With lumber prices skyrocketing, the home construction industry last week took a look at what may be the future: steel framing.
Steel instead of 2 by 4s? Believe it.
Some home builders around Tampa Bay are already using steel framing. Others who attended the National Association of Home Builders' convention in Las Vegas last weekend liked what they saw. Steel framing was Topic A, and a steel-framed house was constructed in the convention center parking lot to let builders take a close look.
"I don't think we have any choice," said Ken Humphreys of Siek Builders in Palm Harbor. "The consumer won't have a choice."
Lumber prices rose from $305 per 1,000 board feet last July 2 to $510 for the same amount on Dec. 30. Industry experts say the use of steel can save $3,000 to $6,000 on the price of a 2,000-square-foot home.
Although the prospect of an alternative to costly lumber is appealing, the steel industry has a selling job to do - to builders, who need to learn how to work with steel, and to consumers, who must be persuaded to accept it.
Here's the pitch from the steel industry. Steel framing won't rot, it won't burn, termites won't eat it, it won't split or crack, it's recyclable. It's held together with screws, which are stronger than nails. It is said to be hurricane- and earthquake-tolerant. Since the steel is grounded, they say, it won't turn a house into a giant lightning rod. The strength of steel allows for longer spans, so a house can be designed without interior load-bearing walls, which allows for big airy spaces or cathedral ceilings.
Yet steel is light: "I can ship out a whole house in a small pickup truck," said Tom Morris, who works with his family's Melbourne-based construction business, Jim Morris & Sons Inc. Said his brother John: "I can carry 20 studs at a time upstairs in just my arms."
Steel framing has been around for decades in commercial building, of course. Steel for home construction was first proposed at the Chicago World's Fair in 1933 but went nowhere for several reasons, explained John Ewing, managing director for business development at U.S. Steel. The prototypes then were overbuilt; the steel industry tried to market them on its own, without the involvement of the housing industry; and steel cost more than lumber.
Times have changed. The steel industry is seeking new markets and perceives it has a product that meets the market's needs.
One of the biggest hurdles for the steel and construction industries is retraining framing carpenters to work with steel. "There aren't enough people who know how to put a house together," said Peter Tibma of Nohl Crest Homes, which builds in Hillsborough, Pasco and Pinellas counties and has talked about using steel. On the other hand, he said, "It's not brain surgery."
"There's a little bit of a learning curve" as carpenters learn to use tin snips, chop saws and screw guns, said Greg Turain, director of construction for Westfield Homes, which uses steel studs for non-load-bearing interior walls in its communities of Cobbs Ridge, Coventry at Ridgemoor and The Enclave at GlenEagles, all in North Pinellas.
But once a worker is trained, he said, it takes about the same amount of time to frame in steel as in lumber. Westfield has retrained some framing carpenters and has hired some steel framers who formerly worked on commercial buildings.
Westfield used interior steel studs for 95 percent of the 120 houses it built last year, said Lonnie Herman, director of sales and marketing. The builder still uses wood trusses and wood studs for exterior load-bearing walls, preferring to move "one step at a time," Turain said, but "is looking into both trusses and exterior walls" made of steel.
(Westfield uses masonry block walls; this year's New American Home, an "idea house" built for the Las Vegas convention, used expanded polystyrene blocks filled with concrete for its walls.)
Another problem steel construction faces is that there are no building codes for steel trusses or steel exterior walls in residential construction. Each wall or roof has to be engineered by an architect or engineer; construction crews can't simply refer to a standard code book. But the steel industry is confident that will come.
The wood-steel combination Westfield is using may be the model for the rest of the industry as workers get comfortable with something new. "This isn't a steel-versus-wood issue," said Bruce Ward of Res-Tek International in Salem, Ore., who has been building with steel for 16 years. "We don't promote going to 100 percent steel if you're not comfortable with it. And you can't expect wood crews to be as efficient immediately on steel."
Ward estimated he's paying 42 cents a foot for a 2 by 4 but only 35 cents a foot for 3 1/2-inch, 20-gauge steel. A 2 by 6, he said, runs 65 cents a foot; 6-inch steel is 45 cents a foot.
Steel officials caution that the quality of steel is important: Low-grade steel doesn't function as well as high-grade. Some builders at the Las Vegas convention wondered whether steel's traditionally stable prices will start a roller-coaster ride like those of lumber once steel framing becomes common. Some worried about safety when working with metal, but builders with experience with steel say steel is no more hazardous than wood.
The biggest challenge, said U.S. Steel's Ewing, is creating a nationwide distribution network.
Duane Smith, construction superintendent for Westfield at Cobbs Ridge, stood Wednesday morning in a house under construction and pointed to an 18-foot floor-to-ceiling steel stud. "If we used wood for that, we'd have to piece it together," he said. You can buy 18-foot wood studs, but the cost is prohibitive, he said.
Then he turned and pointed to the opposite wall, also studded in with steel. "You get straighter walls than with lumber," he said. "God didn't make it that way, it was manufactured that way." Because steel does not expand or contract as wood does with humidity changes, drywall is less likely to warp or pop its fasteners.
Frank and Mary Benedetto live a few doors away in Cobbs Ridge in a home with interior steel studs, and they're satisfied. There's no tinny sound to TV or stereo, Frank Benedetto said, and he doesn't pick up radio transmissions through the studs. The only problem he's had is determining where the studs are when he wants to hang pictures.
"You can tap a nail in and ruin the drywall and you won't realize why the nail didn't go in," he said. He took snapshots of the house before it was drywalled, and now he refers to those when he wants to hang something. He uses a steel-bit drill if he's putting a hanger into a stud.
As for lightning? Randy Poucher of Randy's Electric, the big Pinellas electrical contractor, said a house with interior steel studs should not need special protection. A house with all-steel construction might want to have a lightning arrester, he said. The possibility of lightning strikes is not a major concern, he said.
Forty-five percent of the homebuilders' members said they'd consider building with steel. The steel industry reports that in 1992, there were 500 steel-framed homes; last year, between 15,000 and 20,000. This year, the target is 75,000 steel-framed homes, and the steel industry hopes to achieve 25 percent of all new homes, or 250,000, by 1997.
Among them may be a neighborhood of 200 homes in Florida City, near Homestead in South Florida, to replace homes damaged or destroyed by Hurricane Andrew. The American Iron and Steel Institute is working with a non-profit Christian construction organization on the project, which will provide homes for people with incomes under $15,000. The project's name: Andrew Estates.
The industry must also persuade consumers that while steel is less expensive than wood, this change in construction isn't an effort to sell "cheap" houses and that steel's conductivity of heat and cold won't chill or heat their house and that the galvanized coating will protect the steel from rust, a consideration here in the bay area.
Lane Lance, of LanCo Construction and Development in Seminole, said he's considering building with steel, but acknowledges there are unanswered questions. "We have to stand behind what we do," he said as he waited Sunday night for his plane home from the builders' convention to take off from Las Vegas. "That's why builders are reluctant to be the first."
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