 IMAGINE TRYING TO BUILD A SIX-BEDROOM, 3,000-square-foot house in under a week—pulling 20, 30, sometimes even 60-hour shifts in the rain. Imagine trying to oversee a team of as many as 170 construction firms and over 3,000 general and trade volunteers to accomplish your goal. And in spite of these challenges, saying you’d do it all again if you had the chance. That’s exactly what Trumbull-Nelson President Larry Ufford said about his company’s recent involvement in the Extreme Makeover: Home Edition project to construct a home for the Marshall family in Lyme, New Hampshire.
“The excitement and enthusiasm generated by this project was electric. I’ve never seen anything like it,” he said. “Would I do it again, you bet I would.”
Myriad subcontractors and volunteers who worked alongside Trumbull-Nelson are now basking in a sense of community pride at what many might consider a miraculous achievement. These people know the task was anything but miraculous, requiring instead a lot of expertise, meticulous preplanning, careful orchestration, and intense team-building. A project that began with television cameras and a desire to help one’s neighbor resulted in a lot of hard work and a blueprint for how to approach challenging projects in the future.
The Decision
 “I received a call late on a Friday afternoon from someone claiming to be involved with Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, and my first reaction, was ‘yeah, right,’” said Steve Usle, director of sales and marketing at Trumbull-Nelson. That was August 21, only a little more than a month before the build was supposed to begin. After a half-hour of discussion with the producers of the show and a few calls to verify references, Usle brought the idea to Ufford, and Trumbull-Nelson Vice President, Ron Bauer. Although Ufford and Bauer immediately saw it as an opportunity “to make a real difference in somebody’s life,” they knew that this needed to be a team effort if they wanted to succeed. They quickly brought in key players from the Company, including project manager Jim Odorisio, and other key team leaders including Ken Merrow, Nate Carey, Bobby Allen, Jon McKeon, Jay Hoag, Kathleen Raynak, and Maria Shindler. The team leaders then met with the show’s executive producers to weigh the project’s feasibility.
“From a Company standpoint we knew it was going to tie up more resources than we could imagine. We had to make a decision whether we could spare those resources from ongoing projects,” said Odorisio.
Trumbull-Nelson also sought advice from contractors who had participated in previous Extreme Makeover: Home Edition projects such as The McKernon Group, who had worked on the Vitale family home in Athens, Vermont, and Reggie Moreau, who was part of the Voisine family build in Manchester, New Hampshire.
While the task sounded almost impossible at first, “We were immediately intrigued because of the logistical challenges,” said Odorisio. “From a professional standpoint, we saw a puzzle everyone wanted to try to solve, and an opportunity to learn new methods and techniques.”
“The excitement and enthusiasm generated by this project was electric.”
On August 26, Trumbull-Nelson gave the project the go ahead, engaging Geoff Thornton as project architect and Rod Finley from Pathways Consulting as civil engineer. Finley, a resident of Lyme, was instrumental in working with the zoning board to secure the necessary approvals for the project.
The Planning
 One of the key decisions Trumbull-Nelson made early on was to contact subcontractors that the Company had worked with in the past, to ask them to oversee their aspects of the project, and in turn to recruit other subcontractors to work under them. Odorisio called this a rewarding experience because, after rehearsing a 5–10 minute spiel about the benefits of participating in the project, he quickly learned that most everyone was more than willing to say “Yes.”
“A project like this would normally take 10 months or so, not 100 hours… each hour of the build was equivalent to two traditional work days.”
| This plan gave valued subs and trades “ownership” of key parts of the project, and the responsibility for building their own teams. Following Odorisio’s request that his company coordinate the painting, Doug Windsor of House of Windsor contacted eight other painting contractors, six of whom immediately jumped on board. “Frankly, because of our desire to work with Trumbull-Nelson and other subcontractors to work with me, everyone said ‘yup,’” said Windsor. Going into the project, many were concerned about what effect the state of the economy would have on people’s willingness to contribute time and materials. In the end, Windsor felt the challenging economic climate may have made the answer of “Yes” even a more obvious choice. |
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Once the critical people were in place, Trumbull-Nelson began regular planning meetings with its construction design team.
“We met at least twice a week for half a day each time” said Odorisio. “At the initial meetings we had eight or 10 key contractors, but by the final meeting we had to break up into two separate groups because there were so many. A project like this would normally take 10 months or so, not 100 hours. As a result there was a crucial need to plan every detail, given that each hour of the build was equivalent to two traditional work days.” |
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“It reminded us... we are part of a bigger community,”
The Challenges
Foreseeing the need to be flexible, Odorisio and his operations manager, Ken Merrow, inserted “float time,” or extra time into the schedule, realizing that things would not always go as planned.
“In the first 24 hours, we built in six or seven hours of float,” said Merrow.
Early challenges, such as the unforeseen need to remove the existing concrete slab because of elevation issues, ate up their float time right away. This created a domino effect, delaying other aspects of the project. The drywall team, for example, led by Optimum Drywall of Litchfield, New Hampshire, had to wait through the night to do their work.
“Once they started they did a yeoman’s effort, but eventually they ran out of gas and had to get some sleep,” said Odorisio. As with other “bumps” in the road during the build, the result was that people needed to improvise, get creative, and use their personal connections to figure out solutions . . . as quickly as possible. Windsor and others were enlisted to phone in some backup help, including Upper Valley Drywall, who came in to complete the work. “They really were lifesavers in terms of keeping us on schedule,” said Odorisio.
One key aspect of addressing the challenge of how to build a house in 100 hours, was being able to panelize parts of the project ahead of time at William C. Wallace Prefab Corporation in Danbury, New Hampshire. The floors, as well as parts of the interior, exterior, and roof panels, were worked on at Wallace’s shop, with Quality Insulation spray foaming the walls and Economy Heating installing the radiant heat. Cole Electric was also able to drill holes, run wire, and install boxes. HP Roofing shingled the roof. As a result of these early efforts, Wallace Prefab was able to deliver the frame of the house, including the roof already shingled and insulated, and set it up in four-and-a-half hours. Many equated it to snapping pieces of a giant puzzle into place, but whereas a puzzle starts whole and is cut up, in this case every individual piece had been created separately to exacting specifications.
 Even by Extreme Makeover: Home Edition standards this build was particularly challenging. Due to the rural nature of the site, the staging area for materials and food was located three-and-a-half miles away at the Dartmouth Skiway. To make the logistics even more complicated, communications were severely limited at the site for most of the project.
Just as the framing was being completed, a cold, driving rain descended on the workers, and it continued to pummel them periodically for nearly a day and a half. The building site grew increasingly muddy, and the builders, many of whom had already been working for 24 or more hours straight, shivered in the cold.
“It convinced me, more than ever, that if you get enough people working together there is nothing you can’t do,”
In spite of everything, tempers held. Merrow said that in his 126 hours on site, he saw only one minor spat during the pouring rain. “Typically in our business, everyone looks out for number one. Here, everyone looked out for everyone else,” he said. EMTs were on call in case of an accident. But miraculously, even with up to 400 people working at any one time—elbow to elbow in some extremely challenging conditions—there was not a single injury.
Moving Forward
 Windsor feels that this new-found respect among the trades will be one of the lasting effects of the project, moving forward. Throughout the build, people worked side-by-side with both typical partners and traditional competitors.
“I know that every single trade who worked on this project has a certain appreciation and respect for the other contractors, and we are going to continue to reach out and cooperate in a much more extensive manner than we ever would have in the past.”
Bill Wallace of Wallace Prefab feels that Trumbull-Nelson was instrumental in fostering this spirit. “They put their faith in their tradespeople and had confidence in us. If any one of us had not come through for them, they would have had mud on their face, but they stuck it out there with their subs and as far as I’ve heard, everyone shined,” he said.
Both Merrow and Odorisio feel that preplanning and a team approach will be helpful techniques in brainstorming strategies in the future. “Getting everyone at the table early to talk about potential hiccups and overlaps in the trades, as well as hear them talk over strategies, was a valuable experience we can use as an example that worked,” said Merrow.
This sense of teamwork and community has extended beyond the trades. Volunteer groups involved in the project have begun looking at ways to extend the spirit of volunteerism into their efforts. “It reminded us we are part of a bigger community,” said Usle.
“It convinced me, more than ever, that if you get enough people working together there is nothing you can’t do,” concluded Ufford.
Thank You T-N Crew!
I just wanted to thank the T-N crew for letting us be a part of the EMHE project. Jay, John, Bobby, Jim, and the rest of you did a great job keeping everyone’s spirits up. I don’t believe I have ever been thanked so many times in a two-day period and it made me feel good to be there. When I signed up I was doing it for the experience of the project—as a contractor I didn’t really believe it could be done. After I left the bustle of the site and had time to reflect, I came away with a new appreciation for community and volunteering. The best part was one point when I went out to my truck and a family walked past on the road. Their little girl, probably three or four, turned back and said “thank you stranger.” I couldn’t have felt much better than I did at that moment. I would be proud to volunteer my time to help more. Please contact me if there is anything I can do.
Chris Osgood
Mike Osgood and Sons Inc |
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