Building a home is complicated business: there are dozens people involved, hundreds of decisions that need to be made, deadlines to meet and budgets to maintain. In this article, Andy Stauffer writes about one of the most important tasks a home builder has: making sure the home is buildable.
…the majority of my daily exchanges are with the design and production team rather than the client. I endeavor, with the help of my architect, to please our team of tradesmen to the greatest extent possible, by offering designs that are sensitive to the real world “buildability” of a structure. The importance of planning and designing buildable structures cannot be overemphasized. At its heart, buildability is as much about process as it is about final product. To illustrate, I need only ask readers to recall a project in their own careers that came together in the end in spite of innumerable hurdles, RFIs, ASIs, change orders, cost overruns, and pain and gnashing of teeth. All of these small negatives add up, ultimately, to one big negative – lost profits.