Birdhouse Dwellings Inc. was created to address a root problem in the housing industry, which has functioned, virtually unchanged, since the 1950's. The construction industry, in general, is well known to be one of the slowest adopters of new technology and methodologies, and this characteristic of the industry is now running up against ever-increasing demands for more supply, higher quality, and stricter code compliance. As a result, the cost and time required to build a home has never been higher, relative to the income of the average purchaser. We believe that this situation is intolerable and will not improve unless something changes, and drastically.
We also realized that, in order to make any kind of significant impact on this issue, we had to think beyond what we could physically accomplish by ourselves. As a result, we've chosen to adopt a business model that works a little differently:
- Henry Ford (of Ford Motors) was the grandfather of the automobile boom, he figured out how to make them affordable for the average person. His motto was "you can have any colour you want, as long as it's black." While we're not limiting you to just having a black dwelling, we are recognizing that the idea of 'custom design' is largely responsible for the exorbitant cost of building these days. To address that, we offer limited options for design and material selections. While it won't offend us if you ask, "can I change this?", be prepared for the answer to be "no". You can have custom design, or you can have efficiency and affordability; rarely both at the same time. Many aspects of our designs have been carefully decided upon for reasons of efficiency and affordability, and even slight changes could introduce many weeks (or months!) of delay and many thousands of dollars in additional costs. Trust us on this...
- We are experienced in land use and design, so we can help you cross that hurdle, which is often significant. The average home-owner/home-buyer only needs to deal with these complex and ever-changing regulations once or twice in their lifetime; we do it every day. This process is sometimes the most time-consuming part of the entire building process, you'll want to get through this with as few delays as possible, and confusion only slows things down.
- We don't assemble our units. We've gone to great lengths (and years of preparation) to design dwellings that are compact, efficient, and easy to build, as well as establishing relationships with the many various suppliers of engineering, materials, appliances, etc. You can build one yourself, if that's your thing, or you can have a contractor build one for you. If you go the contractor route, we can help you to choose who to work with.
- We will teach you or your contractor how to build it. As time goes by, we will be certifying contractors as licensed builders of our units.
- We can provide local or remote consulting assistance during construction, and we'll perform final inspections of the structure, prior to finishing, to ensure that the efficiencies of the design have been faithfully reproduced in the construction. We'll also provide instructions on how to remedy any flaws, if any are found.
