My mother has been in the kitchen design arena in various capacities for about 20 years now as I write this.  She's a certified kitchen designer, she's worked with solid surfaces with more focus than I'm sure she was looking for, she's come up with brilliant remodel designs, worked with people from the planning stages on new construction projects, taken on special-needs cases like universal kitchens and accessible bathrooms, and all sorts of other things I don't remember at the moment.  Basically, she's been in the business and she's seen it in action.

After I moved to Phoenix from my time in silly valley, I was looking around for something interesting to do in the new post-9/11 era, and had tried my hand at home automation with a slant toward conservation with a college friend of mine in Tempe.  That went nowhere, as I learned that home builders in Arizona don't want to beta-test on their clients.  This is sort of foreshadowing, actually, which is why I mention it.

One day I was a passenger with my mom as we were headed somewhere, and she was on the phone with a plumber about a project where she needed some information to enable some countertops to be fabricated and delivered to the job site.  The information she needed was the separation distance between faucet handles so that the cultured marble could be properly templated and poured for the job.  The plumber did not have that information, and the person who did was out for a week.  There was no annotation anywhere to be found to indicate this dimension, so fabrication of the countertop would wait for a full week for the lack of one length measurement.  Actually, drilling out the mounting holes at the site was possible, but the bottom line was that this sort of information should have been easily accessible even if this person were to never return from absentia.

When the call ended, I asked why it was that a home construction project, which is something that goes on hundreds or thousands of times each day here in the Phoenix area, would be so confused and disorganized.  I figured this sort of problem had been solved in the computer business, with tools like revision control systems, email, news groups, and now project web pages and all that sort of thing.  This lead us to an idea.

Why not create a portal-type website where builders and subcontractors could share information like this handle distance for a bathroom faucet so that it would always be available?  Make a version that will work with cell phones-- which everybody has on the job sites-- and you could check out project information any time without having to get a particular person on the phone.

Now, when my parents moved to Arizona in 1977, they had a home built, and when the house was framed my dad went in and snapped photos of every single wall and any other interesting spot in the structure.  Over the years, those have been invaluable, through a broken pipe that runined kitchen cabinets and an entire wall, a remodel project, some wire tracing, and even simple things like putting some nails in walls to hang things.  Every pipe, wire, and stud was clearly visible in each photo.

I figured we could do the same thing for this portal.  We would visit each site before the insulation was installed so that all wiring and plumbing would be visible in the frame structure.  We took that a step further and figured that since we would have detailed photos, why not detailed specs, so that this project page would include not only dimensions for faucets and other such things, but what part number for that faucet, where it was purchased and who installed it.  After years of working with people on remodel projects when they didn't have any idea what kind of countertop or cabinetry or carpeting or tile or whatever they had had in the home for years, this seemed like a pretty straightforward notion.  Even better, at the end of the project all of this information could be dumped to a CD-ROM so that the builder and buyer would always have a record of the project for posterity.

Finally, to get started on this, I figured it would be easier to work backwards.  Convincing all of the people who work on a home to sit at a computer or work from their cell phone would be a tricky task, but surely the CD-ROM would be useful, so we could collect that information manually, build the CD from photos and specs and user manuals and architectural drawings, and deliver the whole thing once the project was finished.  We even added a final feature, where would would visit the site before the house closed and get photos of the empty house as it would be delivered to the buyer.

We convinced a builder in Fountain Hills to let us document an entire home project from start to finish for free, which gave us a complete demostration CD.  We then went to other builders and showed them this while we described the scenario above, and we were greeted with a very positive resposne.  In fact, we started getting projects to work on!  Imagine that, a new idea that actually goes somewhere!

Our pricing model was based on square footage, and we accepted 50% of the total payment to start the project, with the balance due on completion.  I would personally visit the sites and take 100 or more digital photos with a Nikon CoolPix 5000 with their 19mm (35mm equivalent focal length) wide angle lens attachment, which made for some pretty informative photos.   I would take these photos and annotate them, so that each wall or each plumbing feature or wire run could be seen according to where it was in the home.

On a few occassions, we had builders call us up to get a particular photo of a particular wall that had been covered over with drywall.  Locating a valve or a waste line or the hot and cold line swap or whatever was simple with these photos and in most cases paid for our services in the savings of time and job quality.  Basically, our value-add was becoming more and more apparent.

There was a problem, though.  Contractors in Arizona have been building homes for generations.  The process evolves very slowly, with cell phones and fax machines dominating the workflow.  Home buyers are used ot receiving a binder or a manila envelope full of invoices and other information, a roll of plans from the architect, some appliance user manuals in one of the drawers in the kitchen, and the left-over paint and other scrap materials in the garage.  What we were offering sort of revolutionized that since everything was accessible on a single CD-ROM using a web browser, and it could all be copied and passed along to a new buyer or used in the event of a fire or other catstrophic event.  In order to accomplish this end result, though, we had to insert ourselves into that slowly-evolved workflow, and that proved to be our downfall.

What we needed from the home builder was an accounting of what was going into the home through the project.  If I went to snap photos of the finished project and saw that an appliance installed did not match an appliance we had an invoice or other record for, our deliverable would be inaccurate and, in effect, "broken," so we needed to be "in the loop" on day-to-day changes and progress.  A custom or semi-custom home has a ton of specification data associated with it, and while it would be quite reasonable to collect and sort that information as it becomes available and as it changes, we always ended up getting a pile of invoices and specs after the buyer closed on the home and moved in.

As anyone who waits for April 15th at 5pm to start doing their taxes knows, saving everything up until the last minute can make completion that much more difficult, particularly if accuracy is important.  Despite our urgings, we always ran into this problem, where we would have to sort through detail-poor documents to try to figure out what actually ended up in the home.  Sometimes we would have to refer to project photos to figure out whether a particular light or fixture was located in a particular room, and sometimes nobody seemed to know.

At the end of the day, a few things became apparent:

• Your product or service must be easier to use than to not-use.  In other words, a labor-saving process needs to require the least possible amount of turmoil to implement, or the labor-savings might become invisible to your clients.  That was a tough-but-valuable lesson.
• The home construction business has some deeply-planted roots.  Some builders use email and visit websites, but your typical home builder works from a pickup truck and uses a cell phone intensively, with a fax machine back at their base (their home or an actual office).  This workflow has been established through generational business practices, and is difficult to change from outside.
• Despite the fact that every home buyer who saw or received our final deliverable was impressed, the fact that the legacy binder or other less-organized, less-modern offerings were already accepted across the board made our services interesting as a value-add, but not essential.  We were not on the critial path in any way, which made us expendable.

So in the end, it was taking a tremendous amount of time to collect project information, it was taking even longer to make sure it was correct, and more often than not we were getting information long after the project itself was completed.  Since we were not on the critical path, we had to be careful to find out when the walls would be closed up and when the buyers would move in so that we could get the photos, and sometimes the architects would balk at our request to get digital copies of plans (though a large-format scanner at a local blueprint service bureau solved that problem).

Many of our projects only went the first 50% before interest was apparently lost.  In the final analysis, our service was viewed by our general contrator clients as extremely cool but not essential, and apparently not worth the extra effort required to make it happen.  Our costs to make up for this were greater than our revenues, which was a recipe for shutdown.

Thus, our effort lasted for something just longer than 2 years.  Lessons were learned, money was spent, profits were nil, and in the end we have moved on to other things.  It was a learning experience to be sure, but a frustrating one.