At BrightBuilt, we are lucky to get a chance to work with many different builders based across New England and beyond. We love building these relationships, and getting to know each outfit well enough to determine who might have the most impressive tool collection, who might have the cutest shop dogs, or who would be most likely to win in a local potato sack race (and of course practical things, like who would be the best fit for a given client).
In this round of “meet a builder of BrightBuilt Homes,” we wanted to take a moment to chat with Joe Carry, owner of Decumanus Green, of Great Barrington, MA. Having completed both modular and stick-built BrightBuilt Homes, among many other high-performance homes, Joe has some great insights on both the high-performance world and off-site construction.
What is your history with building high-performance homes? How did you get started?
The July, 2007 cover of the NewYorker magazine featured a drawing of the Statue of Liberty with a CFL instead of a flame atop her torch base. At the time, the economy was showing signs of stress and fault lines were widening. I feared for my young business and was looking for ways to distinguish myself in what was soon going to be a very tight market. That New Yorker cover bolstered my sense that major changes were coming to energy-adjacent industries and to the economy at large, and I saw opportunity there. So, oddly enough, it was first and foremost an economic calculation that directed me towards high-performance building. I had a young family, I needed to provide for them; and so I needed to find a way keep my business going.
Of course, climate change worried me and I certainly wanted to do my part to improve things; but looking back, if I’m to be honest, it really was first and foremost an economic thing for me, which I think might be a little unusual among builders drawn to more sustainable practices.
Once I got into it, however, I was also really drawn by the building science part of it. I found the systems-thinking approach to analyzing problems within building science really, really compelling.
What brought you to BrightBuilt?
I’d been introduced to BrightBuilt through Phil Kaplan. I really admired Phil and Jesse’s commitment to the challenge of making sustainable houses more economically available. Back at home, I was struggling to find skilled workers to reliably and professionally do the work in my pipeline, and I could see that problem getting worse with time, as the few remaining “old-timers” hung up their belts with no one in sight to take them up.
So I really liked the idea of getting a significant amount of the labor done off-site and in cities with a larger population of skilled and semi-skilled workers. I really trusted the integrity and smarts of Phil and Jesse and knew that their product would be top shelf, so when a client came to me looking to build a Net-Zero-type house, I explained the scheduling and other production benefits of off-site construction and then connected him with BrightBuilt. That turned out to be the first project we did together. We have just broken ground on our third, have one more under pre-construction and several more in the exploratory phase. So the future is looking bright for Decumanus and BrightBuilt collaboration.
What do you most enjoy about building?
This has changed over the years. I used to just love the building part: having a full workday stretching ahead of you and jumping into the process of seeing how much you could get built in a day. And it was always so gratifying to see the finished product and think to myself, damn, I built that!
But then my business grew. I took on one and then two, then three weatherization crews. A lot of my time was spent struggling to run that part of the business while also leading production on my renovation and new home construction projects. That was a stressful time. I could never again feel that sense of having a whole day stretching ahead with nothing to do but build stuff. The interruptions and fire-fighting were pretty constant, and I think that soured me on carpentry a bit. It was nowhere nearly as satisfying as it had once been. I stopped being efficient, getting into the flow, and the stress poured in to fill the gap. I eventually realized I really needed to focus on running a business and not building homes.
That turned out to be a surprisingly natural transition. I could start building a business rather than houses. Building a business is about building relationships and the protocols and procedures, and routines and structures that support those relationships and keep them healthy and functional—and enjoyable. I found myself well-suited to that relationship building; it was fulfilling, gratifying work and to this day it is far and away the thing I enjoy most about my work.
In your mind, what are some of the primary benefits of off-site construction?
For me, as a builder, it is first and foremost about solving my skilled labor issues. I can reserve the limited highly-skilled carpentry workforce I have access to for those parts of the job that can only be done on site or are best done on site. Off-site construction also helps with design and construction schedules and with bringing actual costs in line with estimated costs. During design, it provides hard decision deadlines that clients take seriously because they understand and accept the rigidity of a factory schedule. During construction, I am better able to focus on one thing at a time: first, getting the modules into the production schedule, then shifting to getting the site ready and lining up post-delivery work. Finally, it locks in a fixed cost of construction for all the work done in the factory. That means that up to half the cost of the job is immunized against overages.
What’s more, from a more global perspective, there is a strong argument to be made for the less wasteful, less carbon intensive nature of off-site construction. Let’s look at waste first. Factories are much better at matching material inventory to production needs. Crews on site always over order. They have to, because the cost of having too little on site is simply too high. Often the extra material is returned, but equally often it is wasted in one way or another. Industry-wide comparisons between site and off-site construction point to a 22-52% reduction in waste for off-site construction. The environmental impact of that is significant, given that an estimated 40% of landfill waste comes from the construction industry.
The difference in carbon footprint between these two building processes may be even more dramatic. Several well-established and well-run residential construction companies have tracked the carbon footprint of their operational processes. One of these found that over 80% of their carbon footprint could be attributed to commuting time by their workforce and the delivery miles traveled by their materials. This is a staggering number and one that is very difficult to lower, especially in non-urban environments. Generally speaking, modular manufacturing facilities are located closer to urban centers where workforce commutes take far less time, use far less energy and therefore have far smaller carbon footprints. Same goes for the delivery of materials.
What other interests do you pursue when you aren’t on the job site?
In my spare time I enjoy trail running and mountain biking in the summer and backcountry skiing in the winter. I also enjoy tinkering with an old Miata of mine and an even older (1959) Dodge pickup, as well as writing both fiction and non-fiction short stories and essays.
Anything else you’d like to share?
Despite the really serious and really terrifying situation we humans have gotten ourselves into, I feel remarkably both lucky and hopeful, the source of those feelings lying with the relationships I’ve lucked into and built up with people at companies like BrightBuilt.
