Building Green: Promoting Healthy Indoor Air

Healthy indoor air quality may be the most important aspect of building green. After all, what could be more important to your health than the air you breathe? Achieving healthy indoor air, however, depends on a comprehensive approach to high-performance building. There's no way, for example, to make an indoor environment comfortable and healthy without properly building, insulating, sealing the house against air and moisture, and without installing the appropriate heating, cooling and ventilating equipment.

Still, there are practices and products we offer as an eco-conscious builder that can improve indoor air quality. Specifically, we look for and encourage the use of various interior finishes that contain low levels of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) or ideally, no VOCs at all.

Manufacturers of products that have emitted VOCs in the past have made impressive strides in reducing or eliminating those chemicals in their products, usually without a loss in performance or durability. Here are a few of the ways we address VOCs in the homes we build:

Particleboard. Particleboard has been used for decades in the manufacture of kitchen and bathroom cabinet boxes, as underlayment for countertops and floors, and as backing for wood paneling, to name just a few. However, particleboard (and certain wood composite panels) can emit or "off-gas" VOCs from the glues and resins used to make it. We work with our suppliers to identify products and manufacturers that have switched to wood composite panels emitting no or low VOCs or to alternative products, such as solid-wood or non-wood panel products that do not contain such chemicals at all.

Adhesives and sealants. In several phases of construction, our crews and subcontractors use adhesives and sealants to build your home -- in most cases, to help ensure a quality job and promote better energy efficiency. Past versions of these products have emitted VOCs. To address the issue, we work to make sure that new-generation, non-VOC products are used as adhesives and sealants while still achieving the goals of high-performance housing.

Paints and stains. These are perhaps the most-used and best-addressed examples of low and no-VOC technology. Paints (and to a lesser extent, wood stains) are a prevalent finish product in every house, covering the walls and ceilings of every room. They also are completely exposed to the indoor air and the home's occupants. Manufacturers of coatings, by state and federal regulations and on their own accord, have effectively reduced or eliminated VOCs from their formulations while maintaining the durability, application, color retention, and other qualities we as builders and you as homeowners demand and expect.

Flooring. Like paints and stains, various floor finishes are in direct contact with a home's occupants. Carpets and pads, wood flooring, and resilient (vinyl) sheets and tiles, as well as the adhesives used to apply them, have traditionally contained chemicals that emit VOCs. But, like other products with this problem, they have been reformulated without those hazards, resulting in cleaner and healthier indoor air quality.

The market for low- and no-VOC products across several categories of finishes is expanding all the time, making it easy to find suitable alternatives to conventional products for your home. That being said, we will continue to work with our trade partners and suppliers to offer the best selection of materials and finishes that meet all of your expectations, from style and durability to your family's health and comfort.

3 PILLAR HOMES OWNER & PRESIDENT NAMED BUILDER VICE PRESIDENT OF CENTRAL OHIO BUILDING INDUSTRY ASSOCIATION

Galena, OH – Dec. 7 2008 – The 3 Pillar Homes owner and president, Zenios Michael Zenios, was named Builder Vice President of the Building Industry Association of Central Ohio Friday December 5 at Wedgewood Golf and Country Club in Powell. The Builder VP resides on the Executive Committee and is part of the Board of Trustees.

The Board of Trustees is the governing body of the Association. They direct affairs in a customary manner in accordance with BIA bylaws. It consists of 17 total members, with a combination of Builder and Associate members, as well as the Executive Director of the Association. The President, Senior Vice President, Builder Vice President and Immediate Past President of the Board must all be Builder members. Each office has a one-year term.

Homebuilding Myths: The Three-Bid Rule

As the housing industry becomes more sophisticated and conscientious about achieving genuine and lasting homebuyer satisfaction, the level of professionalism among builders continues to reach new heights.

As a result, potential clients searching for a builder to create their dream home have a much deeper pool of talent from which to select. Today's professional builder is not only skilled in construction and client relations, but also highly-competent in terms of his or her business expertise.

This new and more professional breed of builder deserves to be evaluated by home buyers in a new way. Namely by dropping the age-old practice of collecting three bids for the work in favor of a more business-like approach to a very important decision.

In theory, the three-bid rule was thought to work because it assumed everything else, other than cost, from the competing builders was equal. This thought process assumed that each builder had assessed and calculated the scope of work, blueprints, and specifications in the exact same way.

In reality, however, such assumptions are dangerous and rarely, if ever, accurate. Every builder and contractor, professional or not, analyzes a new-home project and estimates its associated costs differently; as a result, the three bids are not apples-to-apples comparisons. The differences can be subtle, but they exist. And those differences render an unequal playing field for competitive bidding creating confusion and misunderstanding.

Even if all three contractors based their bids on precisely the same interpretation of the project, the three-bid rule still reduces each builder to a number rather than considering his or her various skills, experience, personality, record of success, and ability to do the work. For this reason, an increasing number of the best homebuilders simply refuse to bid competitively, opting out of such opportunities because they know they are being evaluated only in terms of a cost estimate rather than whether they are the best builder for the job.

The professional builder prefers a different approach to contractor selection: the negotiated contract. In that scenario, a homebuilder is selected based on his or her abilities and personality and how they fit with the homebuyer. These are two critical considerations considering how closely builder and client will interact with each other during the construction of a new home.
The negotiated contract also takes the guesswork out of the project's cost. The budget is shared up-front with each of the builders being considered based on what the buyers can afford, not what the builder (and his stable of trade contractors) thinks it will cost. Sharing the budget not only removes assumptions and judging a builder's worth based on price alone, but also builds trust and enables honest communication about actual costs and, if necessary, choices that need to be made to match the project's scope with the homebuyer's budget. That's the "negotiated" part of the contract process.

As important, the negotiated contract process is far superior to the three-bid rule in matching personalities between the homebuyer and the builder, and between projects and a building company's skills and experience. By first narrowing and then selecting one homebuilder based on everything but the cost of the project, buyers help ensure that the project will remain on budget and schedule and result in a finished home that meets (or ideally exceeds) their expectations.
As the homebuilding industry continues to evolve into an increasingly professional business, it requires new and more effective models for conducting that business. The negotiated contract has strong advantages over the three-bid rule. This approach reflects the new age of new home construction to the benefit of every homebuyer.