A custom built home requires a lot of design choices and takes a longer period of time due to it’s very unique nature. The home building industry hasn’t seen any real advancements to speed up the process since the nail gun in the 1950’s. The term used in home building is called a critical path method and simply put means any delay in turn delays the whole project. Your builder is then forced to rush to meet deadlines as he reorganizes project tasks pushing things out of their proper order requiring trade contractors to accommodate scheduling changes. This can mean errors, mistakes and rash decisions while the homeowner waits and waits and is an accepted part of home building.
Faster Build Times Are Now Possible
It’s a dilemma that has puzzled custom home builders Victoria BC as they tried to find more efficient ways to make deadlines. By taking a close look at the way commercial projects are completed in a more timely manner they found that incorporating their way of staying to a schedule works for home building as well. In commercial building projects the schedule is the heart of any commercial project and now is used by custom home builders to finish the build on schedule. Faster build times are now possible minus the errors and without sacrificing quality. Scrutinizing other industries highlighted the need to keep the site clean and improved efficiency significantly. Changing the critical path by lowering the number of workers on each crew allowed more than one crew to work at the same time. It has been shown that smaller crews result in less rework needed while closing the site for larger crews of painters for example was more efficient. Many trades are reluctant to send out smaller crews and requires good communication to help other contractors see the advantages of working this way. Other issues that can slow a custom build are misplaced items, delayed shipments, products out of stock, broken of missing parts. Not every factor can be completely controlled and builders tend to add contingencies into their schedule to allow for any of these delays.
By looking at the manner in which large commercial projects keep to a schedule and examining other industries the result can be faster build times for custom homes. This latest innovation in the critical path and it’s improved schedule results in a better quality of work and before long will be adopted by custom home builders worldwide.
