Custom Home Builders Don't Make Them Like They Used To!

You hear it a lot: “They just don’t build ‘em like they used to.” When it comes to custom home builders, it couldn’t be more true. Years ago homes were built by teams of skilled workers who often went to vocational schools, took pride in their work, and had the know-how to truly be called “Masters of their trades.” I have heard people say that things aren’t built like they used to be, and that statement rings true for me, but probably not for the same reason most people might think. There are builders who claim they “still do it the old fashioned way,” probably because most people associate superior quality and craftsmanship with traditional building (or as we say in the business, “Stick Building”). Homebuilding today is quite different than it was even as short as ten years ago.
Skilled Labor

It’s no mystery that things have changed on the labor side. You may have noticed the profusion of day-laborers standing around on the side of the road somewhere near where you live—that is a relatively recent phenomenon for most of the country. Over the past 25 years, the labor pool has shifted from home-grown high school and vocational school graduates to mostly undereducated immigrant labor. Much of today’s labor pool does not have access to vocational schools, so almost all of the learning is done on-the-job (read: while building your house) by people who may or may not have received a formal education of any kind in the United States (with most of the rest of the world dealing in Metric units, it makes you wonder how these folks make the transition to our system). Due to the availability of such cheap labor, construction companies have strayed from the age-old “company crew” model, and now hire more and more disassociated, or “piece” crews to get jobs done. Piece crews are small groups of loosely affiliated workers who are not “employees” (the “IRS Test” aside), but work for other companies and are paid upon completion of certain tasks (or “by the piece”). For example, a plumbing company might hire a piece crew to install plumbing pipe in a new home, paying them after completion of certain tasks; the crew may or may not have the status of “employee,” but either way is only paid upon completion. It’s this completion incentive that is different from the traditional model of pay-for-the-day where worker loyalty (and presumably incentive to perform well) and quality of work was rewarded with pay. Piece crews are incented on one thing only: speed. The low overhead and pay-at-completion model of piece work is advantageous from a cash-flow and low overhead position for business owners, but does not create the same worker loyalty and care the older models did. With the advent of this practice, not only are most of the builders sub-contracting work to smaller companies, but those companies are themselves often farming the work out to third parties, so the workers actually doing the work are twice-removed from the builder (and so is their incentive to do their best work). This is not to say that ALL modular home builders use only piece workers, but most have at least tried it at some point because it is the cheapest way to get work done. The better builders and their subs typically make a “no piece crew” agreement, but it remains a market force, and surely is prevalent with the not-so-reputable builders out there who are motivated only by keeping their costs low and cranking out volume product. So it is very true on the labor front: they don’t build ‘em like they used to.
Advanced Materials

Beyond the methods of employing workers and their skill, something else that has changed is the materials used to build homes. In the building materials world, things have evolved as well. While a stick builder still has dimensional lumber to use, the quality and strength of lumber today is clearly less than what it used to be. If you don’t believe me, just take a trip to one of the national lumber supply retailers (“blue” or “orange”) and examine the Southern Yellow Pine studs that they sell. I know when I have to pick up lumber I usually reject 2-3 boards for each one I take. Why is that? Well, for starters, we have consumed a lot of our old-growth forests, and have taken steps as a nation to control logging to preserve our remaining forests. With the good that it may do for the environment, it creates a challenge for the building industry, as the lumber that’s available, namely the Pine varieties that are harvested and milled into dimensional lumber, are of a faster-growing variety that do not perform as well as the varieties previously used. With lesser quality lumber to work with, the building industry has moved to more and more engineered lumber products. Without getting too in-depth into these products, suffice it to say that the lumber industry has come up with ways of producing (more expensively) engineered lumber products that in many ways outperform the traditional dimensional lumber products of old. Yes, we still use a lot of studs in homes, but much of the major load-bearing structure in today’s homes is built with engineered lumber products and steel. So, while the wood studs used in construction today are of lesser quality than those used by carpenters 50 and 100 years ago, we have compensated with stronger engineered products. Add to that a much more demanding building code, and the resulting homes built today are built to higher structural tolerances than ever before.
New building practices and more stringent building code

But there is the one hitch that may be a potential negative. While the building code standards are higher today, the care that is put into the FINISH of the home and the knowledge of WHY things are done certain ways is less than what was common 50 to 100 years ago. With all the engineered lumber products used in modern homes, today’s residential framer is faced with a mounting need to learn new products and practices. With a labor force that is largely undereducated, the interest and motivation to seek out the necessary continuing education is largely lacking. I once built a home with a seemingly knowledgeable framing crew (definitely not a “piece crew”), but found toward the end of the framing stage that a number of engineered wood posts were left on the garage slab uninstalled. The home was presented to me by the lead framer as “ready for frame-check,” but I knew I hadn’t ordered anything extra in engineered lumber products, so I consulted my plans to compare to what was built. What I found were several key posts that were meant to be built out of the stronger engineered posts had instead been replaced by a bunch of dimensional lumber studs nailed together! When I challenged them, I was told “wood is strong,” but they did not know that the laminated posts they replaced were actually stronger, though smaller dimensionally, than all the studs they had nailed together. It’s a small example of this void in education many tradespeople have today, but a telling one. The upshot of this is that more burden for quality control is placed on the shoulders of the general contractor and his or her supervisors to ensure that things are built per plan and using the best practices, because such “misses” by the labor force are more and more common these days.
Quality control—harder than you may think

To bridge the gap in education, many builders have created Quality Control (QC) checkpoints throughout the construction process to stop and check that things are done correctly before moving on to other phases. These checkpoints are important for a supervisory person to do, as they often check over the work done by a variety of sub-contracted companies, so it’s a systems-check not just a singular phase check. But there’s a scary phenomenon with bigger builders especially: one person is the focal point for quality, the superintendent. Performing QC checks on work that has been accomplished by over four different trade companies is a tedious task, and requires a tremendous amount of discipline. A thorough QC check can take over four hours, and in the dead of winter or the heat of summer, it is not a pleasant thing to do. Having administered a variety of QC programs and educating field supervisors on the importance and reason for them at a medium sized homebuilding company, I can tell you that despite all the education we provided Project Managers, there is a weak-link at the superintendent level. I once took the most respected framing crew our company subcontracted to task after completing a QC check on a home because I found many items on the checklist I challenged them on had never been challenged before. They assured me that they had never heard of some of the things I found to be missing, even though I was using the same QC checklist I had educated the superintendents about. If the supposed “best” framing crew at that company had never been challenged, you can guess how well less respected crews faired. I don’t offer this example to convey that all superintendents don’t do their jobs, but there are many who think QC checklists “cramp their style,” because they require a substantial amount of time to complete them correctly, and many of them feel their “eye” is good enough to assure quality. With a combination of third-party crews building homes who lack the education required to understand the evolving building practices, a strong QC process is critical. That reality requires that builders develop a strong QC program, and that superintendents be steadfast in execution of that program; a seemingly simple solution that is in practice quite difficult for many to execute consistently.
The state of the art

For stick builders, the only viable solution to guarantee quality is to create a multi-tiered QC check system, to make sure every home is

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