Speed Building #1

Michael Holigan: Why are you guys doing this?

Bob Armstrong: Well, several reasons. It's in conjunction with the B.I.A. Remodeling and Home Show, so that was one thing. But it's also a great thing to get everybody together, it earns a little bit of money for the B.I.A., it earns a lot of money for charities, we've got four of them that we're giving money to.

M.H.: Well, it looks like a great cohesiveness of all the different trades at one spot.

B.A.: Yeah, it's wonderful.

M.H.: I've got to ask, cause I build a lot of homes and I know you build a lot of homes, how long does it take to plan a house like this, so you can do it in 8 hours?

B.A.: Well, that's kind of interesting. You know, a home like this, if you were just to build it with all the different crews and everything, we figure would take about 800 hours. Here we'll probably do it in less than 700, maybe 600 to 700. But when you look at the management side, what we've done over the last like three months getting it ready, we've probably spent about 3,000 hours putting it together. So it's not really a very cost effective way to build a house.

M.H.: That's a lot of man hours. What happens when everybody in Hawaii sees this and they want their house built in one day? What are you going to tell them?

B.A.: Well I tell them that's great. I could probably get all these guys together, but you have to remember, you know, the house itself may be in the hundred, hundred and quarter range, but the management time's going to be about another $200,000.

M.H.: So you think that will curtail that?

B.A.: I think that will probably curtail that, you're right.

M.H.: Okay. Bob, how many people does it take to do it? You're talking about six, seven, eight hundred man hours, how many people is that out here?

B.A.: Well, from early this morning till this afternoon, there will be about 300. We had about 80 framing carpenters to start the morning, and that was pretty wild. The platform was half decked and the first walls were up in about seven minutes.

M.H.: I noticed that. And even putting the siding on the house, I noticed the painting crew was right behind the guy with the nails.

B.A.: Right. Well, what's happening in the home at the moment is, the finish carpenters started at the back, they're moving forward. Right behind them are the painters, and as the painters move out of a room, the flooring guys are in there doing the prep for the tile that's going to be going down in just a few minutes actually.

M.H.: That's intense. What are you going to do with the house? I know you can't leave it here in the parking lot.

B.A.: Nope. They're going to come and split it apart. We designed it so that it would unbolt in the center and come apart. And then they're going to truck it about 15 miles from here, out to Eva Beach, and it's going to go on a beach front lot out there.

M.H.: To split it apart, what did you have to do to the trusses and to the, say, the plumbing and the electrical, to get that to happen?

B.A.: Well the main beams are running parallel to the length of the house.

M.H.: Okay.

B.A.: And then the trusses are also running parallel to the length of the house. Plumbing is set so that it runs through all those channels. It should come apart pretty easily.

M.H.: And I noticed that you guys are pretty confident. You've got right there on your shirt, you think you're going to finish in less than 8 hours?

B.A.: I'm afraid that somebody sandbagged me on these things. So we have a little bit more push to make sure that we get it in under eight.

Episode 016 1995 - 96 Season

| Speed Building 1 | Garage Door Peephole | Speed Building 2 | Protective Painting | Bringing Plants Indoors | Speed Building 3 | Loan Process | LIST |

To order a Video Tape, call 1-800-TO-BUILD and ask for Episode #016.