MAY 23, 2024

Long time, no blog.

We met today with Offsite Construction Leaders, Panel Designers, Residential Designers, and Truss Gurus. I won’t lie, I was frustrated this meeting was happening. We’ve basically put everything on pause for two weeks, and I was under the impression that the design would be changing. In my brain as the homeowner, when we say we’re going to modify the design, it means the house will not look like it does currently. Modify = change.

Here’s what I learned.

Okay, so actually let me back up a bit and explain what value engineering actually is… “A systematic approach to providing necessary functions in a project at the lowest cost”. What actually ended up happening was we had a lot of industry brain power in the room to say, “Why are we doing it this way when we can do it this way for less cost and the same functionalitity?”. The final design and how the house currently looks to the average joe will not actually be changing. PHEW.

There’s a large disconnect between residential design, panel design, and field solutions. I feel like residental design is a very emotional part of the home building process. You have a wish list and you get to bring your home to life. I personally do not care what an i-joist is and how many there are until it comes down to cost. Panel designers and field solutions do in fact care though, and this is where the modification come in. They were able to poke apart how we can achieve the same look with less materials and less labor. So I didn’t need to be as worried about this as I actually was. In fact, by reworking some of the bones, I could save hundreds, if not thousands of dollars, from the original offsite construction plan.

A few ideas that were thrown out there were:

-Making the stairs going down to the basement a half wall to save material costs.

-The front porch posts don’t necessarily need to be structural which would save costs on labor and materials, as we wouldn’t need an actual beam and it would be more for cosmetic appeal.

-The floor trusses could be a differnet size (I think? Don’t repeat that, I need to double check) to use less of them, cut back on beams, and save money on materials.

For Drexel as a whole, diving into this plan could be a game changer in the longrun for builders. We regroup next week to make any final changes and plans.