John Wyatt

In our current building climate, rockers, tapers, finishers, all want a complete range of products to handle every job. And the manufacturers seem eager to please, as every tradeshow will undoubtedly showcase the latest of a company’s line.

Three units on four lots of land on the beach-all designated for family. That is what Ed Arnold, owner and president of Arnold & Associates, will have once he finalizes his new family compound in Long Beach’s Peninsula area. The retired Los Angeles fire department veteran will have his dream house for him and his children as he enjoys his twilight years right on the beach. Surf’s up.

Florida: the land of sunshine, gators, sandy beaches, margaritas and concrete masonry units. The state of Florida was built on masonry or concrete construction.

The Alpha Chi Sigma fraternity faced a catastrophe when an original decorative plaster ceiling was destroyed by a leaky bathtub. This unit, on the second floor of the fraternity house in Ann Arbor, Mich., lacked a 35-cent washer.

A new three-and-one system dares to make contractors’ jobs easier while reducing labor costs.

As indicators suggest another year before housing starts rebound, has the remodeling market seen a spike in activity? The walls and ceilings community seems divided on the answer.

After reading the article “The Habituals” (Walls & Ceilings, Sept. 2005) about the Jimmy Carter Work Project in Detroit that W&C and other BNP Media sister publications were involved in, Joseph Lyman, the Insulating Concrete Form Association’s executive director, wanted to show metro Detroit another kind of construction project. This one would be a Habitat home utilizing a very unique design, one that incorporated ICFs for the foundation and above-grade floors, structural insulated panels for the roof and gable and an acrylic finish for the exterior.

The annual STUD U, a program that commences just before the METALCON trade show opens each year, began Saturday, Sept. 30., in Tampa. Assembled in various conference rooms within the convention center, the Steel Framing Alliance’s Marybeth Ruzzito and Nadir Elhajj welcomed the class of 31 individuals who came to learn more about cold-formed steel. Some from as far as Brazil to New Zealand to Fiji hadn’t worked with metal framing and came to understand more about the system and its functions.

This feature article is a case study of a project in the Seattle area where a condominium project was slated to be built out of wood framing members but was switched to steel framing in the final stages of design.