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Building PhilosophyThe Builder's Note We all want to make a difference in our lives. We all hope that perhaps the future could be a little better for our children. It seems today, that believing that the future could be better is difficult. It's easy to feel apathetic and powerless to have an influence on the future. Participation in politics certainly seems fruitless. But we do have control of how we raise our families and how we spend our money. As Americans, we earn a lot of money and what we spend our money on has a direct effect on the direction and the emphasis this huge economic system travels in.
My goal as a builder is to build responsibly. To wed craftsmanship, new environmental technologies, and sound design into every home I build. Driving down our streets it's easy to tell which homes are built with care by an owner-builder, and which ones are built by someone who does not care. Contractors build most new homes, for speculative purposes. Production of these houses is driven by money. How big, how many, how fast and how much? These are the questions that drive the decisions, which describe what these houses will look and feel like. They are built incredibly efficiently and cheaply, but with almost no regard for creating a cohesive and beautiful environment. In contrast the now rare older houses or carefully built newer houses with big old trees around them are simple and beautiful. New homes are sterile and lifeless, not because of their age but because of the process with which they are built. Watch a new home being put in. First there is a beautiful site, a hill, woods or meadow. But instead of preserving the existing inherent beauty of that land and building around it, most builders want to start with a flat clear site. Clear the trees and flatten the land, and quite possibly even build a huge mound too poorly disguise a septic system. The start of the typical building process is to destroy the beauty that has taken centuries to evolve. Have you ever noticed the incredible beauty of stonewalls running all through our communities? The hundreds of years of weather, moss and lichen on them, compare them to a stone just been clawed from the earth by an excavator. You can see the difference. You can see the years of life from the exposure. If you wanted to build a beautiful wall, which rock would you choose to use? Many people like to say that beauty is a subjective quality. I believe beauty is objective; we as humans all see and respond to beauty in the same way. A sunset, a waterfall, a flower, these are beautiful things. All of us can recognize this. The same is true of our larger environments. A country lane is prettier than a super-highway. A busy thriving downtown is more beautiful than a strip mall with a huge parking lot in front. A house built, designed and sited with care is more beautiful than most speculative contractor built houses. A house is a collection of thousands of choices. Every choice contributes to either making what is presently there more or less beautiful. Unfortunately in current building practices almost all these decisions are made in a remote location, such as an architects office, where it is impossible to immediately asses the value of the decisions. If you have ever traveled to old European cites or notice older houses in our own towns, you may have noticed their beauty. The builder, the architect and/or artisan, were one in the same, when these buildings were built. For this reason older buildings and older towns, are far more beautiful than most new construction.
The current building practices, where everyone involved is super-specialized (the architect, the contractor, the framer, the foundation crew, et.); leave no one at most building sites that have an interest in ultimately how the building looks. If it is noticed that it might be nicer if the master bedroom window was two feet to the left to take advantage of the view of an oak tree, instead of how it was draw on a set of plans, making this change is very complicated and expensive, under current typical building practices. The architect and owner must be called; a change order must be made. So in most cases, this does not happen. In most cases, new construction lacks character and beauty because of this. As a building goes up all sorts of new unforeseen opportunities arise, that can make a buildings design richer and more beautiful. If those who are present for construction, either builder or owner, pay attention and take advantage of them and allow the process to be flexible enough to allow the building to evolve and be designed as it is built, the results are remarkable.
I love what I do. I feel strongly about building responsibly. I'm driven by these philosophies, not by a profit margin. While I do expect and need to be paid for the hours I work, I do not charge above and beyond my hourly rate. There is no overhead and profit charge like a typical contractor. There is no percentage of the overall budget cost, like an architect's design fee. Compare the cost of a house I build with other new houses.
A House with:
Thank you, Duncan J. Thorne
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When we make the biggest investment of our lives, we have a big opportunity. All of our sweat and labor, all those dollars we earned in the past and into the future, have a huge influence on our economy and literally on what our future looks like. Not to mention, the burdens we leave to our children's generation. We can choose to take part in moving towards the future we all want. We can invest in technologies that can make a difference. With our nations enormous dependence on foreign oil, it's surprising that builders and homeowners continue to build with heating and electric needs tied to an industry that is finite. Today, we enjoy low energy costs, only because the government subsidizes energy production, which pollutes our environment, and passes on the economic and environmental consequences to our children. There are incredible technologies that have been in use for years that are super efficient and clean, but our mammoth building industry is slow to change. 