Reimagining how affordable homes are built

Affordable housing is right now a crisis in the United States and framing is actually a big portion of the cost of the house. In this project, we're using the PAVE method. PAVE stands for Prefabricated Approaches and Volunteer-based Enhancement. It's an innovative method for framing. Every piece is pre-cut and assembled together in the shop as modules of frames. And on the job side, because everything is modularized and everything is perfectly labeled and we know where things are going to be installed, so it's very fast. All right, we're going to go this way. Rotate around. We're trying to introduce manufacturing principles into a low-tech, very accessible volunteer group. We have students from all over the university right now. We just ask for volunteers in general. So it's not just construction or engineering or design students. We have students from all over. The goal is we're going to produce all the walls for a two-story home, ship them out, and the next week they'll go up. We partner with Habitat for Humanity. This house is going to be in Williamsburg. It's going to go to a family in need. It's very difficult to kind of reduce the cost of some of these different parts of the home. And so we're trying to tackle that. We are working every day now with industry to figure out what do they need, how can we help them solve those those questions hopefully what it does is it brings the price of producing a home down and it makes builders realize that there are a lot more options out there that they just might need to rethink it a little bit and think of it differently that's what is nice about universities and research is we can take the time to kind of explore some of these pieces that builders might not either have the time or the ability to do