Pat Buchanan of Buchanan Construction Systems has been building custom homes in Boulder since the early '90s. He started as a framer, moved into supervision six months into a five-year build of a 16,000 square foot house near NCAR, and went on to work for years with Tom Stanko at Harrington Stanko. He says he still quotes Tom to subcontractors about three times a day.

Alex and Pat talk about what happens when a builder steps into design. Pat walks through an architect's flooring spec he couldn't stand behind: 5/8" engineered plank, a 2mm wear layer, a pine core, 9" wide, over radiant heat. One substitution rippled into the paint colors, the cabinets and the schedule. They cover the liability that comes with changing a spec (the Spearin Doctrine), and what Alex calls being the steward of the design.

They also get into Pat's 5% target on budget and schedule, why he sets a tile order date 12 weeks before install with a confirmation meeting four weeks before that, how his escalation allowance went from 7% a year to 30 to 35% after COVID, and why he recommends an owner's rep to every client. Pat also explains what a CLT roof fabricated in Austria bought him: a roof installed in two weeks, at roughly a $200,000 premium. The conversation closes on panelization and double-stud walls.

The Build Project gives the mic to everyone who builds a house, from the architect to the person sweeping the floor. Hosted by Alex Molkentin of Fernhill Build Studio.

Chapters
00:00 Intro
01:50 From framer to supervisor on a 16,000 sq ft house
05:21 When the carpenter becomes the builder
09:15 Lessons from Tom Stanko and Harrington Stanko
16:35 Stepping on design toes
19:46 One flooring spec, a whole project changed
26:17 Budget and schedule within 5%
28:51 Escalation after COVID
34:43 Why a builder wants an owner's rep
40:04 Picking subs
46:03 How the builder's role is changing
51:48 CLT roofs and commercial methods in custom homes
55:02 Panelization and double-stud walls

Every house is assembled by people, so every house accumulates error. Traditional trim was never only decoration. Overlapping profiles and reveals were the mechanism that absorbed that error and made the result read as deliberate. Contemporary detailing deletes the mechanism. It does not delete the error.

That is the argument running underneath this conversation with Mark Schaefer, one half of FS Woodworks and one of the finish carpentry companies we have worked with the longest. Mark's number for flush base is three to four times an applied baseboard, and the useful question is not the multiple, it is where the money goes. It goes upstream. When the visible tolerance drops to zero, the work does not disappear, it relocates into sequencing, framing material, shop drawings, and the order in which decisions get made. Doors hung before drywall and before flooring, reversing a hundred years of residential sequence. Framing that would have been forgiven by a piece of applied base now has to be straight on its own. A company paid for finish carpentry ends up doing much of its real work months earlier, in drawings and phone calls, before anyone puts on a tool belt.

So the episode keeps circling one distinction: skill that shows, and skill that was planned. A carpenter scribing tight into irregular stone is visible talent and it photographs well. A builder who sets a piece of plywood at the stone line six months earlier, so the stone gets laid to the wood and the joint is straight once the wood comes out, gets the better result and leaves no evidence behind. Mark's preference between those two is not ambiguous, and it says something about what he thinks he is actually selling.

The back half is about who carries the risk that this kind of detail creates. Full time site supervision. Floor protection paid for properly or not attempted. Pocket doors at roughly $2,000 a door in hardware, and what happens to a door cage when the person hanging the drywall is paid by the board. Whether a homeowner has been told they are living in a prototype. Then labor, which is where Mark is most direct: fifteen people, W-2 for anyone who wants it, workers' comp, paid holidays, no health benefits yet, and what he says that costs the two guys who own the company.

His rule is the compressed version of the whole hour. If engineered studs are not in the budget, flush base should not be either.

Two things about this version. It leads with an idea rather than a search term, so the discoverable words are doing their work in the middle of the copy instead of the first line, which is the right trade for an architect audience and the wrong one for cold homeowner search. And the first paragraph now carries the thesis, which means it is the paragraph to reuse verbatim as the blog deck and the YouTube description opener so the three surfaces argue the same thing.