35 Years of Building Industry Milestones
As the building landscape has evolved over the years, so have quality, standards and practices
By Don Neff
The U.S. production housing industry has achieved many milestones over the past several decades and continues to evolve. So too has LJP Construction Services and Builder and Developer (BD) magazine. BD has been our advertising partner for 30 years, sharing our story of new industry milestones achieved. Our teams and proprietary software have become a go-to solution for documenting construction quality assurance practices on projects coast to coast.
The germination of construction defect litigation began in the early 90s when two years of back-to-back El Niño weather patterns in Southern California revealed questionable construction quality practices. Preceding these monumentally wet winters were eight years of drought, leading to cost saving designs and construction practices such as clipped eaves on houses, use of single layer 10-minute building paper applied with pneumatic staplers over line wire and non-sheathed open bay stud walls, all covered with three coat stucco. Use of sisal kraft window and door flashing building materials were the standards of care and the combination of these products and practices achieved greater housing affordability. In hindsight, however, litigation costs arose.
Fortunately, most builders are responsive to fixing issues and endeavor to implement innovative designs and incorporate better materials. By the mid-late 90s while the CDL trends had grown, new standards of care evolved to include fully sheathed buildings, two layers of 60-minute building paper, applied with self-furred stucco wire and hand driven nails. The building industry boot-strapped its way to higher standards of care and created much more robust weatherproofing flashing systems for windows, walls and roofs. Roof eaves came back into style and interior improvements included upgraded acoustic performance products and more robust fire resistive assemblies. Equally important, third-party inspections became a routine practice industry-wide.
By the early to mid-2000s, energy conservation required performance testing of HVAC systems, blower door/duct testing and better insulation of the building envelope. Green building practices were a natural outgrowth of the energy conservation movement with many compliance programs emerging, though not all in alignment with each other. Once the new Cal Green Building Code was adopted, a single new standard of care became the norm. The BD team also initiated their ABC Home series—affordable, buildable and green certified. LJP participated in the certification process for the early ABC Home designs.
What can be measured, can be improved and has become the focus.”
Third party QA services have evolved similarly. Conducting pre-construction plan reviews to confirm details are buildable and functional became routine. Field inspections of those critical assemblies led to tracking and closing out of deficiencies discovered. Routine use of mock-up assemblies has also become essential. Mock-ups of failure prone components such as exterior weather barriers provide a field training and testing tool helping all the key trade contractors to understand important sequences and intricacies of multiple layers in the construction assemblies.
This logically led to benchmarking project quality trends. What can be measured, can be improved and has become the focus. CaptureQA® is a software solution designed to accomplish this objective. It is necessary to identify deficiencies, but not sufficient. One also needs to identify the root causes, such as deviations from plans/specs, deviations from manufacturers installation guidelines and deviations from normal standard of care for field workmanship. This provides a closed feedback loop to implement corrective action at the source.
Post construction tools to assist HOAs have also evolved, including video-taped turnover walks, maintenance training, comprehensive manuals with checklists and annual reviews to address short-term and long-term needs, covering buildings and landscapes. Equally important, these growing risk management practices have become requirements of builder risk managers and insurance carriers. Not limited to homes, they apply to all building types across the US.
Regional quality variations exist across the U.S. in these QA/QC practices as a function of design trends, construction methods, contractor training, manufactured products sensitive to climatic variation and other similar physical and societal forces. Given that California was the birthplace of residential CDL, that state has the longest history of improved practices and legislative reform measures including clarity for builders right to repair, functionality standards and implementation of maintenance protocols. Other states have similarly adopted their own solutions, including Colorado, Texas and Florida. Many states now have “right to repair” statutes on the books.
More importantly, there has been a “sea change” across the construction industry to improve quality. Project deliveries have become more complex, and the role of all team members has expanded such that all are focused on walking that tightrope of compromise, balancing the triangle of schedule, budget and quality. What’s in your toolbox?
Don Neff is president of LJP Construction Services, which provides comprehensive third-party QA services on projects from coast to coast. Learn more about our team and services at www.ljpltd.com.
