Some Green Building Pros Shrinking From LEED

by: Duane Craig - February 27th, 2009   Filed under: Green, Process

It’s always interesting to see a new survey about green building. Even if you don’t pay attention to who was in the survey, or what the survey was measuring about green building, just the idea that someone bothered to poll some people and find out what they thought about things is pretty cool.

Allen Matkins Leck Gamble Mallory & Natsis LLP, the Constructive Technology Group, Inc., and Green Building Insider completed a green building survey in December 2008 and just released the results after doing telephone followups with respondents during January.

Topping the list of findings was that huge numbers of design pros, contractors, subcontractors, construction and planning managers, consultants and owners agree that it is worth the time and effort to build green. A little more than 93 percent agreed with that statement, although that number is about 3 percent lower than the responses from a survey in 2007.

The surprising thing that came out of the survey was that fewer people thought LEED certification was worth obtaining. In 2007 there were 77.4 percent of respondents saying LEED was worthwhile, while in 2008 that number dropped to 66.4 percent.

The survey authors suggested a few reasons why LEED may have drawn a lower percentage;

  • Difficult financial times may have been making people more sensitive to costs
  • Other certification schemes could be pulling people away from LEED
  • Carbon footprints and greenhouse gases were not included in LEED at the time of the survey
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Old Hands May be Staying Around Longer

by: Duane Craig - February 26th, 2009   Filed under: Managing People

Of course, no sooner did I publish the post yesterday about the coming shortage of construction people and how retiring boomers were one of the reasons for the shortfall, then a report comes out saying 75 percent of boomers don’t believe they will ever be able to fully retire.

Scottrade came up with that number from a survey this year. Although the sampling could be somewhat suspect since it was from a “representative sample of 1,000 Americans 18 years of age or older.”

Still, there has to be some truth to it since many retirement accounts have nosedived and home values have tumbled. It’s going to be up to astute managers to figure out how best to capture and inspire this growing pool of experienced workers. Some of the techniques I’ve read about include:

  • Offering flexible hours
  • Fine tuning job descriptions so they include work the people are interested in doing
  • Offering training on aspects of the business the person is attracted to
  • Encouraging communication so this pool of experience can express and help solve business problems

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Kansas Organizations Take Construction to the Masses

by: Duane Craig - February 25th, 2009   Filed under: Industry

According to most accounts the construction industry is poised to experience some large shortages of people. This is partly because many boomers are going to be retiring, and also partly because the country hasn’t really made a serious effort at attracting young people to the trades.

But there are many organizations that are working on this front. One effort that I read about recently was a construction learning center that has been set up for a couple of years now at the Kansas State Fair. Members of the Associated General Contractors of Kansas, the Kansas Contractors Association, the Kansas Construction Careers Association and the National Association for Women in Construction, put together exhibits and helped 2,000 children participate in activities like building blocks, PVC pipe bridge building, operating remote-controlled front end loaders, and operating a computer simulated grader. Oh, and they had drill guns too. One of my favorites.

The exhibit drew more than 3,000 parents, grandparents, teachers and counselors. On top of that 600 people tried their hands at backhoe golf – dropping three golf balls into a cup within 90 seconds earned them T-shirts.

These kinds of efforts no doubt get some people thinking about construction as a career and that’s where it all begins.

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Prevailing Wage Battles Re-Loaded

by: Duane Craig - February 24th, 2009   Filed under: General News

The current economic crisis, which is nothing more than a cyclical devaluation necessary to keep the currency from bottoming out, is causing states and municipalities to make decisions about prevailing wage legislation.

In Cedar Rapids, IA, a bill that sets a prevailing local wage, benefits and overtime, is waiting for one more vote in order to become law. In Colorado, a bill that would have established a prevailing wage for employees of contractors was defeated in committee. Some voices in Washington state are calling for the repeal of its prevailing wage law.

Prevailing wage largely affects public works projects and is often credited with driving up the costs of those projects. Although it isn’t really clear that’s the case, even when that idea is advanced by an opponent of prevailing wage. Here is how Mark Latimer, president of the Rocky Mountain Chapter of Associated Builders and Contractors explained it:

In some cases, the prevailing wage is lower than the going rate at the fair-market system. These are decent-paying jobs. We believe the prevailing wage artificially inflates [wages] and drives up the cost of construction. It will hurt the economic stimulus and restrict the free market.

So, if prevailing wages in some cases are “lower than the going fair-market system,” and they are “decent-paying jobs,” how are they going to “drive up the cost of construction?” More to the point it just may be that when prevailing wages are in effect contractors can’t make as much on reselling that labor without pricing themselves out of the market.

Since a person’s labor (expressed as time) is largely the only thing most people have available to sell for their livelihood, perhaps contractors should try to find more value somewhere else in the resources under their control. After all, what is often overlooked in the discussion of prevailing wages is that people are going to spend those wages in the community. So if they have a little extra that’s a good thing, isn’t it?

The other point often advanced by prevailing wage opponents is that the free market does a great job of setting wages. But you have to ask, great for whom? It’s probably true that the free market sets a great wage for a person who is buying the labor, but if you ask a lot of the people supplying the labor they might disagree.

Those on the government side, who propose prevailing wages, sometimes see them as a tool to control those who are eligible to bid on projects. As one legislator in IA put it:

Without it, the state would see fly-by-night, out-of-state contractors coming into Iowa underbidding our standard of living.

So, could it be that prevailing wage offers government a chance to minimize due diligence while it qualifies contracts and enforces building codes and contract delivery? Especially in these times of diminishing budgets having a “safe” pool of bidders could save time and money.

It seems that when you get to the bottom of the prevailing wage issue you find it is simply a manipulation of an already over-manipulated economic system, with proponents and opponents squared off over who will benefit and who will lose. This is no different than most other issues that have economic gravity. Perhaps it would be better to establish a scorecard system where one economic interest is served one time, and another is served the next. That way, at least things might stay a bit more balanced.

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Sustainable Lumber At What Cost?

by: Duane Craig - February 23rd, 2009   Filed under: Green

You don’t have to look any further than the current posturing and worldwide legislative initiatives over illegal wood imports to see how good environmental intentions often end up creating un-sustainable practices.

Last year the amendment to the Lacey Act was passed in the U.S. Congress that makes it illegal to sell illegally-harvested wood and wood products within the country’s borders. This change in the law goes into effect in April much to the pleasure of the National Wood Flooring Association (NWFA) a primary proponent of the legislation, as well as a primary benefactor. Less illegal wood products means those who want wood flooring will be paying higher prices since the illegal stuff is sold cheap. This is just an example of using the latest in environmental spin tactics, and it seems everyone is on this band wagon.

The European Union is now struggling with proposed legislation on this issue as some members feel the way the legislation is crafted will make it hard on small European timber harvesters, and it won’t be easily enforceable. Still, from across “the pond,” a Canadian forestry official says the forest products industry in Canada is in favor of the currently proposed legislation partly because cracking down on illegal products, which are cheaper, would open the EU market to Canadian timber.

If the EU legislation makes its own timber producers less competitive so that EU countries start importing more Canadian timber from across the ocean, is that a very sustainable model? And what if, depending upon where the illegally-harvested lumber originates, it is actually a more sustainable option by the time shipping is factored? Do we just substitute one un-sustainable practice for another depending upon who is profiting and how large the profits are?

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Use Tools To Track Insurance Requirements

by: Duane Craig - February 20th, 2009   Filed under: Managing, Process

One of the challenges of our time is to stay out of court. It’s great that we live in a nation of laws, but when people intentionally cause an accident with one of your trucks because they know you probably have a lot of insurance it seems the spirit of the law is being violated.

But less sinister than people throwing themselves in front of your vehicles is the creeping danger of subs with expired liability, worker’s comp or unemployment insurance coverage. These are difficult things to keep track of and many businesses have someone assigned to the task. But there are automated solutions that interface with your accounting system, or are a part of your accounting system that will alert you when your subs’ insurance is expiring.

One example is Sage’s Peachtree accounting software which warns you when you try to pay or enter a transaction for a subcontractor who’s insurance has expired. Turtle Creek Software’s Goldenseal Contractor Software includes a similar feature that allows you to pay, not pay, or pay with a percentage deduction.

Greg Kirk, president of Universal Construction Software The Power Tools in Orlando, FL, developers of PowerTools Software Suite makes a case for construction companies to consider adopting accounting software that is specifically written for construction in order to get the most functionality.

When new clients start using our system they often comment on features like the ability to track insurance expirations. With integrated systems the accounting department can receive warnings on each subcontractor’s insurance, or unsigned change orders, or even that a critical letter such as 24-hour notice was written. Our system issues a warning when invoices are entered and before a check is written.

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Are Prefab Homes Another Solution to the U.S. Decline in Manufacturing?

by: Duane Craig - February 19th, 2009   Filed under: Architecture and Design, Industry

The handwriting may be on the wall spelling the gradual end of inefficient home construction. Inefficiency in home construction begins and ends with the processes that have been used to build homes. Nowhere are those inefficient processes better shown than in site-built homes.

Handicapped right from the start because building operations must face the vagaries of the weather, the process of building on site also means there is a large expenditure of fossil fuels just to get workers and materials to the job site over an extended period of time. Then there is the waste disposal factor where all that waste has to be carted away using even more fossil fuels.

Probably the only reason site-built homes have been constructed for so long is because fossil fuel has been cheap and abundant. There have been alternatives to building on site for many years but in the last two years there have been major strides in taking the “mobile” connotation out of modular and pre-fab.

One case in point is EcoSteel Building Systems‘ approach using prefabricated panels that are assembled on site. The company claims the finished homes can produce their own energy, and have amenities like roof gardens for food production. Joss Hudson, president of EcoSteel says the prefab business has been booming in the midst of the building downturn and he goes one step further saying:

The prefab product shift out of traditional construction methods could be the next industrial base that brings the U.S. back into a force of manufacturing and export. If we could begin supplying buildings to the rest of the world, U.S. automakers could quickly add a prefab housing division to their factories. The prefab building movement is a threat to most builders; in my opinion, 2009 marks the death of carbon-copy suburban architecture known as The McMansion.

Time will tell, but one thing is perhaps becoming clearer and clearer – building homes on site will either need to get a lot more efficient, or the practice will soon be dying a quick death.

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The Mystery of Clean URLs

by: Duane Craig - February 18th, 2009   Filed under: Web Tech 3 Comments

This might be of interest to others who run WordPress blogs and Web sites. As is often the case when things go awry in computing it is hard to track down just how they went awry. A lot of times that is true simply because in our zeal to get things working again we make changes and then don’t test the results before moving on to the next change.

The problem I had yesterday with this blog ended up being all about SEO and clean URLs. Basically, a clean URL is one that is descriptive like:

http://constructioninformer.com/2009/02/17/blog-crashes-fries-duanes-brain/

rather than

http://constructioninformer.com/?p=206.

From a search engine’s perspective, and from readers’ perspectives, the descriptive, or clean URL is better.

But this is where things start to get a little fuzzy. My blog has always used clean URLs and so I was surprised when Blue Host’s tech support brought my blog back to life by making a change to my .htaccess file. But after a little research I discovered that while WordPress allows you to choose clean URLs in the interface (look under Settings>Permalink Settings), it doesn’t always add some code to .htaccess that is supposed to make this all work the way it should.

I still don’t know though why the installation of the plugin I was doing caused all of this to come undone. But then, maybe it’s better if some things just remain mysteries.

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Blog Crashes, Fries Duane’s Brain

by: Duane Craig - February 17th, 2009   Filed under: Notices, Web Tech

Sometimes things just don’t work out.

I was installing a plugin to this blog and somehow broke most of it – the blog, not the plugin. So, that’s why you may not be able to reach any of the posts, or pages, or comments beyond this main page. It appears to be a problem beyond my comprehension, although it has been enlightening to get into the bowels of the beast so to speak. I am currently up to my ears in php and sql and a wide range of other acronyms. Oh, and I have a support ticket opened up too at the host.

Some might cry foul, thinking I did not back up…but I did. It’s just that restoring the database with the backup is not working like the other times I’ve had to restore it. Well, it isn’t working at all whether I use the hosts’s restore, or phpMyAdmin.

I’m also beginning to have a sneaking suspicion that the database may not actually be the culprit.

Anyway, I hope this will be resolved soon and then you can all wander around here again and see more than just the main page.

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Economic Recovery Act Opens Door Wide on Government Construction

by: Duane Craig - February 17th, 2009   Filed under: Finance, Industry

If you are a builder that focuses on government contracts the Economic Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 portends to offer a wide range of projects ripe for the bidding. Many of these no doubt won’t be for new construction, but rather for repair and improvements of facilities.

Some, as in the case of facilities used by the Dept. of Agriculture, also have rental payments listed as potential expenditure items. Money available for “necessary construction, repair, and improvement activities,” is $200 million for that agency. However, $176 million of that is for deferred maintenance at Ag Research Service facilities which are supposed to be fast-tracked.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is set to spend $360 million for construction of research facilities. NIST is involved in research activities that assess construction materials, the construction environment, construction safety, construction tools and equipment, and construction’s global competitiveness and productivity.

Of course one of the broadest ways to spread around the stimulation lies with funding military construction since those facilities exist in almost every state. So, the Army, Navy, Marines and Air Force will be looking to spend roughly $3.3 billion to “improve, repair and modernize Department of Defense facilities, restore and modernize real property to include barracks, and invest in the energy efficiency of Department of Defense facilities.”

The various branches’ Reserves will see more than $200 million for similar work and the Army and Air National Guard units will together be awarding $292 million in contracts.

This is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg when it comes to the scope of this latest handout that we tax payers are giving ourselves. In one way it almost seems like it ought to be our turn. We’ve been spending trillions in other countries, so why not spend a little at home?

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Presidents’ Day White House Construction Trivia

by: Duane Craig - February 16th, 2009   Filed under: Architecture and Design, For Fun

Since it’s President’s Day, and most U.S. Presidents have lived in the White House, a little background on that building from a construction point of view seems interesting.

The building was originally designed to be about four times larger than it was first built, and even though George Washington never got to live there he did plant the cornerstone in 1792. The construction took eight years and cost a little more than $230,000 (although in 2007 dollars that would have been $63 million).

Many people may not be aware that the building was modeled after the Leinster House in Dublin, Ireland, which is today the seat of the Irish Parliament. Perhaps the resemblance is accounted for by the fact the final plans were drawn up by the Irish architect James Hoban.

The construction of the White House was not a model of efficiency and speed by any means. Besides the eight years it took to build it, when John Adams moved in the East Room wasn’t finished, (and wouldn’t be for years), the grand staircase was going nowhere, and some rooms were only set up for storage.

Until 1860, the White House was the largest residence in the U.S. When it comes to amenities the building got hot water piped to the first family’s second floor bathroom in 1853, the first telephone was installed in 1879 and it had the number “1″, and electrical wiring was installed in 1891.

But what about the name?

The Scottish masons who did the stone work knew the sandstone being used to cover the building would not weather well, so they used a whitewash that covered like paint but sealed the stone like glue. From that grew the White House nickname. It wasn’t until 1901 that the name was made official.

If you absolutely need more info than is presented here about the construction of the White House you can find much more here and here.

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Worldwide Construction News

by: Duane Craig - February 13th, 2009   Filed under: General News

How Much Stimulation Will Your School District Lose? Or, maybe by now it should read – Did Lose. Pro Publica has put up a tool on the Web where you can see how much construction money won’t be flowing to your school system if the Senate version of the stimulus package gets passed. Some builders may have to forego those new tape measures since even in small communities the money that won’t be flowing is significant. I checked on a town with a population of 20,000 that is nearby and the amount was more than $1.5 million.

Earthquake Proofing According to Purdue: In light of the disastrous collapses of schools and other public buildings around the world as a result of earthquakes some civil engineers at Purdue have looked at building failures and found a built-in flaw that makes buildings more susceptible to earthquake damage. Buildings in Turkey, China and Latin America use too many partial height walls between structural columns. That leads to weak points that could easily be strengthened by replacing some windows with ordinary masonry bricks.

Brazil To Build Its Way Out Of Economic Doldrums: Government in Brazil plans to build a million homes and increase government-backed home loans by 42 percent in order to reactivate the domestic construction sector. The Brazilian President is bent on getting a package that generates more jobs while building cheaper housing for poor people.

Got an Infection? Eat Your Plaster. Chinese scientists are putting the finishing touches on a self-sanitizing building plaster that is more powerful than penicillin. Dubbed “supramolecular” the material can be used for wall coatings, paints and art work, to name a few applications. It is capable of killing five types of disease-causing bacteria and controls the growth of four other kinds of bacteria better than penicillin.

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Trimmable Doors Promise Installation Nirvana

by: Duane Craig - February 12th, 2009   Filed under: Products

Here’s one I couldn’t resist because…well, because it brings back fond memories of a remodel I was doing once on a mobile home.

Mobile homes, particularly older ones, and old homes that have been worked on a lot, don’t necessarily have standard sized doors. The ones in the place I was working on were 76 inches high and I needed to install a prehung unit since that’s what was on site. The original door was hung by a piano hinge so the prehung unit was a good choice since it had the brick mold and offered finished and sealed jambs, top and threshold. So it would really keep the necessary finish work to a minimum. I had to move the header up in this instance, slide in the new unit, level and plumb, screw it off and I was basically done, other than adding some face trim inside. Outside there was going to be new siding so it would fill the gaps there.

But suppose I had wanted to install just a slab and fit it to the original framing? I would have had to buy a custom door, (since there were no mobile home suppliers nearby), and then cut it to size. That’s a costly route to go.

Now, Plastpro has come out with a door that is trimmable with no negative consequences – well, other than if you trim it wrong. You can cut two inches from the width and length without compromising the fiberglass unit’s strength or weather-ability. It comes in 12 styles too.

What will they think of next?

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Metrostudy Calls Housing Starts Forecasts Too High

by: Duane Craig - February 11th, 2009   Filed under: Finance, Industry

If you want to get a non-governmental view of the residential housing market one place to start is with Metrostudy. The company provides independent primary and secondary housing market information.

In doing so it claims that unlike government statistics which rely on a “sampling of housing permits,” its statistics are backed up by researchers who drive to every site in the housing markets it serves and verify there are foundations in place.

Metrostudy is predicting a much longer recovery than other economists and is seeing 2009 starts being down by 47 percent over 2008. The company claims that other housing starts forecasts are unrealistically high and that housing starts could be just 500,000 in 2009, a departure of 100,000 to 200,000 lower than other housing forecasts. The company claims that government “headline housing starts numbers have long been overstated.”

Here is how Brad Hunter, chief economist and national director of consulting, for Metrostudy characterized inventories in the Florida market:

Finished vacant inventories are actually being reduced, but they remain too high in most markets. Florida leads the nation as the most overbuilt, with 12.6 months of finished vacant inventory in South Florida, 10 months in Naples-Fort Myers, and 9.2 months in Central Florida. These readings are all far in excess of the equilibrium level of 1.5 to 2.5 months that Metrostudy considers normal in a healthy market. Only San Antonio and Baltimore are presently in a normal range for this measure.

And so there you have it – another view for consideration.

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Survey Explores Reasons for Skilled Trades Worker Shortages

by: Duane Craig - February 10th, 2009   Filed under: Industry 2 Comments

A recent survey of a little more than 1,000 high school students between the ages of 14 and 18 revealed some key reasons why young people don’t consider the skilled trades as viable career options.

More than half said that working in the trades just doesn’t interest them, or that there is a better future working in computers. This comes in the face of rapidly increasing retirements of skilled trades people. For example it’s estimated that a third of all skilled plumbers will be exiting the workforce in the coming years. At the same time demand for plumbers is expected to increase by 10 percent through 2016.

Of course we should have been able to see this coming just by looking at our public policies regarding education. By making college the educational standard we have relegated the maintenance of a skilled workforce to largely on-the-job-training. At the same time we have made skilled work appear to be less rewarding, and less appealing. Plus the focus on how much money someone can make with a college degree as compared to having vocational training is misleading as skilled trades workers often earn as much as college graduates. In a way it’s kind of strange that when we are selling college to people we put money at the top of the list of reasons to consider it, yet survey after survey have shown that those in the workforce typically rank the amount of money they make as third or lower when asked what contributes most to their job satisfaction.

So for a kid today who is good with his or her hands, and is interested in creating things with them, we continually work to refocus their ambitions until they give up and accept a college program. Every year, for more than a half million of these kids, dropping out of college is on the horizon.

There are a lot of industry efforts and partnerships that have sprung up to begin addressing the coming labor shortage. One effort in Portland, OR, teams an IBEW Local and an electrical contractors association with the goal of encouraging high school students to consider apprenticeship as an alternative to college.

Monster released a detailed look at the skilled trades that includes a lot of analysis for those who want to get to the bottom of things. There are also organizations like Exploring that have created a framework that sponsors can use to help kids begin to envision careers in the skilled trades.

One telling revelation from the survey above is that once kids are exposed to vocational education classes 77 percent say they would consider careers in the skilled trades.

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