BUILDING GREEN - Step 2. Form a Team

BUILDING GREEN - Step 2. Form a Team

It takes a lot of people to make a house a reality—designers, engineers, a general contractor (builder), construction workers, appraiser, lender, insurer, realtor, building officials, inspectors, and more. Maybe you won’t need all of them, and you probably won’t have to choose all of them yourself, (for example, the lender may choose the appraiser; the builder probably will select all the construction workers). But you need to make sure that all these people are on the same team—your team—all communicating and cooperating to produce the best possible result. You’ll need to choose people who are willing to work as a team and you’ll need to make sure the design and building process is set up to facilitate this. You might assume that teamwork is the norm. It isn’t! It’s actually more common for the various parties to have little or no contact with each other. They may even view each other as adversaries. What starts as a lack of communication can snowball to a lack of coordination and to conflicts that result in a lower-quality and higher-priced home.

It takes a lot of people all working together to make a house a reality. Here are just a few of the team members you might need—a lender, designer, builder, and craftspeople.

A good team will help you refine and prioritize your goals, and then help you make the specific choices that meet your goals. For example, it may not have occurred to you that a building affects your health, but a good green team will be sure you understand this. Then they will advise you about what to include and exclude in your home to promote a healthy indoor environment (where you will usually spend the most hours of your day).

A good team shares and integrates its expertise. A building is not an aggregation of unconnected parts, but rather a unit, each part affecting another. Team members understand this and pool their knowledge so better solutions to problems can be found and money saved.