Avoiding Building Failure In Your Home Remodeling Projects

Not all buildings are created equal. In reality, some building types have surprisingly high failure rates. To prevent becoming a victim of building failure, it pays to understand just what makes a building fail and what you can do to minimize the risks.

Structural engineers define three broad categories of building failures.

1. high frequency/low consequence building failures.
2. low frequency/high consequence building failures
3. high frequency/high consequence failures.

Taking a more practical approach, we can suggest that the saying 'You can have it good. You can have it cheap. You can have it quick. But you can only have two of the three any time'. In other words, a good and cheap building will not be quick. A cheap and quick building will not be good. Or a good and quick building will not be cheap.

As the owner of your home remodeling and renovation project, you need to decide right up front which combination of these three elements you want to base your project on. Once decided, you need to maintain that foundation throughout the project [unless you change your whole approach].

During the start out phase of design of any remodeling project, cost and schedule [cheap and quick] are often the incentive. But as construction proceeds, quality starts to become an issue. Suddenly, as building owner you are not happy with the quality of the workmanship - but often it is too late.

So think very carefully about the cheap and crappy approach - it is what you are asking for, and it is what you are likely to end up with.

Your Designer, building contractor and project manager all play roles in ensuring your building does not fail.

Designers And Your Home Remodeling Project - Once you have set your budget and design guidelines, it is the job of the designer to create a final building design to those guidelines. If their design exceeds budget, redesign is generally performed on a gratis basis. Therefore, there is a pretty strong incentive by designers to maintain costs at all stages.

Contractors And Your Home Remodeling Project - Contractors don't have the same economic drivers as the Designer. The building contract with the owner generally has a clause concerning liquidated damages. If the builders do not meet a deadline, they start paying costs. Quality, at this stage, becomes much less important.

For both Desginers and Builders, cost and schedule are both drivers during this stage of design and construction, but from differing perspectives.

Independent Project Managers And Your Home Remodeling Project - Using an independent project manager [PM] adds a layer of quality throughout the whole design and build process. The PM will guard against decisions being made largely in the absence of a quality consideration. That said, it is important to recognise that the PM does not always want quality, nor are they equipped to make judgment calls without input from the designer and contractor.

The best time to make economy versus quality decisions is in the design phase. Once you get past the conceptual design phase, the cost of making a quality change significantly rises. Problems ignored or not detected in the early stages have the habit of gaining overwhelming momentum against remedy; as the time and cost to correct the fault at laster stages most likely will have significant impact the schedule and the budget.

Major Contributors To Building Failures

So now that we understand the various perspectives of Designer, Contractor and Project Manager, we can adopt a stand off position to isolate the major contributors to building failures. Just as in business - the two most significant drivers are process and technology. Translated into building terms:

Technology refers to the design capability, methods of construction and the materials used. Process includes both the process used to both design the building and to construct it. Add to that a third primary factor - lack of communication and you have a recipe for success or recipe for disaster. Which end of the scale your risk profile lies depends upon the gap between:

1. What building designers and contractors know and what they need to know to consistently produce successful buildings.
2. Communication between architects and mechanical engineers.
3. Standard building and unique factors in the design, the construction, or the operation that might contribute to making any building a high-risk building. The includes demanding climatic conditions, unique code requirements or unique building usage.

This is why it is extremely important for the home owner to as much as possible, assess the knowledge and skill of a designer in terms of meeting their remodeling project requirements. If you are going for an economic solution - don't go looking at all the high quality homes these professionals have completed. Ask for examples that fall within the category of the building category you have stipulated.

Even taking the best precautions, the outcome of your building project has a large element of luck. Even the best building design companies don't manage to consistently produce successful results. Many do not have an adequate grasp of why one building is successful and why another building fails. Rather than doing a 360 review, as is done in cases of business process failure, more often, the focus is on litigation. Litigation is a very poor mechanism for honest feedback that often focuses on the organization with the largest insurance policy rather than the most guilty party. There are also a number of technical gaps that exist within the design community. And the more complex the design, the higher the potential for failure.

When reviewing building failures, one area jumps high above all others; weathertightness. Many building failures identified immediately after construction occur in facilities - heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning (HVAC). If you consider a dwelling as a single vessel of pressure, with airflows directed by air tightness and HVAC systems, the pressure placed on various parts of the building can have structural impact resulting in weathertightness breaches. Buildings that leak are the most common type of building failure, so if you need to invest in any one area, consider this a priority.

So remember - you get what you ask for. So be very careful in what you ask for.

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