What do you get when you put five engineers alone in a room for a year and give them a problem to solve?

Rob Boydstun got a revolutionary new product: affordable green housing.

The president of Boydstun Metal Works has gone from building commercial car carriers to constructing manufactured green homes out of the crushed carcasses of junked vehicles. (About four to six cars per house.)

"I knew I needed to diversify in order to stay afloat," says Boydstun, who launched his startup, Miranda Homes (mirandahomes.com), about a year and a half ago. "Our goal was to build a home that is sustainable but also affordable."

Boydstun does so in all earnestness -- and not just because his empty assembly plant is a painful daily reminder of the 400 employees he has laid off in the past year because of the downturn in the automobile industry.

Boydstun wants to change the way we build houses.

By turning a fresh eye on the construction industry -- and taking full advantage of his own established infrastructure -- Boydstun has trimmed the fat from an often wasteful construction process and created a highly efficient home to boot.

"One day out of nowhere, Rob called us in and said, 'I've got this idea for getting into the housing market,'" says Loren Hanson, one of Boydstun's five engineers on staff.

Tucked into the far corner of a sprawling parking lot in St. Johns, their 2,570-square-foot experimental model looks like an average family home straight out of a leafy Beaverton suburb. With an attached two-car garage, three bedrooms, 2½ baths and an open floor plan, it's meant to feel familiar.

But average it's not.

A new Energy Star-rated home is allowed as many as seven air changes per hour, which is well above code; Boydstun's model home recently clocked just 2½ air changes per hour, according to Andrew Shepard, a green building specialist with Earth Advantage who performed the test.

What's more, Boydstun's experimental model home -- based on a stock plan from a magazine -- was completed for $95 a square foot.

"It's a wonderful concept," says Shepard. "There are a lot of inefficiencies in standard building practices -- waste in insulation, wood framing, and multiple trips to the work site by subcontractors."

By visiting construction sites and asking countless questions, Boydstun's engineers got a good handle on what works -- and what doesn't.

Then they put their heads together and booted up their computer-assisted design programs.

"Because none of us knew anything, we just had the (building) code guiding us the whole way," says Hanson.

The goal was to find areas where they could shift work from the job site to the more controlled environment of the plant, cutting out inefficiencies along the way.

Over the course of a year, the team made energy efficiency their mantra. They emphasized a tight structural envelope encased in rigid foam insulation and slathered wall cavities and crawl spaces with blown-in foam insulation for a more airtight seal. The finished, insulated crawl spaces between floors containing the home's heating, ventilating and cooling systems allow for shorter duct runs and smaller, high-efficiency furnaces.

In essence, they've constructed a stick-built house, except that the framing members are made of recycled steel, not wood. Everything is pre-engineered, from the plumbing and wiring to the insulated wall and panelized roof systems that are delivered, fully assembled, to the work site.

"By controlling our processes, we control our costs," explains Boydstun. "You can have a highly efficient house that's affordable."

All told, Boydstun's engineers have narrowed the process of building a house down to 45 days, compared with an average of six to nine months for a standard home, he says.

It takes five workers for Boydstun to complete a home, compared with the 15-plus subs required to complete a similar-size home the old-fashioned way.

Numbers like those are getting noticed by folks such as Bonnie Serkin, chief operating officer for Landwaves Inc., a master developer that is in the early stages of designing a planned community called Wilder in the coastal town of Newport.

"It really does stand out as a unique method of construction," says Serkin, who has a long-standing interest in modular housing. "The end product looks very familiar, but there are a whole lot of big differences."

Eventually, Miranda Homes will offer dozens of different home models for potential buyers, says Boydstun.

Getting the software set up for each home model is the hard part, he says, requiring extensive front-end work on the part of his engineers.

Currently, they've developed five home models, but they will also engineer other plans sold by architects and design firms, such as Alan Mascord Design Associates.

For instance, Boydstun's team is engineering a model for the Wilder development based on a Northwest-inspired cottage by Washington architect Ross Chapin. The 'Coho Cottage' has an Earth-friendly footprint of about 1,200 square feet.

But it's not just about being green -- good design at a palatable price is a must.

"We want to offer an excellent product to regular people at regular prices," says Serkin.

More than that, she adds, "Rob can provide soul for not very much money."

Source: The Oregonian, February 26, 2009