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Click here to read the article (PDF)

I have a B.A. in structural engineering from the University of Florida.  I had worked for a large commercial contractor – Omni Construction in Washington, D.C. – and was in the arena of doing large commercial projects.  I had the opportunity to do a high-end custom home.  I decided to leave and go out on my own.  I’ve built high-end custom homes ever since.
In commercial development, the most important thing is time.  To consumers buying a new home, it’s quality.  I was tired of sacrificing quality, and I’m not writing the interest-carry checks as a big developer.  Usually we will work with clients.  I’ve never build the same house twice.  We work with them to arrive at an external facade and look and an internal look.  Half the time they have a lot; half the time we find them a lot.  We’ll build on any lot or acreage within a 125-mile radius outside Washington.
My annual volume has almost doubled every year.  I build about 5 homes per year for a dollar volume of $5 million. We are deeply rooted with real estate referrals.  I choose to spend my marketing money with them.  It’s hard to market what we do because we can do so much – whatever a customer dream is.  About half the homes we build are Smart Houses.  At that price range, people say to themselves, “What’s another $20,000?”  It’s a much easier sell.  It lends another touch of credibility to the fact that we’re on the cutting edge.

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Gretchen E. Yahn was asked to build a new house for a couple – nothing unusual there.  But she was instructed to make the house look old so that it fit in with the historical nature of the Virginia countryside where it was to be built. “In order to meet this goal, we utilized natural components, such as stone and stucco systems,” said Yahn, president of Castlerock Enterprises, Inc., The Plains, VA.  “Compounding this was the major requirement that this home take on a French country look in terms of aesthetics,” she said.  “In doing so, we had an inordinate amount of steep roof pitches and curved roofs – it was just an incredibly cut up roof.”Yahn had engineer Randy Hoffman work closely with her long-time component supplier, Shoffner Industries, Inc., to design the roof as a component system.  “The biggest challenge in the roof system was that we had different roof angles coming together at different points,” Hoffman said.  “There would be four trusses all pitching at different directions and the challenge was bringing them together so that they would stay together structurally.” The structure was also beefed up by using microllams to hold it up “Because we had a lot of free spans inside, not to mention we had typical ceiling height of 13 feet, nine inches on the first floor,” Yahn said.  “We also had a lot of combinations of standard gables with hips and curvilinear roofs.” The roof components for the 180-feet long house went up in three days.  “If we would have stick framed it, it would have taken us in excess of three-and-a-half to four weeks,” Yahn said.  Added Vince Palazzi of Shoffner Industries, “Castlerock was the only contractor who could make the owners’ timetable and the trusses helped make this possible for the contractor.”
For the component floor system, Castlerock used Georgia-Pacific’s Series 43 Wood I.  “With the Series 43, we used the deflection of L over 640 because the owner wanted to feel as if they were walking on concrete and the Series 43, which is one of Georgia-Pacific’s beefier components, allowed us to achieve that on the spans,” Yahn said.  “It also allowed us, in certain areas, to drop down the size of the Wood I and not have any transition problems between wood flooring and tiled areas.”
Yahn offered a top to fellow builders when it comes to utilizing components for framing needs. “You have to do your homework up front.  Make sure you’re getting your shop drawings.  Shoffner does a very good job of engineering shop drawings and working with us in that process.” The teamwork paid off because components played an integral role in making the new look old.