Military Family Housing - Fort Lewis, WA.

Our team was especially proud of this competitive bid design-build military housing project. We incorporated a great

mix of preconstruction efforts seamlessly through the execution and completion of this project. This was especially a

pleasure for me due to the fact that I was the preconstruction manager, design lead and ultimately the onsite project manager.

Since Fort Lewis is heavily timbered we had to log and deck the project site prior to the commencement of construction.

Therefore we looked to opportunities to be especially efficient during this “down-time”, taking from my experiences as

a carpenter with the fast track residential builder “Berg & Divosta” we took on an assembly-line approach.

We panelized on-site all of our wall panels for each of the homes, we were able to set up a project flow matrix which

allowed us to have onsite the correct number trusses, windows, siding materials as well as wall panels. All parts were

located, numbered and tagged. Then we set about training the crews in single repetitious assembly style activities, to set

any single crew to fully complete one simple activity across the site prior to considering that crew free to perform the next

specific activity.

So we graded eight building sites, then started our batter-boards crew while still continuing the grading going

forward, got batter-boards on four building sites then released the form crew while batter-boards continued forward,

had three in form boards, then released underground and so on and on. When the one crew completed the circuit they

would either be let-go or if the skills were there we had these crew drop back to either assist the trades behind or got

these trades people started on the next assembly. We bid and bought according to the per-unit basis but set the total as

a lump sum for all units, paid on a completed assembly per unit on the “each” basis, this served as the trigger to release

next group of units all work was completed and quality was outstanding. This kept things moving, vendors engaged

while eliminating many lose-ends.

This project was the highest grossing profit project in the company’s fifty-year history. In turn we were awarded the

next three phases of housing in succession.