From simple bungalows to rainscreen technology: 50 years of change in the construction industry
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This video first ran in October 2011.
Allen Booth is a co-founder and sits on the board of directors for FirstOnsite Restoration. He has over half a century of experience in the construction/ restoration industry and is skilled in everything from building log homes to iron working for bridge construction. He talks to ILSTV about the incredible changes in building methods and materials that have occurred over the last 50 years.
Allen Booth: The methodology has been driven by various government levels through the implementation of changes to the building codes over time. That has allowed for more complicated building designs. For instance, very seldom do you see, if ever, in a highly populated area, a bungalow being built of the type that was built in the 50s and the 60s. Those types of buildings were very easy to put together, unsophisticated in their design and not difficult to take apart and reconstruct.
Over time, people’s desires for something different, something new, something “modern” changes, and now we have very sophisticated houses built in the highly populated areas. If you look at at roof structure of a house being built over the last ten years versus what was built in a ten year period between 1960 and 1970 the roof structure now is much more complicated, and because of that building codes mandate that they have to engineered; and because of the litigious society we now live in, the municipalities and these cities do not want to sign off on those structures unless they’ve been stamped and approved by an engineer.
So we find ourselves working with more complicated buildings now and in concert with engineers much more so than we did in the past.
I know in the Vancouver area there has been something new brought to the market in the last ten years called rainscreen technology; by virtue of the leaky building syndrome we had in Vancouver.
Green technology is certainly on the horizon and is here now in some forms, certainly in geothermal and solar. So we have to align ourselves with experts that can walk us through that and assure that the job is done properly.
There’s a much broader selection of materials. Certainly when I first started out you couldn’t walk through the aisles of Home Depot and Rona and have an opportunity to pick thirty or forty different light fixtures, or thirty or forty different cupboard handles, and on and on it goes, and the variety of flooring you have now. So sometimes that creates a bit of a challenge for the homeowner because sometimes a broader selection is just too much choice and they suffer from over choice and have problems on making a decision. And then from contracting standpoint it certainly adds a challenge to try and ascertain valuation of what someone had versus what they now want, and advising the adjuster if there is a difference in cost; and then they have to determine if there is the appropriate coverages.
