New Year, New Homes
Let 2016 be the year that you finally stop living in somebody else's home and start building that dream home that you always wanted!
There is no better time then this year to get yourself a custom home.
Most people want to start the building of their new home in the spring and why not you have been stuck inside because of winter and would like to have you home ready to live in before the next one arrives. To do this you should be starting the process of the design of your home NOW.
If you wait till later on in the winter closer to spring you run the risk that the architect or designer that you want to draw the home is to busy to complete your drawings before spring arrives.
The sooner that you are able to get the drawings completed the sooner that you are able to bring them to a builder for a quote. Like architects and designers builders become busier with not only quoting but actual work the closer that it gets to the actual spring.
The best way to make sure that you get the service you want from your architect/designer and the most attention from perspective builders is to get them your dream home plans early. The longer they have to help you with them the smoother the build process will be, the smoother the process of the actual construction usually means a saving's for you the homeowner.
So if you really want your new custom dream home ready to live in before next winter you should be STARTING RIGHT NOW!
Rob Abbott
Village Builders Inc.
Showing posts with label building a better home. Show all posts
Showing posts with label building a better home. Show all posts
Tuesday, January 12, 2016
Wednesday, August 26, 2015
Value Engineering Your New Home
Value Engineering: A Short History
General Electric introduced value engineering to its factories during WWII. Supply shortages during the war forced GE to get creative to meet wartime demand. To their delight, replacement alloys for steel often led to better production at a reduced cost.
These value-engineering campaigns were so successful that GE continued this approach after the war in their commercial lines. Other industries followed suit, and value engineering made it into the home construction industry in the early 1970s.
General Electric introduced value engineering to its factories during WWII. Supply shortages during the war forced GE to get creative to meet wartime demand. To their delight, replacement alloys for steel often led to better production at a reduced cost.
These value-engineering campaigns were so successful that GE continued this approach after the war in their commercial lines. Other industries followed suit, and value engineering made it into the home construction industry in the early 1970s.
Value Engineering when dealing with residential home construction is about the same as any other industry.
When you are building a custom home for a client you are going to want to stepback and take a big picture look at the home and what you and the client are attempting to achieve. You want to make sure that the money you spend in one place will pay itself back in the future either through resale or through savings ie: in energy.
For example;
When constructing your new home your home builder will give you the option to adding more insulation into the building envelope. There are all kinds of ways of doing this and they all come with pro's and con's and also with differing price tags. What you and your building need to decide on is how much more do you want to spend on your insulation to save future money on energy use. If you spend the maximum on insulation then you will be saving the maximum amount of money on energy use going into the future. But because you spend a larger portion of money to install all that extra insulation the time that it will take to be paid back to you will be longer. Some options of insulation are so expensive that you will have to look at recouping your loses decades into the future where spending less on the insulation might have a payback of only 5 or 6 years. It all depends on what you are using for energy (gas, propane, electricity) and how you think the overall price of that energy is going to rise and at what rate. If you heat your home with electricity and you believe that the electricity rate is going to climb significantly then you might want to spend a lot more on insulation so that the return is better on your lowered electricity costs.
All of these choices need to be decided on before you build the entire home, adding in the type of heating system, the positioning of the house on the property, the material that is used to build the house and quality that it is all done will all come in to play when value engineering your new home.
Make sure that you hire a general contractor that can do this for you and you will be able to balance the spending of monies and the savings of monies well into the future.
Rob Abbott
Village Builders Inc.
Tuesday, June 3, 2014
Adapt or die changing with modern custom home building
“It’s not the strongest species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the ones most responsive to change.” Charles Darwin
That quote holds a lot of meaning for me in life and in the construction industry as a whole. As a general contractor the easiest thing to do is to do nothing different and keep doing the same thing over and over again because they worked on the last job. The problem with this is that eventually you will be left behind in the antiquated way you do things; by the time your able to educate yourself and catch up you have already been killed by your competition.
In our Company Village Builders we are always investigating new ways to do things, whether they cost more or they save money we always are exploring new and inventive ways to do things.
I had a comment on my blog that claimed that the old way of waterproofing houses before waterproof membranes was good enough for the old houses and thus it should be good enough for today’s modern houses. What he failed to take into consideration is that modern houses have changed so much with limiting the air flow into the home that any moisture penetration into your home will not dry in a normal time and will result overtime in rot, mildew and possibly mold. Old homes used their basements as foundations to hold up the walls of the home and maybe also as root cellars. Modern homes use their basements as livable space and as such need to be protected like the upstairs of your home is protected.
The construction of residential homes has changed more in the last 2 decades then it changed in the previous 5 decades before it. Most of the changes that have happened are in areas of the home that cannot be seen when the house is finished. They are in the foundations, the walls and the attic spaces. Also the heating, plumbing and lighting have been changing at an almost break neck pace compared to the rest of the home.
My clients are asking for more and more new and innovative things in their homes and with every new thing that is installed it has a chain effect on the rest of the home. If you don’t know how it affects the rest of the performance of the home then you will be returning to the home to answer questions and possibly warranty repairs at a later date. You must keep a head of the changing technology and how it affects the rest of the home.
Some new technologies do not work well with others or with older existing technology or trade practices and if you don’t take the time to do the research then you can end up with parts of the home that are compromised.
Adapt or die, the only way to do that in the residential construction industry is to learn, educate yourself and teach your employee’s and sub-trades the better way.
Make sure that when you are looking for a contractor to build your home that they understand modern building methods and how one affects the other.
Rob Abbott
Operations Manager
Village Builders Inc.
That quote holds a lot of meaning for me in life and in the construction industry as a whole. As a general contractor the easiest thing to do is to do nothing different and keep doing the same thing over and over again because they worked on the last job. The problem with this is that eventually you will be left behind in the antiquated way you do things; by the time your able to educate yourself and catch up you have already been killed by your competition.
In our Company Village Builders we are always investigating new ways to do things, whether they cost more or they save money we always are exploring new and inventive ways to do things.
I had a comment on my blog that claimed that the old way of waterproofing houses before waterproof membranes was good enough for the old houses and thus it should be good enough for today’s modern houses. What he failed to take into consideration is that modern houses have changed so much with limiting the air flow into the home that any moisture penetration into your home will not dry in a normal time and will result overtime in rot, mildew and possibly mold. Old homes used their basements as foundations to hold up the walls of the home and maybe also as root cellars. Modern homes use their basements as livable space and as such need to be protected like the upstairs of your home is protected.
The construction of residential homes has changed more in the last 2 decades then it changed in the previous 5 decades before it. Most of the changes that have happened are in areas of the home that cannot be seen when the house is finished. They are in the foundations, the walls and the attic spaces. Also the heating, plumbing and lighting have been changing at an almost break neck pace compared to the rest of the home.
My clients are asking for more and more new and innovative things in their homes and with every new thing that is installed it has a chain effect on the rest of the home. If you don’t know how it affects the rest of the performance of the home then you will be returning to the home to answer questions and possibly warranty repairs at a later date. You must keep a head of the changing technology and how it affects the rest of the home.
Some new technologies do not work well with others or with older existing technology or trade practices and if you don’t take the time to do the research then you can end up with parts of the home that are compromised.
Adapt or die, the only way to do that in the residential construction industry is to learn, educate yourself and teach your employee’s and sub-trades the better way.
Make sure that when you are looking for a contractor to build your home that they understand modern building methods and how one affects the other.
Rob Abbott
Operations Manager
Village Builders Inc.
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