Installation

The stage

Parts arrive and are set in place by many trades in a fixed order: frame, roof, windows, pipes, wires, insulation, finishes. Most of what goes wrong in building goes wrong here, where one trade’s work meets the next.

What the usual way assumes

That a builder’s skill is juggling. Drawings are finished on site, trades trip over each other, the schedule has no slack, and a slow payer gets the crew’s second-best effort.

What we do instead

Treat the trades as the customer. A tradesperson asks for four things: complete drawings, a clean and ready site, a schedule that holds and prompt pay. None of those is a favor. Each is something a builder either organizes or doesn’t. We wrote about that here.

Plan slack on purpose. We put time buffers where trades hand over to each other, so one delay can’t knock down the rest.

Give pipes and wires their own space. Services run in a dedicated cavity inside the airtight layer, so no outlet box or vent ever punctures it. That makes the wall tighter today and easier to open later.

What we don’t know yet

How small our margin for error really is. Parts made to bolt together don’t forgive a frame that is out of square. We expect to learn this the hard way, on site, and to publish what it cost.