What's your BuildIQ: Building for Performance

The home is a system. Sounds simple enough, right? Once you start to examine what that statement really means, though, you'll find that treating a home like the system it is can produce great benefits like increasing customer satisfaction and your bottom line. You'll also find hidden challenges and a new way of thinking about and building homes.

Like any system, homebuilding is complex, multi-faceted, and interdependent. The key to working with systems like houses is to understand how the parts work and how they work together. Think of the popular game Jenga. The goal is to produce a high tower by taking pieces from the bottom and placing them on top. The challenge is that when you make an improvement or change in one area of the system, it will impact other areas. And you might not always see how the pieces are connected until the tower tumbles.

Luckily your homes won't topple over, but you can apply the same strategy to homebuilding that you would to Jenga. Think about the relationships among components. This kind of thought process will allow you to make informed decisions about implementing new construction practices and materials.

New materials or methods might be seen as a benefit in one area, like creating warmer basements, but can have negative consequences. In the case of the warmer basement you may have created a comfortable living space by adding studs, insulation, and drywall over the foundation walls and carpet over the concrete floor, but if a plan for preventing moisture intrusion hasn't been implemented, you've also created an ideal environment for mold growth.

Before rushing out to implement a new method or material, think about how that change can impact the rest of the components in the house system. For more information, go to http://hz.buildiquniversity.com to enroll in Building for Performance to learn how the house system works and how you can improve your practices with positive results.