First Responder
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I had an interesting talk the other day with Rick Westmoreland, out in Kansas City, Missouri. Over 30 years in construction, Rick has been a home improvement contractor, an HVAC contractor, and a production homebuilder banging out 100-plus houses a year. Right now, he's re-inventing his company again as a weatherization contractor, fixing up houses for the Weatherization Assistance Program in Kansas City.
"I'm stimulating the economy," says Rick. "I hired back some guys, I've been sending them to training, I've invested in some new equipment, I'm tweaking my production management software — I'm stimulating the economy."
I'm working with Rick currently on an article for JLC, about business systems for weatherization and home performance contracting companies. But I wanted to share right away a story Rick told me that sheds a little light on the real value of this kind of work.
"The first house we went and did," Rick told me, "was a tri-level, with the bedroom area above the garage, and then you step down into a living room and kitchen area. The homeowner is a firefighter with a disabled daughter. And when we went in, his wife said to me, 'The only thing I hope is that we can fix that bedroom level, because it has never been comfortable up there. We can never get that place cool.' So just standing in the entry vestibule and looking at the scope of work that the city gave us, I told her, 'I tell you what, I'll guarantee you'll feel the difference tonight.'"
"So as soon as we got up into the attic to air-seal the attic bypasses, the first thing I noticed was that there was an open soffit. The house was built in the seventies, and the hall bath had one of those soffits built down over the bathroom vanity; and from the attic, I can look right down into that soffit, and I'm looking right down the wall. This house was built before the codes came into our area that would require fire-blocking that would pan that opening off at the ceiling line. So here you've got this open wall that bisects that whole floor up there, and for lack of a better word, it's a vertical uninsulated attic bisecting the bedrooms. So we get up there and we cap that off and do an air-seal on it — we get all of our air-seal done the first day — and come back the next day and the guy was saying, ’Man, you know, the temperature dropped.’ But the weather had cooled off too, so he didn't think too much about it. So then we came back the next day and we insulated the attic."
A couple weeks later, says Rick, his crew chief, Wes, had to go back to the site on a call-back to fix a catch chain on the new insulated attic hatch over the folding-ladder access for the attic. The homeowner told Wes he was having a little trouble sleeping at night. Wes asked what the problem was, and the homeowner said,”It took me a while to figure it out, but I finally realized it's too quiet.” Rick explained that the air conditioner was cycling off. “In all the time he has lived there,” Rick said, ”the air conditioner unit outside his bedroom window has never shut off at night in the summertime. It has always run all night. Now it cycles off — and the rooms still stay at 72 degrees. He said, in all the time he’d lived there, those bedrooms had never seen 72 degrees in the summertime. They didn't even know it was possible."
"My reward," said Rick, "was seeing that homeowner and that disabled child and that family sit there and go, wow — we can enjoy our house like we've never enjoyed it before. I have no idea what impact that made on their finances or their utility bill, because that is yet to be determined. But I was able to walk out of that house and know that I made that house more comfortable, that day. I improved somebody's quality of life, in one day. To me, that is what home performance contracting is all about." "And," Rick went on, "You're adding net value to these people's single greatest asset. For the most part, people's homes are their largest asset. When you can go in and make that home safer, more healthy, with better indoor air quality, and lower their bills, at a guess, 40 or 50 bucks a month ... that feels pretty good."
It's worth noting. Home improvement contractors usually don't get to save lives, or save homes from total destruction, like firefighters. But in our own way, people in our industry are also first responders. People call you, you show up, and you make a difference. That's worth more than money — and it's a reason to care. You make someone's life better — that's a reason to get out of bed in the morning.