Construction Informer

Here’s one that’s a bit challenging. Everybody wants to know what’s going on with remodeling, and in particular what to expect in terms of remodeling business. Well, it isn’t that nobody really knows the answer, it’s that everyone does.

I’ll start with my assessment since…well, it’s my blog. As the new housing market started to slow and go into its nosedive I suggested there may be increased remodeling in the forecast. My crystal ball came from a combination of Census Bureau historical records and logic - fewer people buying homes should mean more people staying in their homes and that could lead to more people remodeling their homes.

The Joint Center for Housing Studies (JCHS) at Harvard University does a lot of slicing and dicing of housing statistics and turns that effort into analysis designed to give us an idea of what the heck is going on when it comes to the humble abodes we all seem to be infatuated with.

In a press release out January 17 the JCHS wrote that "Tighter credit standards and falling consumer confidence are expected to depress remodeling spending through 2008," and that the slowdown would be in the area of a 2.6% decrease through the third quarter of 2008. That’s not a very big drop as a percentage since it is an annualized rate and would put it on par with the 2007 Q1 activity.

On January 24, Systems Paving, an installer of paving stones, issued a press release with the headline - "Remodeling on the Rise," and went on to cite JCHS statistics regarding remodeling. I think that release was using statistics from a JCHS report from August 2007 that was predicting long-term remodeling trends - into 2015.

The National Association of Homebuilders (NAHB) released a chart that was reprinted in Kitchen and Bath Design News with the headline: "Remodeling Activity: Holding its Own in the Face of the Housing Downturn," and it cited as evidence its own Remodeling Market Index (RMI) that shows the perceptions remodelers have about the market for remodeling. An RMI number over 50 means remodelers believe that market conditions are improving. In the third quarter of 2007 the number was 46.2. The last time the index was 50 or more was in the third quarter of 2005 when it was 50.9.

It seems to be though that remodelers have mixed results with accurately predicting their market. The JCHS publishes historical data showing billions of dollars spent on remodeling along with the percent change from the previous quarter. For every quarter in 2006 the NAHB’s RMI was under 50 while the market was growing by double digits in the first three quarters and then by almost seven percent in the final quarter. In 2007 the remodelers were closer to reality since their assessment was below 50 the entire year while actual activity ended up being down a percentage point. 

In the end predictions are guesses, some being better than others, but all still only guesses. If a remodeling downturn is spread equally across all markets that means according to the JCHS remodeling businesses that usually do $100,000 in revenue will be doing $2600 less in 2008 and companies doing $30,000 in gross revenue will be down by $780. I often wonder if predictions come true just because enough people believe them.

The people who lead smart companies will use predictions to help set strategies but won’t let them limit their goals.

Just think of the massive amounts of television screens that are destined for the landfill as we continue to draw toward the close of the analog age. It would be nice if we could use them for building stuff. Well, we are actually on the verge of doing just that!

The technology company Geofusion is opening a factory within a year that will produce facing bricks made of recycled glass. Besides any standard-type of glass the process can also use computer screens and television screens.

Some of the attributes of these bricks are quite startling. They can be produced in a rainbow of color… well, actually, any color you may want. Their texture can be specified and they have the unique ability to have porosity built-in. You may wonder why that would be beneficial. It seems that many of the floods and water shortages of the current age can be traced to urban and commercial developments that disrupt the flow of the water back to the ground. So if the building blocks of those developments were porous then water falling on car parks and building walls could be captured and reused.

Since the bricks, and other things made with the same process like pavers, can be recycled several times the company says they make it possible to create recyclable buildings. There is no extraction necessary so you don’t need huge quarries with their attendant ecological issues, and the manufacturing process uses less energy for firing than traditional bricks. According to Geofusion glass bricks are fired at 650 degrees C for less than seven hours and traditional brick are fired at 1,050 degrees C in a three day process. Robots will do the packing of the glass bricks.

In a recent post I wrote about how the downturn in home building could drive up electricity costs and that trees that would have been made into lumber are instead being chipped up to use as fuel for electrical generation facilities. This is one small part of an on-going debate about the proper way to use and manage our forests and a micro-debate about what wood is considered to be the most "green."

Whenever a company wants to build according to green standards it often looks to the US Green Building Council’s (USBG), Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) as the way to certify what it is doing as being green. It’s basically a points-based system with points being awarded for doing certain things. One of the things that can be done under Credit 7 has to do with choosing to use wood that is certified as coming from a place that encourages environmentally friendly forest management. Who certifies forest management schemes as being environmentally friendly you ask? Well there are several organizations all with varying certification standards. Two of the most prominent are:

• the Forest Stewardship Council, FSC, a non-profit;
• and the Sustainable Forest Initiative, SFI, an newly independent non-profit.

The SFI first appeared in 1994 as a committee of the AF&PA (American Forest and Paper Association) that was charged with a task to create a program that would "visibly improve industrial forest practices and report results."  Out of that evolved the SFI program with principles and guidelines for implementing practices that would achieve the objectives, and later included certification aspects. In 2007 this program became an independent non-profit.

Apparently the US Green Building Council discounts SFI’s and other’s certifications and instead favors the standards and certification scheme of FSC by only crediting FSC-certified wood products for LEED ratings. The president of the SFI recently questioned that, and asked if "FSC wood from Indonesia or a plantation in Brazil was really better positioned to be featured in North American green buildings than SFI-certified wood from Maine, Canada’s boreal or a southern yellow pine forest in Georgia."

The FSC was created in 1993 partly because of "the failure of an intergovernmental process to agree on a global forest compact, and the compelling question-what is sustainable forestry?” It was formed by loggers, foresters, environmentalists and sociologists. For its part FSC doesn’t directly address its monopoly position relevant to LEED but in general ways says its standards are superior since it is the only one that "prohibits the use of genetically modified trees, prevents the conversion of natural forest to plantations and requires a precautionary approach to management of areas with high conservation value."

I suppose there are some good aspects to having multiple creators of standards and multiple certifiers. If the reasons for that are to encourage a wider platform of investigation, and thought, it can be beneficial. But if it’s just to protect some economic interests (and I’m not sure that’s the case here) it seems the effort could be better expended on something else. Massive duplication of effort robs us of energy and resources for other things that need attention.

Back in 1927 Frank Lloyd Wright did some preliminary plans for a filling station to be located in Buffalo, NY at the corner of Michigan Ave. and Cherry Street. For reasons I haven’t been able to uncover the project never went forward. Wright designed it for a Buffalo oil company named Tydol. You can see a rendering of what it might have looked like here.

Or, you can go see it in the near future. Now, 81 years later it’s going to be built. Buffalo has been steadily building up its existing Wright  holdings and adding more that had been designed but never built. The idea is to continue emerging as a hotbed of architectural history using Wright projects, and to attract more architectural tourism. Besides the gas station, a boathouse designed by Wright for the University of Wisconsin is complete; a mausoleum he designed for Darwin D. Martin is complete; and two houses he designed and built for Martin are in different stages of restoration.

The filling station will be built completely enclosed in a steel and glass structure at Carroll Street, Michigan Avenue and Seneca Street. That spot is to be renamed Frank Lloyd Wright Place. Right nearby, and a contributor to and benefactor of the project, is the Buffalo Transportation Pierce Arrow Museum. It houses some very interesting autos like the Pierce-Arrow and Thomas Flyer. 

According to a NY Times article from 2004, the gas station was supposed to be the prototype for 2,500 stations the Tydol company would build nationwide. One of the unique accommodations was a ladies’ room so women wouldn’t have to use the mechanics’ bathroom. The waiting room was on the second floor and featured Wright’s iconic built-in seating.

The changing times did cause the redesign of Wright’s original stairway since it didn’t include enough headroom to meet today’s standards, and an elevator was added to accommodate people in wheelchairs.

Timeless…absolutely timeless.

In case you missed it there are opportunities for you to give your opinion on construction software and make some bucks while doing so. Construction Software Review is offering rewards for people who have used construction software and are willing to fill out a questionnaire about their experiences, likes and dislikes. Contact Brian Eastwood directly for more info, and here is his description of the deal.

We are offering a $100 AMEX gift card as an incentive for each completed form we get back regarding a construction software package. So if someone uses three different packages we will give them $300 in AMEX gift checks if they fill out a form for each product.  Their names can be kept confidential on the site if they wish.