Lakesideca Curmudgeon

It has been a busy winter and spring, wrapping up construction. Work on the house and carport were essentially complete in March; however, delays in locating the pervious pavers and an installer for the pervious concrete kept us from completing the site work until mid-April.

We wrapped up landscaping and received our Certificate of Occupancy on April 29th.

Our home construction project is over the hump: drywall and flooring have been installed, exterior trim is wrapping up, and interior trim, cabinets, and tile will be starting soon.

Although things are generally going quite well, and while I am happy with the house, I am not enjoying the process very much. Even after 25 years as a contractor, I don’t deal well with the stress of coordinating dozens of subcontractors and suppliers. Materials don’t arrive when promised, workers don’t finish on schedule, and managing different trades in the house at the same time creates tensions.

Carl Seville and his wife are building themselves a new home in Decatur, Georgia. The first blog in this series was titled The Third Time’s the Charm. Links to all of the blogs in this series can be found in the “Related Articles” sidebar below.

Carl Seville and his wife are building themselves a new home in Decatur, Georgia. The first blog in this series was titled The Third Time’s the Charm. Links to all of the blogs in this series can be found in the “Related Articles” sidebar below.

Carl Seville and his wife are building themselves a new home in Decatur, Georgia. The first blog in this series was titled The Third Time’s the Charm. Links to all of the blogs in this series can be found in the “Related Articles” sidebar below.

Carl Seville and his wife are building themselves a new home in Decatur, Georgia. The first blog in this series was titled The Third Time’s the Charm. Links to all of the blogs in this series can be found in the “Related Articles” sidebar below.

Carl Seville and his wife are building themselves a new home in Decatur, Georgia. This is the first blog in a series describing the construction project. Links to all of the blogs in this series can be found in the “Related Articles” sidebar below.

It’s been quite a while since my last post. The good news is that the recession is over and business is good, leaving me little time to write these days. The bad news is that there is so much work going on, which, combined with a shortage of skilled labor, ends up with large knowledge and communication gaps that create problems in the field.

Last week I had the opportunity to attend the 2013 convention of the American Institute of Architects (AIA) — a simple matter for me, as it took place in Atlanta. I find that it is often challenging to attend local conferences because we let our daily work take over in a way that we don’t when we travel out of town for events. This time, however, I was able to block out two full days for the event, and was interrupted only occasionally by calls and emails.

Although I spent most of my construction career working on single-family homes, the primary subject of this great website, I find that my current work involves primarily multifamily projects — mostly low-rise and mid-rise apartments that are seeking green building certification.

In these projects, my partner and I continue to see both new and recurring problems that are not resolved in the design phase, only to be pushed down to the field to be figured out — on a tight budget, in a hurry, and often in the cold or rain.