Sponsored Products Five tips for selecting the best composite deck material Expanding homeowners’ outdoor living spaces has become one of the top remodeling projects. The projects often involve upgrades to better...
Sponsored Products Add amenities for sustainability-oriented customers Outdoor living spaces are expanding, with larger decks and more attention to the entire yard. This trend gives homeowners ways to extend...
Lean Design 3 Major Distinctions Between Good and Great Design In my travels working with builders all over the country, I have the opportunity to see a lot of home designs. I see good, bad, fair, and...
The Design Side Home as the realm of the senses Remember when interior designer Carole Eichen coined the term “merchandising” to describe her approach to model homes? I’m not sure how many...
Sponsored Decking + Railings Helping consumers check their decks May has been declared “Deck Safety Month” by the North American of Deck & Railing Association, a program the group started in 2006....
Design Spotlight* UNPUBLISHED Advantage, Housing Giants Some years ago, a small production builder told me that he didn’t want his company to get too big. Smaller companies were nimble, he...
Lean Design Transformers—More than meets the eye! This is a transformer-type plan that offers “plug and play” options without too much of a fuss for the builder. A very popular option as of...
Quality Management And you thought getting trades was a problem! A lot has been written recently on the industry problem of getting good trades and rightly so. However, there is another problem you should...
The Design Side Mid-century modern stirs passions Where do you stand on mid-century modern design? Do you love it or hate it? In the San Francisco Bay area, a resurgence of interest in...
Design Spotlight* UNPUBLISHED Rites of spring Spring is here, regardless of the fact that it is snowing in the D.C. area as I write this at the end of March, and it’s the beginning,...
Lean Design The goods for today’s move-up buyer Move-up buyers are a fickle bunch, and this blog entry focuses on a Lean Design for that group. It is actually an excerpt from a future...
Quality Management Lessons from an ‘Extreme Home Makeover’ project ABC’s Extreme Home Makeover challenged Veridian Homes (of Madison WI) in 2008 to build a home for a family in need. The home builder’s...
Market Data + Trends 'Married with Children' only 20 percent of all households During the last 50 years, the rate of growth of households has outpaced that of population growth in the U.S. The total number of...
Lean Design This 2,800-square-foot stunner makes them slam on the brakes! I had the pleasure of meeting Mary Schumacher from Schumacher Homes a few years back while doing plan reviews at the International Builders'...
The Design Side The Wrights are still cutting edge As regular readers know, I rarely miss an opportunity to mention Frank Lloyd Wright in my blog. That goes for his descendants, too. FLW’s...
Quality Management St. Patrick: 10 Lessons in Leadership A look to St. Patrick's Servant Leadership as an example of how we might develop our own leadership skills
Design Spotlight* UNPUBLISHED Solving housing's labor problem Although recovery for home building has been looking up for a while—with new-home starts in 2013 up 18 percent over 2012 and new-home sales...
Economics Housing market continues to improve While analysts continue to argue about whether or not the dip in housing sales in the first two months of 2014 is weather-related or not,...
Building Business The Truth Behind February's Home Builder Confidence Decline The Wells Fargo/NAHB Builder Confidence survey, for February, reported a historic drop in Builder Confidence. The report was hyped and in...
Quality Management Lean project helps Colorado DOT: Post disaster repair of highways and bridges This is a case study by ASQ and its a great example of how quality tools can be applied to the construction industry. 'When...
The Design Side When a house is just a house Maybe you saw the New York Times article “In Housing, Big is Back (Not Counting the Extras).” While it doesn’t overtly herald the return of...
Economics Declining homeownership in the United States The boom and bust cycle of the first decade of the 21st century had an enormous effect on U.S. homeownership rates. The overall rate in the...
Quality Management Video interviews with Ford on Quality: Leadership, culture and innovation “Two approaches to improvement to avoid: systems without passion and passion without systems” Tom Peters, Thriving on Chaos, 1987 This is...
Sponsored blog_entry Reducing Transactional Costs in Your Supply Chain As we recover from the holidays and look back on the year, it appears we should all give thanks that 2013 has shaped up to be a pretty good...
The Design Side Four days in the garden of good and evil If you’ve never been to Savannah, Ga., by all means go, especially if you love 18th and 19th century architecture. I just returned from a...