The drive to make energy efficient, solar powered, disaster resistant homes more affordable for working families has led to a series of innovations by Make It Right contractors, engineers, landscape architects and architects that could transform the green building industry. Traditionally, building green has added to the upfront costs of a home.  However, Make It Right’s work helping to rebuild New Orleans Lower 9th Ward, a low-income neighborhood devastated by Hurricane Katrina, has yielded a number of breakthroughs that have brought construction costs down.

Some examples are:

Advanced Framing
Make It Right builders implement “Advanced Framing Techniques” that minimize waste while simultaneously increasing the framing system’s strength through some simple methods. Advanced framing has allowed Make It Right to cut the amount of lumber used in the houses.  By switching from conventional 16-inch on-center spacing to 24-inch on-center, aligning the structural members of the house, and using metal fasteners in place of excess lumber at corners, headers, and intersecting walls, Make It Right is able to reduce material and labor costs, save energy, and make the house stronger.

Construction Type Testing
With six different construction types being implemented on a single jobsite, the Make It Right project is both a showcase and a laboratory for the construction industry.  Structural Insulated Panel (SIP) is foam insulation sandwiched between two sheets of material, either wood or steel. To date, Make It Right has utilized steel SIP, and two different types of wood SIP, each with unique components and installation systems that can be compared and evaluated.  The manufacturers of these SIP variations have natural incentive to prove their system is superior, which has already led to some improvements in these products.  Make It Right has also implemented modular construction, site-built stick construction with advanced framing techniques, and the Saebi Alternative Building System (SABS), which uses concrete-coated foam to create a strong, light-weight, and versatile foundation. A SABS foundation is currently being constructed for Make It Right’s floating house, which will be the first of its kind in America.

Foundation Building
Make It Right uses “friction piles,” timber posts that extend 40 feet into the ground.  These piles do not rest on subsurface bedrock (which does not exist in New Orleans) but rather relies on the post’s surface creating friction with the soil to hold it in place.  Concrete grade beams (also known as “footers”) rest on top of the piles just below the surface and interlock the piles to prevent lateral movement.  The footer supports eight-foot tall columns - well above the minimum elevation to allow the house to withstand a 100-year storm event - and all concrete used has a high recycle content.  By creating an engineering model of each house, Make It Right is able to achieve the maximum strength with minimum material, meaning that the Make It Right foundation uses about 1/3 the concrete of a foundation designed with “rules of thumb”. This saves substantial cost and energy.