floors planked, but otherwise empty
• Heating system: central wood stove and the sun

The photo below shows the house we moved into, waiting for the solarium and screened porch. The bedrooms and 2nd floor bath weren’t in yet, but we were moving from 500 sq. ft. to the nearly 1000 sq. ft. on the main level. It was huge step up for us. Though the house wasn’t complete, all the visible surfaces were finished, making “finished, but not complete” our motto for the next years. As we tackled projects, we have always tried to consolidate the construction areas to minimize the disruption of our lives. We tried always to have the house look finished, even though it took years to complete.

The original core building proved to be remarkably energy efficient. When it was finally completed, we had 2400 square feet of living area, kept warm by passive solar and one central woodstove. It also won’t freeze. Through the coldest winter conditions, we can leave the house for days without worrying about pipes freezing. The secret to this building’s performance is the separation of the supporting structure from the insulating skin. With the frame on the interior and protected from the potential compromises associated with being subjected to air infiltration and moisture, its durability is optimized. Likewise, the insulation system is less compromised by structure, allowing it to be intrinsically tighter and more contiguous. This high performance “chassis” was the primary achievement in the original construction. Exterior finishes and interior “fit outs” were accomplished as time and money allowed and some of it changed several times in the following decades, but the core building remains today, even though you may have trouble identifying it in recent photos.

I don’t know my total costs exactly and I certainly don’t know what it would have cost to borrow the full amount when I started the project, so I’m going to make some assumptions about how the theoretical math works out: I’m going to assume the house would have cost about $250K

Lessons of this project, by the (theoretical) numbers:

As built:

Initial construction: $36K; $30K borrowed (assume 8%, though interest rates were higher then); $6K savings
Loan period: 5 yr.; payments approximately $600 per month
Cost of loan after 5 yr.: $36,500
“Paycheck” cash invested over following years to complete: $215K (this is a worst case scenario)
Total of loan and incremental cash investment: $250K

If I had borrowed the full amount:

Full construction: 250K at 8% (again, 1980 rates were higher)
Loan period: 30 yr; payments approximately $1830 per month
Cost of loan after 30 yr.: $660,000

Now you can see what I’m getting to. Banks don’t give money away. The very best way to save money is to borrow less. By “suffering” with our “finished but not complete” home, we theoretically saved $410,000!

No wonder banks are discouraging people from building incrementally!

***
All these many years later, our house has changed again. We recently invested again and made yet more changes to our home.

•

For added living area, we eventually took off the solarium and added a great room.
• Dormers were added to the bedrooms and the second floor bath for added space, light and ventilation.
• The screened porch was removed and became a larger three-season porch.
• An addition to the north side gave us added room in our study and gave space for an additional second floor bath.
• We added to the entry side for a larger laundry, a new porch and a pantry. It also added space to the master bedroom.

Even today, our home is finished but not complete. I’m planning some much-needed bookshelves; we’re talking about adding doors to the study; what about a little separate writing room? Or perhaps we’ll just relax.

One of our important human rights is the right to roll up our sleeves (bare our arms!) and build or remodel our own homes. Banks, insurance companies and building codes are chipping away at that right, but in most of the country there remains enough latitude for people to find a way to get involved, save a bundle of money, and ensure a better, more personalized place to live.

There are lots of ways for people to participate effectively in the construction of their own homes and I happen to have first-hand, hard-won experience with most of them, starting with:

Big Need, No Money
(Where existence is far more important than perfection)

When my wife and I bought our land, it was a deal we couldn’t refuse. The land was a beautiful piece on a remote dirt road without electricity, and therefore was very inexpensive. In addition, it was financed by the owner, which was critical because no responsible bank (This was back in the old days, when banks were careful and actually held the loans they made.) would have looked favorably on our tenuous, mostly broke, financial situation. Even with the low cost, a good interest rate and a lenient lender, making the payments on the land was all we could afford and precluded paying rent elsewhere.

Without good alternatives, we camped on the land and made plans to build. Youthful idealism, ignorance and physical vigor turned out to be a powerful antidote to our lack of money. I didn’t know very much about what was realistic or practical and therefore just dreamed big.

I decided that we not only needed a place to live, but I also needed a woodworking shop and garage to broaden my work possibilities and give me a way to continue working through the long New Hampshire winters. The phased plan thus unfolded this way:

1. Next 2 months: 14’ x 28 ft. barn/cabin for temporary living quarters
2. Next 12 months: 30’ x 70 ft. woodworking shop and garage
3. Next 24 months: Big, fancy house in which to live happily ever after

With little income and no possibility for a bank loan, I got started by doing the tasks I could that had little or no cost associated with them. Of course, I couldn’t do anything without building materials and I also I couldn’t buy them, so the alternative was to salvage materials from derelict buildings and scrounge whatever I could find from other sources.

As I traveled the area, I first mentally inventoried the unused barns, silos and outbuildings and eventually approached the owners of the best ones to see if they might be interested in demolition and removal in exchange for usable materials. I could have done demolition and deconstruction full time. Within a few days and about a dozen inquiries, I had more buildings to take apart than I could accomplish in the time I had. It turns out that New Englanders don’t like wasting things and they don’t like paying taxes, especially on assets they don’t use. Many owners readily accepted my no-cost solution to both problems. I found my construction manna in buildings that leaned, sagged or had holes in the roof. If the situation looked bad, my possibilities were good.

With the help of my brother and a friend, we did the deconstruction work between paying jobs, in the evenings, and on weekends. Before long, we had taken apart several small buildings and were putting up impressive piles of cleaned and sorted timbers and boards. Barn deconstruction is a lot of work, but the materials are often very good and usually have good character. My new buildings would instantly have a historical patina, with the various blemishes and weathering telling part of their story. Each piece was earned with sweat and perseverance and was precious beyond anything I might have purchased with money.

The most labor-efficient salvage came from wooden silos. They are made of vertical 2” x 6” tongue-and-groove staves held together like barrels, with external iron hoops providing compressive pressure to clasp them together to form big cylinders. I discovered I could just topple them by hooking a cable to one of the top hoops and then pulling the cable with my pickup truck. When collapsed, the staves would crumple into a loose heap, mostly free of attachments to each other and the hoops. Within ½ hour, we were piling up good, clean lumber that could be used either for decking or framing. Pulled-out straight, the hoops made good concrete reinforcing bar and cut into short lengths, they could be used like huge nails to hold timbers together.

It wasn’t long before I had enough framing and sheathing lumber to build the cabin and was already well into assembling a kit of materials for the woodworking shop. Since we desperately needed shelter before winter, I needed to focus my attention on the cabin. I paused on the demolition projects in order to find the rest of the materials and deal with a few infrastructure issues, which resulted in more sweat equity and some good scrounges.

• Foundation: piers of dry-laid stone.
• Windows: fixed sash found at dump
• Door: made from barn board and silo staves
• Roof shingles: free pine sawmill slabs cut into 24 in. lengths
• Insulation: factory seconds from Styrofoam manufacturer
• Well: clean and revive old hand dug well on property
• Bathroom: two-holer
• Heat: used woodstove

Without regard for precision, the cabin went up quickly. It was designed around the materials I had and most of the cutting was done with a chain saw since there wasn’t any electrical power on the property at the time. It didn’t make sense to be overly fussy anyway because it was intended to be used for living quarters only temporarily and then converted into a barn.

We moved in with full ownership after spending under $500. I had a full investment of personal labor hours and some debts to the family members and friends who helped, but otherwise we were well-positioned to ride out our personal recession in relative comfort.

As it turned out, we stayed there for 8 years, holding out until the birth of our second daughter forced us to build a larger home. During the time we were there, we upgraded nearly everything and added a bathroom wing. When we left, another couple moved in and stayed even longer and made even more improvements. They also had two daughters during their years there and finally built a beautiful new home down the road.

A few other people lived in the cabin for short periods and then my daughter and her husband lived there up until recently. They improved the heating system, fixed the roof, and built an even better bathroom. My grandson lived there for the first two years of his life.


After 37 years, the “temporary” cabin has become revered and nearly sacred in our family. It is now empty for the first time, but waiting for the next adventure.

Lessons from the cabin about life:

• No home mortgage payments meant I could do what I wanted to do, not what I had to do. The path we chose would not have been possible if we were in debt. My company wouldn’t exist today if I had needed to be profitable in the first 5 years.
• Idealism and apparent ignorance sometimes can be forces for good. Resignation and cynicism are useless.
• In modern lifestyle assumptions, comfort can cost you your life and therefore is way overrated. The comforts of home aren’t comforts if you can’t afford them.
• If you have no work, you can still earn the things you need.
• Friends and family are your strength and hope.

Lessons from the cabin about building:

• Lots of free materials are available, but you have to go get them. There are just as many abandoned buildings now as there were 35 years ago.
• First assemble the kit of parts, and then design the building around what you have.
• On little money, the point is not to finish, but to make continual progress. All improvements are paid for in cash or sweat equity. It’s the rule of low-budget building.
• A decent place to live doesn’t mean a fancy place to live. Good workmanship in this type of dwelling means sturdy first, getting the job done second, and being fussy about the details third. Two out of three is sufficient.

When the cabin was done, I went about building the woodworking shop in exactly the same way. It was a much bigger building, but the challenge of that was somehow exciting more than daunting. We took down a very large barn and also recovered some salvage from a railroad trestle. I was able to trade some of the beautifully weathered barn boards for new boards and went about my scrounging until I had gathered all the materials needed for the building.

• Used windows given by a neighbor when their home was renovated
• Metal roofing salvaged from a covered bridge when it got a new roof
• Pilings salvaged from old telephone poles
• Concrete slab filled with a large quantity of stone to displace concrete volume and reinforced with silo hoops and assorted junk metal.
• Wooden deck: timbers and silo staves
• Structure: barn and bridge timbers
• Insulation: Styrofoam slab seconds
• Labor help: friends and family
• Heat: wood furnace salvaged from an old house; owner had upgraded to an oil furnace

When the building was enclosed, my business moved in. We owned it, having no debt to anyone other than the amount remaining for the land. It was in that building that we developed the ideas and methods to make timberframing a practical way to build again. Without any financial pressures, we could focus on doing things right and getting good results. Making money came later.

Thirty-five years later, the shop is a thriving facility. It grew and expanded several times over the years until we had over 45 people employed in our timberframe operation and overwhelmed that dirt road location. Today, it is once again our woodworking shop and is humming with activity and continues to be the scene of great craftsmanship, remarkable creativity and inspiring energy.

The current recession is nothing compared to my personal recession in those early years.
Now, as then, nearly anything can be accomplished with work and perseverance.

Now, as then, lack of money isn’t necessarily a reason to not to pursue one’s dreams. It may, in fact, become the very reason you can make them real.

Unwarranted and irrational optimism is one our most powerful tools. Hope and striving, despite the steadfast gravitational force calling for resignation and stasis, is the fuel of human progress. The New York Times ran a story the other day, entitled “What Happens to the American Dream in a Recession?” Sure enough; buoyed on warm wafts of denial, hard times only seem to bring our dreams into sharper focus. No matter the depth of economic difficulties, it’s apparent that we cling to the idea that anything is possible for those who are willing to work for it.

Despite half a million job losses a month, despite dismal forecasts for the future, despite so many people having lost most of their savings or worse, the dreams remain. No doubt, every dream is different and all dreams are adjustable, but it is still remarkable under the circumstances. Perhaps it’s how we survive life’s challenges: just rescale the dream in light of the setbacks and move on. How can a paraplegic get motivated to compete in athletics? How can a person in prison for the remainder of his days “love the breath of life?” How does a single mother with four children, who can’t make ends meet with only one job, find it important to “count my blessings?” Whatever the reason, it’s the best of humanity revealed, again and again.

In these hard times, the hopes and dreams of millions of Americans are becoming sparer, more essential, and therefore less trivial. Basic ideals like freedom, equality and peace are championed again, as are basic needs like good food and reliable shelter. It may take this kind of shaking up to remind us of what’s really important and what’s really needed. No doubt, one of those essential things is the critical role that housing plays in the lives of all people. It came up when the NYT/CBS survey asked people what the American Dream means to them.

“Basically, have a roof over your head and put food on the table.”
“Working at a secure job, being able to have a home and live as happily as you can not spending too much money.”
“Owning own home, having civil liberties.”

As some of the gaudy bubble-induced ambitions get pared back, a decent and comfortable place to live always remains an elemental basis for achieving an improvement in the quality of life. Sturdy homes are at the root of civilization. Freedom and democracy mean nothing to people who lack the security of dependable, dignified shelter.

In light of how important home is in the lives of everyone, it’s unfortunate that homeowners have become removed from the homebuilding process. For most of history, people had to know how to make and maintain their homes. Along with hunting, farming and cooking, the essential skills of homebuilding were critical to the process of creating a sustainable lifestyle. In the 20th century, though, Americans unlearned building knowledge and skills and instead, ceded the idea of outsourcing the entire making of their most important physical asset to “professionals.”

Meanwhile, and ironically, the homebuilding industry used the same century to unlearn their integrated skills and also developed a process dependent on outsourcing an ever-growing number of discreet tasks to teams of specialists. The result is that would-be homeowners have put themselves at the mercy of an industry that is itself at the mercy of a fragmentation and disintegration that has made the homebuilding process too hard, too expensive and wholly bad. Homebuilding is a team sport with no coach, no training, no practice; no team. The average jobsite morale, organization, focus and sport proficiency would appall the average Pop Warner Peewee league coach.

This deep recession also reveals numerous opportunities and one of the big ones is for homeowners to take back homebuilding. In reaction to the economy, there has been a tremendous resurgence in backyard gardening and home-cooked meals. Many are doing this because they are forced to, but they also recognize the rare opportunity to save money and improve quality at the same time. The same is possible in homebuilding. Owner-builders can save a lot of money, and also ensure a better product, with much more customization to personal taste and needs.

The need for good quality homes, critical maintenance and important renovations is almost certainly greater than ever, as we’ve seen record low levels of building activity for nearly a year. Of course, there’s a big inventory of relatively inexpensive housing stock on the market, but most of it is junk. So what if the price of a McDonald’s hamburger is on sale for a dollar? It’s still only a McDonald’s hamburger. If you want a really good quality, affordable meal, you’ll have to cook it.

And if you want a high quality home you can afford, you may just have to roll up your sleeves and build it.

I am among those who believe that the current recession, while painful, is a necessary correction, one that will help lead toward a more sustainable culture, a stronger economy, and importantly, more contentment and happiness.

The foundation of the American experiment is dug deep in the hearts of its people. It is built on an indomitable work ethic, uncommon generosity and the collective pursuit of the common good. Its antithesis is indolence, personal indulgence and selfishness. The virtuous cycle of the former is the well-spring of our greatness, while the vicious cycle of the latter is a recipe for any civilization’s imminent ruin.

Our apparent willingness to trade our hard-won values for a quick road to the “high life” can now be recognized as the worst kind of “deal with the devil.” In the classic Faust legend, he was at least attempting to trade for knowledge; our bargain was only for money and stuff but just like Faust, we ended up losing things far more precious than what can be easily summed.

Of course, the temptation of an easier way has probably always lured people away from their core principles. The American character was hewn to shape in the making of a country. Somewhere, deep in our memory, is the passion and tenacity of the people, who created entire civilized communities out of raw wilderness; who cleared fields of stumps and stone; who built houses, barns, churches, meeting halls and whole towns with bare hands and mutual effort. In the process, they did more work in less time than it took slaves to build the Roman Empire. The intrigue of the American story is the nuanced mystery of what it is that brings about the best of humanity.

Still, the devolution of values has always been a constant possibility and real worry of leaders and wise men through the ages. What John Adams wrote to his brother-in-law at the turn of the 19th century would have been a timely warning for the beginning of the 21st century:

"I am no enemy to elegance, but I say no man has a right to think of elegance till he has secured substance; nor then, to seek more of it than he can afford."

Later, in a letter to Thomas Jefferson in 1819, Adams sounded despairing, as if trends had not gone his way.

“Will you tell me how to prevent luxury from becoming effeminacy, intoxication, extravagance and folly?”

In a few short months, we’ve learned a lot about the link between “extravagance and folly.” The happy illusion that the lifestyle and amentities of your choice could be had without effort did, in fact, intoxicate enough people to cripple the economy when the bitter scheme of it unraveled. We therefore have sobering evidence that Adams’ admonition about living within one’s means and “substance before elegance” is the correct mantra for a better way of thinking, acting and living. It’s a more sustainable approach that is available and applicable at all levels, individually and collectively. Taken together, it’s a prescription for a simpler life; for less grasping for more, and more accepting of less.

Wealth, after all, is not a measurement of asset accumulation, but is instead only an irritating, artificial gap between what you have and what you want. This is how some people who have much become poor, and people with very little can become rich. Learning to satisfy one’s needs and desires with less money and effort is the surest and fastest route to real wealth.

There’s nothing new here. Sages and religious leaders have been banging this drum for ages. It’s just an old truth about how to best live that is now hitting us hard once again as we witness the brutal consequences of ignoring those timeless lessons. This time, I believe the correction will stick (at least for a generation or so) because the change is needed and shifting toward frugality and self-reliance actually comes pretty naturally. There is more of Thoreau than Trump in our collective psyche.

Frugality parallels humility in the same way that ostentation parallels conceit and narcissism. The simpler life makes elegance and wealth a choice instead of a purchase. It democratizes “the pursuit of happiness.”

This brings me back to my uncle Clyde, who I wrote about in my last blog. Clyde never made more than $16K/year, but he was never poor and never deprived. (When I was young, I thought he was rich because of the big tips he left at restaurants.) When he retired, the house he could afford was too small, so he became an owner-builder, took courses in plumbing and electrical work and, with the help of a friend from his Chicago church, built an addition to make the home more adequate to his needs. What he built wasn’t fancy or elegant, but it had substance. It had exactly the qualities that mattered to Clyde and his wife. He built it himself.

I think one of the very best things that could come out of this recession is people reconnecting with the process of homebuilding. Actually, it’s the “turnkey” alternative that’s pretty unnatural. Historically, people have usually had a bigger influence on the making of their “nest.” Given the cost and the compromises, it doesn’t always make sense to simply buy a home complete and entire unto itself without personal intervention at some part of the construction or finishing stages. Over the years, we have worked with many owner-builders and those are some of our finest homes and best experiences. Their personal involvement always makes things better, less expensive and much, much more personalized to their needs and desires.

In the coming years, I see a trend where people are going to be rightfully wary of big mortgages on big houses with lots of superficial glitz and little substance at the core. To get it done right, in a way they can afford, I think many more people will be willing to get involved and manage the process directly, build more incrementally, and control the quality completely.

Best reaction to a recession? Opt out; start building!

While this is the longest hiatus I’ve had since initiating this blog about 1 ½ years ago, I have a good excuse:

That’s not me, but this guy did a pretty good imitation of my crash: wheels up, face down, ribs no doubt saying a rude hello to some rocks. If I’d only act my age!

So, finally, onward.

*****
My uncle, Clyde Allison, passed away a few days ago at age 91. In reminiscing about him, I am reminded that one of the most important functions of homes is to be a place of comfort, security and peace for people in their senior years, through retirement and, with luck, until the end. Lost in the frenzy of the housing bubble and burst is the fundamental reality that real estate value isn’t always about dollars, but it is often nevertheless priceless to those who cherish having a place of their own.

Clyde was a fine man whose wealth was in what he gave, not what he got. He was a Presbyterian minister and the founder of “Trick or Treat for UNICEF”, which has raised ten’s of millions of dollars since it was started in 1950. He also had a long tenure at the Emerald Ave. Presbyterian Church, which is in an area of the South Side of Chicago that was notoriously gang-ruled and crime-infested, especially in the racially divisive 1960’s and 1970’s. I still have no idea how he managed as a white minister in those years, but there’s a clue in the story about how he once cleared an area of the main sanctuary for a boxing ring, giving a place for neighborhood hero and former Heavyweight Champion, Ezzard Charles, to give boxing pointers to the kids. Conflicts between the Bible and boxing probably didn’t seem so important under the circumstances.

Clyde retired to Lowell, Indiana with his wife Mary Emma and had lived there about 25 years. For Clyde, his home’s value was measured in the quality of life it offered him, defined on his own terms. It frankly wouldn’t have mattered to him what it was worth “on the market,” so long as it provided some basic comforts and a place for his books, his family, his ambitions and his many memories. He was especially fond of studying about China, where he, my mother and three other siblings grew up in a missionary family. His house worked perfectly: from it, he could explore the world that mattered to him in the way he wanted to, and it was to it that those who loved him came for frequent visits and family events. Because he and my aunt lived there, it was the “family seat.” Their home has been the center of activity for his immediate family, but was otherwise a place for their personal privacy and introspection.

This is what homes are about. This is why I build. While I take pride in the fact that our homes tend to significantly appreciate in monetary value, the most important aspiration of our work is the ultimate value it brings to the lives of people who live there. So many times, our clients come to us with important intentions for their new home, expressed in terms like, “our legacy house,” or “our last home,” or even “the place I only plan to leave in a box.” These jobs are always at the same time flattering and a weighty responsibility. Will our design, engineering and workmanship measure up? It’s hard to get the testimonials that would allow us to know for sure. Occasionally, a few of our homes are actually tested by natural events like high winds or snow loads and we do revel in those success stories, but the critical, more subjective time-tests are elusive tales indeed.

The home my uncle Clyde lived in until his final days isn’t notable or fancy in any way. What has made it their retirement goldmine was the simple fact that it is their home (they have owned it for many years) and that it could adapt to their increasing physical constraints, allowing them to stay in their own home until their last days. This is why homeownership got to be one word, and became permanently tethered to the concept of the “American Dream.” It is the essence of personal independence and freedom. It is all the comfort, self-assurance, dignity and wealth most people dare to seek.

My parents, like Clyde and Mary Emma, lived out their days in their own home. They had no secret bank accounts and no investment portfolio of any sort, but there was no sense of poverty either. They eked out the utility payments and taxes, ate inexpensively and always at home. They literally had nothing but their house, but from their perspective, that fact alone fulfilled their needs and desires and provided them with what they truly wanted year after year. It was essentially their blue-chip stock; it paid continuous dividends right up to the end. My siblings and I still marvel at how fortunate they were—and we were—that they were able to stay in their own home.

The bane of the housing bubble was that while it made some people wealthy, it made homeownership too expensive for many of those on fixed incomes and forced too many others out of their homes as their taxes skyrocketed along with the homes’ apparent value. So, affordability and lower taxes are silver linings of the housing bubble’s burst. People with no fortune but a house of their own in which to live out their days are not typically disappointed that its monetary value is diminished. The difference is hard on those paying mortgages, but a blessing to those who are only paying taxes and hoping, like Clyde and my parents, to stay in their home to the end.

On the broken fortunes of the present economic malaise, a new approach to building and achieving homeownership needs to arise. We know now that many of the other avenues to long term security are potentially ephemeral and undependable. Homes shouldn’t be like that. It is time to restore some of the old paradigms about the real meaning of house and home, while creating new ways and means for people to build something for themselves that will be the literal foundation for the final comfort and security they have worked through their lives to earn.

I will continue to write on this topic in upcoming blogs.