William Reid: [00:00:00] All right, we're back in the world of design series again, and I'm going to do a little mini-series, which we'll call the doctors of your home. In the past, we've covered in the world of design: architects, residential designers, interior designers, surveyors, geotechnical engineers, and civil engineers. If you remember, these were all of the architects, of course, and the residential designers were designing the conceptual design of the structure. Then we got into everything related to the dirt—I called it the lords of the dirt.

Now what we're going to get into is the actual building of the structure and who gets involved in that, and what consultants your architect's going to need. Because one of the first misconceptions [00:01:00] for a lot of homeowners is they think the architect does just about everything on the project, and that's not necessarily the case. So we're going to get into the first doctor of our homes, which is the structural engineer. This will be a little four-episode mini-series.

We'll be talking about the skeletal system, which is your structural engineer. We'll be talking about the respiratory system of your home, which is a mechanical engineer design—HVAC design. We'll be talking about your circulatory system, which is all of the electrical and lighting systems throughout your home. And then lastly, we'll be talking about your waste and water system and who does that.

So we've got four episodes coming up of the doctors of your home. We got the lords of the dirt out of the way. Now we're going to get into the doctors of your home. This is going to be a fun one, and the first one is structural engineering. Let's get into that, because this is the bones—this is the skeleton of your home that holds everything up.

Cool. So many people believe that an architect does [00:02:00] all of the design of a home, of a project beyond just the conceptual or the architectural design of the home. But in reality, I would say probably, maybe even a hundred percent of the time, but at least 80 to 90% of the time, there's a separate consultant that comes in that's a structural engineer.

Now architects and structural engineers go on the same path when it comes to their education, their credentials, and similar in their licensing, but architects tend to go more on the design side and the creativity side. And structural engineers go more on the engineering, the science, the math side, if you will.

So you've got two different kinds of minds. So a structural engineer—and I'm using that term structural engineer because that's the term that most people understand. In reality, they're a type of civil engineer. But I'm just going to use structural engineer for the rest of this [00:03:00] episode so that you understand that this is the person designing the structure of your home.

A structural engineer technically is a person that could design like bridges and high rises and things like that, but just to keep things simple, we're going to call everybody a structural engineer. So what happens is this is a really critical partnership between the architect and the structural engineer.

And they're probably the other than the architect being the primary designer on the project, the structural engineer is right behind him or her that is participating in the design. So what happens with this is as an architect's developing a design—and we'll get into the design process, but there's stages of the design process.

But during the very early stages of the design process, after all the conceptual design has been done, a smart architect will bring in a structural engineer into the fold, if you will, early [00:04:00] on to start consulting with on all of the things that they've envisioned on the home to make sure that they're feasible.

So that's what really happens—there's a coordination effort by the architect with the structural engineer to basically put their two different minds together to make sure that what we're designing is feasible. For example, you may want a large glass wall off the back of your home because you have a beautiful view and you just don't want to have any interruptions.

And that could require large scale windows with no posts or very minimal posts. And as a structural engineer looks at that on the early consultation, they'll be talking with the architect to decide we may need to be using a steel beam all the way across, or we may need intermediate posts here and here.

And that is how they collaborate on a design. Now architects are very [00:05:00] qualified to design projects with structural engineering in mind. In fact, in some cases, not so much as today as it used to be, architects would actually do the structural engineering. They're very capable of that. But for the most part, you're getting a structural engineer involved, and a lot of it has to do with because of the building code demands. They're getting more and more; architects tend to like to focus on the big picture and the design of the project.

And then collaborate with a structural engineer and come up with the best solution. So that's what happens with that relationship, and you as the homeowner—the idea here today is to make you aware of this relationship, and we're going to get into some really nitty-gritty details about how to approach that relationship and how not to approach that relationship.

And your level of involvement. But you need to understand that a structural engineer is designing the skeletal system of your home, from the [00:06:00] foundation to the floor, to the walls, to the roof and beyond. So let's move into the next portion of this episode, and we'll talk about if you're not even dealing with an architect, how a structural engineer becomes involved.

Now, there may be a case where you're actually not working with an architect, a licensed architect to design your project. You might be working with a residential designer who is not a licensed individual, but is capable of designing single family homes or remodels or renovations. And in some cases you might be working with an interior designer to do a major interior remodel or renovation, or sometimes small additions, and neither are really qualified to do any of the structural engineering on a project.

And this is important for you to know before you hire a designer, because if you're thinking about moving a bunch of walls and adding onto the home, maybe doing a small bump [00:07:00] out addition, or doing anything where you're moving windows on the exterior of the walls—anything where you're doing more than just a renovation, which a renovation is just replacing what you have and updating everything. A remodel is where you're starting to move things around and move and remove walls that affect the structural integrity of the building.

Now, residential designers and interior designers will focus on the space plan, the conceptualizing. Let's remove this wall. Let's put a big sliding glass door here. Let's raise the ceiling. Let's do all these things. Let's pick out all the materials and the finishes, but what's really important here is: can you do it? Can you actually do all the things that they want?

Now, interior designers are not well versed in—usually, I should say—versed in structural design. And this is where a structural engineer becomes involved. And there's not necessarily anything wrong with this as long as [00:08:00] going into the project, this is how it occurs.

Now I have experience in kind of both angles, working with architects and working with interior designers. In fact, in my business for many years, I employed interior designers and residential designers to do all of the design of the project. And then we would bring in an outside structural engineer consultant to actually do the structural plans of the project.

So there's the same kind of level of collaboration between an architect and a structural engineer and interior designer and a structural engineer. Usually what happens when you have a design-build business model, which is what I had, you have somebody that's in charge of that whole process that orchestrates all of that, and it could—in my case, I was the builder of the project, the general contractor and the owner of the company. And then I would oversee that collaboration [00:09:00] between the interior designer and the structural engineer to make sure that everything was being covered.

That is really important for you to understand because as we get deeper into this episode, you're going to see that if you get in the middle of some of these relationships, you could be assuming all this liability, and to assume liability where you know nothing can really be a problem and cause all kinds of aggravation for you.

So projects like this that you could use an interior designer is any substantial renovation involving wall removal, kitchen and bath remodels with changing the layouts, adding beams inside open floor plans to achieve that big, wide open, great room that you're looking for, or anytime anything is being affected by the foundation of the project. So sometimes when you open up walls, interior walls, you have [00:10:00] to put a large beam to hold up the roof, and that weight transfers out to the sides and down all the way down into the foundation.

Your interior designer's not going to know how to design that, and you're going to need to have the proper details in order to convey that scope of work to the general contractor to get accurate costs. So here's some key questions to ask your non-architect designer when you're dealing with them.

Here we go. Do you have enough structural knowledge to propose realistic designs? This question is really important because as an architect designs a project who has a lot more experience than an interior designer, and sometimes a residential designer, most often a residential designer, interior designers can tend to get really creative, if you will, but not really understanding the structural implications of a project.

You don't want to necessarily insult them, but you also want to understand if they have any experience [00:11:00] in any kind of structural knowledge. So if they want to open up a wall, they have a sense whether it's possible or not. Regardless, there's ways to compensate for that as you get further and further in working with them.

The next question could be: do you have any structural engineers that you work with? If they haven't already proposed this to you, this would be a question you'd want to ask because as all these great creative ideas are happening, who's going to determine that this really is feasible?

The next one is: how do you handle load bearing wall determinations? So they may have a structural engineer involved. There might be an owner of a company that is overseeing this process, or if you hired an independent interior designer, how do we know if walls are load bearing or not? Who's going to determine that? And the key is you want to determine that during the design process, not during the construction process.

This is a common problem where there are assumptions that are made, [00:12:00] and we're going to get into that in the next segment here, but you want to understand and listen to what they have to say. When you say how do you understand the load bearing situations? How do you determine that? And then what is the process?

So after a design is conceptualized, what is the process when it's pretty apparent that structural modifications are required? A process could mean that once a concept has been created and accepted by you, that a structural engineer is engaged with and they come visit the site and do their own investigation. They have to be careful here because a lot of structural engineers don't necessarily offer to crawl underneath your house or crawl up into the attic to verify these conditions unless they're asked to.

And if they're not asked to, they may not, and they themselves might make assumptions, which is a really scary thing to do. In my business as a design-build one-stop shop, [00:13:00] it was our responsibility to design the projects and build it. So what did that mean? That means that I became accountable for what we were proposing. There's no clear definition there. And I'm emphasizing this because I just listened to a podcast episode—I won't say who it is, but they were interviewing a design-build business owner, and they did all the design and they did all the construction on this project. They hired the structural engineers, they coordinated the whole process for the owner, and yet during construction, they discovered that they made an error and assumed that the wall joists or the ceiling joists were going one direction when they really were going the other direction. I won't get into the details, but they ended up charging the client for that even though they were responsible for the design and the construction.

I've got a real problem with that when it comes to the design-build business model. And we're going to [00:14:00] get into this in this next episode—in segment two called The Assumption Trap. And this is why verifying these conditions really matters for everybody involved, but especially you as a homeowner because you are the ones that are going to have to pay the price. And you might as well know earlier than later what's happening.

In my years of doing this, even in my own projects, quite honestly, we've made some assumptions early on in my business. We made some assumptions that there were certain conditions behind the walls or behind the ceiling that affected the ideas that we have for opening walls up. And we just made some assumptions. We learned really early on that was a pretty big mistake, and we ended up paying the price.

Architects, structural engineers, interior designers, residential designers—everybody is guilty of making assumptions on [00:15:00] projects when they come to designing it. And what happens with this is it turns into what I call an accountability gap.

And what I mean by that is let's say that you went down the conventional path of hiring an architect, hiring a structural engineer, hiring a general contractor. In many cases, the architect hires a structural engineer, but there's a gap in between the architect and the general contractor who's building the project.

And if the architect or the structural engineers made an assumption that—we'll just say that the foundation was a typical foundation in your 1960s home that you're planning to add a second story on or to add onto the back of the house. They made that assumption and they designed the project like that, basically saying we can use that existing foundation.

The contractor then prices out the project per the plans, understanding that there's [00:16:00] no additional foundation work required in this one part of the home to achieve this addition that you want to do on the back of the home or maybe a small second story addition. So they price it out like that.

Then the contractor begins a project and the foundation work begins, and they start digging to tie into the existing foundation for the new addition on the back of the house, we'll say. And it turns out that the foundation only goes six inches into the ground and there's no rebar in the foundation, no reinforcement.

I'm telling you this because I experienced this on a project and I was blown away when we opened up this situation, realizing that this foundation is not suitable to tie into, that we had to do some retrofitting in order to make the project work. That's one isolated case that I had. I'm hearing hundreds and thousands of stories like this, and here's what happens.

The contractor comes back to you and says yeah, this isn't working. [00:17:00] Let's get the structural engineer out here and let's come up with a solution. And sure enough, they come up with a solution and it's $10,000 or $20,000, whatever it is. It's thousands of dollars more that you did not expect, that you didn't plan for.

As a homeowner, the architects don't usually assume this responsibility. They've got all kinds of disclaimers and non-responsibility clauses in their paperwork that exclude them from being responsible for that. It's unfortunate, but that's the way it goes. I get it that they can't just be out there just tearing your house apart. They don't have x-ray vision, so there's certain things that you can't foresee.

This particular example that I'm talking about can be foreseen. And all it took was two, three hours of digging on the corner of the foundation where we're going to tie in way back in the design process to understand what we were getting ourselves into. This is one little reason [00:18:00] why some of these change order horror stories occur is because some investigative work wasn't done.

So that's an assumption that was made on that project. Other ones that can happen are you're planning to open up a wall, you want to take a wall down inside your home and either you've assumed, or the architect or the interior designers assumed that it's not structural because of the direction that the wall's going, and we'll get into those details later.

The problem is once the home is gutted and you look up into the attic where you're planning to remove this wall, and sure enough, it's a load-bearing wall because the roof is braced down onto that wall and holding up the roof. Now we can't just remove that wall because the roof will come down.

What does that mean? That means revision to the plans. That means putting a big, huge beam all the way across that opening with two posts that go down the [00:19:00] wall and into the foundation. We're talking about significant change where we have to reinforce the foundation, usually open up the walls, open up that ceiling, and take the wall out.

Of course, shore everything up, and then put a new beam, structural beam in there. This all has to be engineered in order to do that. Now this could be a $15,000 to $20,000 line item that was not considered in the original project. This is an assumption that can—that is made—that doesn't have to be made, and there's different levels of assumption I call.

It's the two types of assumptions. I call them resolvable assumptions and unresolvable assumptions. So resolvable assumptions are things like that wall I was just telling you about that we want to remove. All that takes is going up into the attic or opening up a section of drywall on the ceiling to understand [00:20:00] which way the ceiling joists are going, where the roof is, where the roof is being braced by looking on through the attic. This is an example of a resolvable assumption so that, going into the project, I need another $15,000 to remove that wall.

The earlier example of digging around the foundation, understanding the foundation that we're tying into, understanding the wall type and how the walls are constructed, how the floor is constructed—all of this can be determined.

Now, unresolvable assumptions are areas where it's just too invasive to open up an entire section of a home during the design process and cutting into walls, especially since you may not be a hundred percent sure that you're going to even be doing the project during the design. So these are areas that it just starts to cross the line of we're destroying part of my home during the design process when I'm not even convinced I'm going to do that part of the [00:21:00] project.

So it's going to be kind of your choice if you want—if you are really tight on your budget and you really want to understand the cost 100%, then I'd recommend you open up as much as possible so that you can understand and your designers can understand the feasibility of what you want to do and the associated costs.

Okay. Another value of doing this investigative process is your designers can then pivot if it's too much to remove that wall or you can't remove all the wall or the foundation is just going to be too impactful to add onto the second story across the whole home that maybe you'll add onto the back.

These are the kind of things—this is informing the design team of what is really reasonable to do. And if you don't do all that and you spend tens of thousands of dollars on plans in a remodel—most of what I'm talking about of course is talking about remodeling right now, because you're not really [00:22:00] verifying much in new construction except for some of the site work that we talked about in the past episode.

But this kind of information is many times the missing link to providing quality set of plans and specifications for a project. This is the information that is providing you an accurate cost. And this eliminates those infamous stories of, oh, I blew my budget. Oh, I blew my budget. Did you blow your budget because everything you designed wasn't going to work? It's very possible that's what happened, and that's why you blew your budget.

One other thing about this whole situation is on architectural plans and on structural plans, professional architects and engineers will put disclaimers on their plans. I mentioned this a little while ago that says that all of these conditions need to be verified [00:23:00] by the contractor, and if any of the information on site contradicts what's on the plans that they need to inform the architect and engineer and they need to provide revised details.

These disclaimers also do not hold them responsible for any of this verification, any of the existing conditions, which I get, but a lot of that can be taken care of in the verification process by avoiding the assumption process and verifying conditions.

It's up to you as a homeowner to initiate that, rattle the cages, ask those questions so that you can understand what really is going to be happening on your home, what really can happen on your home, and how much it's going to cost. So you'll be asking some of these questions that we'll get into at the end of the segment, to your architect, to your structural engineer, to see how this is going to be mitigated. [00:24:00] How you're going to reduce the risk that would come to you by making compromises on design, by paying more money you didn't expect during construction. All of that can be avoided, or I should say most of that can be avoided when you're doing a major renovation or remodel project.

So now let's move into segment three, which is how to engage with a structural engineer the right way. There's different ways that you can do this, and I want to be careful that you don't get in the middle of it too much. So here we go.

William Reid: This is a classic one where an architect will declare that a structural engineer is required on the project, and homeowners get right in the middle and decide they're going to go out and find the least expensive structural engineer they can find or try to just understand all of the options out there.

And they think they're being smart. You think you're being smart, you're cutting out the middleman, you're going to find the structural engineer, bring them to the [00:25:00] table, and then you'll pay the structural engineer directly. The problem with this is, number one, you've probably never hired a structural engineer before.

So you do not understand their qualifications, their capabilities, and their interpersonal skills, frankly, to deal with your architect. And you look at the bottom line, they provide your proposal and you bring them to the table. Why does this backfire? Because now you are in the middle, so you got your architect, you got your structural engineer, and there you are right in the middle and you're expected to do all the coordination.

Now, some homeowners might say I'll just bring them to the table and I'll back out and I'll let them work together. The problem with that is that if the architect and the structural engineer have never worked together before, I guarantee you that we're going to have a little bit of this bumping heads back and forth.

The communication between the architect and the structural engineer is [00:26:00] really critical and needs to happen a lot. And if there's not an alignment there by an experienced relationship, you're bound to get missing data on your project and you're not bound to get the best end result. You're just really not qualified to handle that usually.

Now, if you have a lot of experience as a homeowner doing projects, and this is your 10th project and you've hired four engineers before, you know you could probably do it. I'm frankly, I still probably wouldn't do it, so it could work. If this option one we're talking about, we call it the direct hire. The riskiest path is if it's a very simple project.

So let's say you're just opening up a wall and you just need to put a beam in a couple posts, you could probably handle that yourself. Like I said, if you have significant construction experience or your architect really endorses this approach, which I'm not a big fan of.

So the next one is option two, which is architect's [00:27:00] recommendation with direct contact. This is a little bit more—this isn't quite as risky, but you want to proceed with caution on this one. Now what this option two is: the architect's recommended a structural engineer that they've worked with. Great. That's a really good thing, and that means that they've worked together before, likely. This is a good advantage to you.

It's also important to understand the relationship between an architect and a structural engineer. That they exchange files. So they exchange software files both in any of these conditions. It's imperative that they work on the same platforms to be able to import and export drawings and details. So AutoCAD or Revit, or Chief Architect, any of these architectural softwares that they work with, it's really important.

So getting a recommendation from an architect is great, and then you go to that person and the problem here is [00:28:00] you end up contracting directly with the structural engineer when you really don't know what you're doing. Sometimes architects do that because they just don't have the time to get involved in the engagement.

They don't want to run the dollar amounts through their books because they're not necessarily making a profit on that. There's a variety of reasons why architects don't want to do that, and a lot of it is because they are just too busy and just want you to make the calls and set up the contracts and that kind of stuff.

You're still in the middle. You're right in the middle of the process and you're in a situation that you are unfamiliar with usually, so I really don't recommend this option either. Again, if it's a smaller project, maybe you can get away with it and handle it, or if you have experience.

The third option is the architect manages the structural engineer. This is my preferred choice. I call this the professional path, and this is where the architect has a structural engineer that they work with all the time, or maybe they have two [00:29:00] or three structural engineers that they work with, and that's often the case. And what they offer is they say, okay, I will send out all my drawings and details to my three different engineers and get proposals back for us, and I will review all the proposals and I will make a recommendation to you.

Great. This is somewhat of a seamless coordination. Now the architect is going to make money off this, and they should make money off this. This takes a lot of time, and even generating the proposal, the structural engineer generating a proposal, there's coordination back and forth, questions back and forth, clarifications back and forth, but this is what you want.

You are better off to pay an architect thousands of dollars. Honestly, maybe it's 10 hours of time for an architect just to get the proposals, but guess what? You're not in the middle. There's now a certain level of accountability that's built into this process where the architect [00:30:00] is responsible now for the structural engineer. You're out of the picture.

Now you can listen in. You can join in on the meetings to learn and make sure that you're being looked out for. You can do all that kind of stuff, but ultimately, the architect is responsible. That two or $3,000 that you spend just for the coordination time of getting the proposals could save you tons of time, tons of money for wrong details, misunderstandings, and people don't really—they just can't put their finger on that dollar amount. And that's what I'm trying to do today, is there is a tremendous amount of value to stepping out of that picture.

And not to mention just your satisfaction, your mental health during your project. If there's a structural problem that comes up during the job, that contractor is going to call the architect. No, that architect's going to call the structural engineer. You may not even know about it, or the architect might come back to feed you back that information, but you're not going to get that call on [00:31:00] Monday morning that says, this doesn't work. What do you want to do? You have no idea that just streams right to your design team. This is the way you should do it.

So it's built in accountability. It's seamless coordination, it's professional liability. You stay in your lane and it leads to this integrated team approach. I'll say it one more time. The worst thing you can do is get in the middle, force a structural engineer onto an architect and expect them to get along hunky dory. You are now in the middle. You are assuming a lot of the liability. You are coordinating the communication. You were picking up the phone when there's a problem. Now most professional architects still take ownership in the process, so this is where I want you to go, if you have a large scale remodel or renovation, and of course, certainly a new home.

So let's just run down a few questions. When you're working [00:32:00] with your architect and he or she recommends a structural engineer for the project: How long have you worked with a structural engineer? Just because they recommended somebody doesn't necessarily mean that they've worked with them for a long time, or frankly, work with them at all.

So you need to understand if there truly is a relationship there. How many projects have you completed together? So now you're getting a sense of if there really is a relationship there. What's the typical turnaround time from this particular engineer? That's good for you to know, just to understand what the expectations are for the design process.

Does your software system integrate with their software system? The reason I'm pointing this out is in my most recent experiences with coordinating a project, the structural engineer and the architect both use Revit and the Revit 3D model got imported into the structural engineer's model, therefore expediting the process and making [00:33:00] it more reasonable on cost.

But I was also able to visualize the skeleton of the home and the software. I'm going to have another episode or a YouTube video about this because it's really cool. And so you understanding if there's an integration there and can I visualize the skeleton of my home? The reason this is important is because sometimes you can see things like where beams are going to go, where openings are that you may not have expected.

So understanding that and then: How do you handle coordination when design changes occur? This is really important because there's a collaboration that goes between the structural engineer and the architect during the design process, and there's going to be decisions that are made to move walls, to raise ceilings, to lower ceilings is usually the case, to build soffits over here and to move windows, and bring windows narrower because of the shear walls, which we're going to talk about next. [00:34:00] How is this coordinated and am I involved? Do I get to know what happens after you send the project to the structural engineer? Do I get to know what changes are made?

This all goes back to that infamous word of mine: expectations. How am I best to achieve my expectations? To understand what's going on? These are the questions that you want to ask so that your architect knows where you're coming from and how involved you want to be as a homeowner.

All right, let's wrap up this segment. Think of your architect and structural engineers, dance partners. They need to know each other's moves, anticipate each other's next steps, and move in perfect coordination. When you force two strangers to dance together, somebody's going to step on the toes, and that somebody is usually you, believe it or not, the homeowner that feels the pain.

So really good relationships between architects and structural engineers: one can [00:35:00] foresee the other, the moves that they're going to be making on the project. There's a solid collaboration where an engineer's not afraid to tell an architect that one of their designs doesn't work or needs more work in order for it to work.

Your job isn't to manage the technical coordination between professionals. Your job is to ensure you have the right professionals who already know how to work together efficiently. That's your job. Your job isn't to be the coordinator to get in the middle of the process, a process that you don't understand.

Let's just talk real quick next about fundamentals of structural engineering. This is really basic, but I want you to understand what I call the three pillars of structural engineering. And a lot of this has to do with remodel work, but it applies to new construction work too. Pillar number one, we'll call it—and that is the lateral forces.

So the lateral forces are the structure moving side to side. And an engineer analyzes [00:36:00] your structure laterally for earthquakes and seismic movement or wind force coming from one side of the building and how that lateral is, how that lateral design stabilizes the building.

You'll hear the word shear wall a lot. Shear wall. You're going to hear that a lot during design with architects and engineers. And what shear walls are: visualize building a wall out of sticks, Popsicle sticks. Just, as you may know, a wall is built with studs that are 16 inches on center vertically, and then there's top plates and bottom plates, and they create this frame.

Now, if you were to take that and you tapped it or pushed it on the end of the wall and hole, Popsicle wall stick would just collapse to one side. A shear wall places a hole—an apron or diaphragm, if you will, of plywood on the outside of the [00:37:00] wall, tying all of the studs and the Popsicle sticks together. And then when you go to tap on the end of that wall, it does not move. It is a rigid structure. That's a shear wall. That's the basics of a shear wall.

Shear walls also are tied all the way down into the foundation of the home, the concrete foundation with hardware to hold that shear wall to the structure, the foundation structure of the home, all the way through the floor and into the foundation. That's the rigidity of your home.

And this is important for you because as you want that big, wide open wall, or you don't—you know you want to move a window over or things like that. Any type, anytime you penetrate an exterior wall with a new window that compromises the shear structure. Anytime you add a wall, let's say you're adding onto the back of a home and you want to continue the wall out to create [00:38:00] that new primary suite on the back of your home that's lined up with your existing home.

The engineer has to address that entire wall of your existing structure, so he or she will be looking at the lateral design there. There's so much more to this, but understand that the lateral forces left or right. There's left to right and the next one is up. Down. That is the transfer load coming down.

Okay, so you've got the weight coming down from the roof, onto the ceiling, onto the walls, onto the foundation. And engineers calculate all of that to understand where posts need to be in inside walls to hold beams, where walls need to be inside the home to hold up roofs, to hold up the second floor, things like that.

So a good example is when a roof is built on top of a home, there is a load, there are point loads coming down that are holding [00:39:00] up the structure of the roof framing down onto the walls, and then all the way through the walls on in, through the floor and onto the foundation. These are point loads coming down, so when you want to remove that big wall between the living room and the kitchen, the first thing you do is look up in the attic and see if there's structural wood coming down onto that wall.

And they're usually braces that come down onto the wall. If there's braces there, then you're in trouble. Then you got to put a beam in where the wall used to be. If your room, if your home is built out of trusses, then you don't necessarily need to do that. But this is where the structural engineer comes into play.

This is where the verification process comes into play, things like that. So this is how you find this out early on, but that is pillar number two. The transfer, weight transfer. And then the last one is uplift. So uplift is forces that could cause a building to rise [00:40:00] and it's usually related to wind and seismic earthquakes.

And that's how the engineer designs and the architect design so that structures are held together in case of high forces of wind to lift that roof off. You see those videos of tornadoes where the roof just immediately just falls, goes flying off. And that could be because they weren't originally designed to current standards, of course, because they're all their homes. So that's the idea here is just the basics, the very basics of structural engineering that hopefully helps you.

All right. What do structural engineers actually do? So structural engineers take the conceptual design of the architect's plans, they import them into their software and they begin designing and analyzing the structure to make sure that all of those shear walls are in place, that there's enough shear walls.

They design the foundation system, a [00:41:00] structural engineer. One of the first things they do is they look at that geotechnical report that we talked about earlier in the previous episodes, a soils report and the soils report, recommendations to the structural engineer about what style of foundation is to be built.

That's the first thing they do. So a structural engineer will design the foundation based on the soils report. And then based on the architectural design, and they will determine the width and the length and the depth and the type of concrete that goes, and the type of reinforcement that goes inside the concrete.

Then they will design the floor system. Then of course, they'll design the walls, the thickness of the walls, the stud spacing. The header sizes over windows and doors, and then they'll develop the ceiling joist system or the second floor framing above you and the walls above that and the roof framing and so on.

So they go from the ground up and they design all of [00:42:00] their systems to assemble the skeleton of the home. A big one that they do is then they decide, they determine, they specify how everything gets connected. So in current times with the building code, structural hardware is becoming just a big line item, and that is all of the metal, bracketry, screws, nails that need to be used to assemble the skeleton. Structural engineers specify every single bracket.

Every single screw, every single nail, the pieces of wood, the sizes of the wood, the type of the wood, the moisture level in the wood, the type of plywoods that should or should not be used. And it goes on and on. And this is what a contractor really needs in order to build your project. And even before that, price your project out.

There's nothing worse than getting a price from a contractor before the [00:43:00] structural engineering's done. Happens all the time. And then you get change ordered to death because, oh now that we have the structural engineer's drawings, oh, I'm going to have to revise my price. Oh, you didn't know that as a homeowner, did you?

You didn't know that. You just got a price like, woohoo. Okay, that's what happens all the time. You can get preliminaries all day long if you want, but your final pricing and your expectation is they're preliminary. Your final pricing is after structural engineering's done.

The structural engineer will then create their own plan pages. So they're usually called the S pages, S for structural, and they're numbered accordingly, and they start with their general notes and disclaimers, like I talked about. Then they start with their foundation sheets and their floor and wall framing.

There's ceiling and upper floor framing. They're roof framing, and then all of those details and details are blown up. Little versions of areas where connections [00:44:00] are made or where more articulation is required in larger scale. They will also include the material specifications like I just spoke of, which is the wood types, the steel grades, and all the engineered products like the bracketry and how to connect them all.

It's kind of like an instruction manual on how to build a project. So you can spend, sometimes you can spend close to as much as you spend on architectural design, as structural design. Just keep that in mind when you're buying those really cheap plans online that require structural engineering. You're not done yet when you buy those plans.

All right, so let's talk about the common pitfalls and how to avoid them with working with an architect and structural engineering.

Here are the things that you might hear or that you should know about, and this is like a big part of you getting to know what you don't know so that you don't undermine yourself on your project. I talked about a little bit of this in the Sabotaging Your Own Project episode.

But just trying to save money on [00:45:00] the most important aspect of your project doesn't really make sense. You're really better off to find a qualified engineer, and hopefully it's one that's recommended by your architect that they've worked with before. Really poor construction plans, really poor structural plans, or incomplete or just real bare bones.

They definitely lead to delays because there's a lot of questions that come up. A lot of stoppage happens until further clarification is obtained. It definitely adds to cost overruns because further clarification means more details, means more work usually, and more money. And let's not forget safety issues.

If things aren't engineered properly the building could fail. It's happened, so let's not cut corners on the structural engineering. Part of it here are the things to listen for or watch out for. Some of these don't happen very often, but you'd be surprised. Things like when the architect says they'll handle all the structural work themselves.

[00:46:00] That used to be the case, but not necessarily happening as much. If it's a really simple project but still requires structural engineering, it might work. Or you might hear from a contractor that says we don't need structural plans. We'll just figure it out. Those days are gone too because the city and the counties require structural engineering usually on any modifications to a project or at least a qualified licensed architect to stamp the plans.

If they say that, that means that your pricing may not be that accurate when going into the project, and you might be compromising quality and safety issues. Getting a structural engineer involved too late in the project is a big one, because what happens is you go through the step one of the design process.

You get into the design development, everybody's happy and excited, and you get really deep. You start picking out materials, and then the architect says, oh yeah, we better get an [00:47:00] engineer involved just to verify all this. They come in. They verify all this, start working on the project and go you can't do this, or you can't have that window that big.

Or we need to fill this wall in over here. And all of a sudden your kitchen and bath designs are done. You're picking out materials, this is something that happens way too often actually. So getting the structural engineer involved early in the design process is pretty damn important.

So that you are getting accurate costs, that you're meeting your expectations, you might hear things like, we'll figure out the load bearing walls during construction. You should hire your own engineer to save money.

I know this episode's getting a little long, but this is some big stuff that I really want to get to you. So let's talk about critical verification questions that I have for you. And I'm going to go through them pretty quick and I'll try to get these on the show notes so that you can download it yourself.

What assumptions have been made and what can we do to resolve them? This is [00:48:00] in the verification category, is there a process to verify, my design is reasonably feasible? If so, who is responsible for that verification? Okay, so you're letting the architect know that you care that you want to understand what assumptions are you making about my existing foundation?

How will you verify the existing conditions before finalizing the design? What happens if your assumptions about existing conditions are wrong and who is accountable when assumptions lead to change orders? So you're laying the groundwork, setting the playing field, if you will, so that now the architect, the designers, realize that you're not going to want to get surprises.

Will you verify the size and condition of my existing foundation before designing the addition? What's the cost to dig test holes to confirm foundation specifications? How do you determine if my existing foundation can handle the additional loads? Okay, so now you're getting it out there that you're really interested in [00:49:00] this and that you want to make sure that what's being designed is feasible and that you're getting accurate cost during the estimating process.

So during the design process, can you walk me through how the structural plans relate to the architectural plans? What are the most critical structural elements in my specific design? Are there any structural challenges unique to my site or design? How will the structural plans help contractors provide accurate estimates? All right, so these are things during the design process that you can pose to the architect so that you can become involved and educated so that if you or yourself are engaging with contractors to get estimates in your project, at least you know a little bit more than you didn't know. No.

And then some other essential structural questions during the design process are, will there be structural retrofitting to my existing home? To achieve my goals, can you explain shear walls to me and how they apply to my [00:50:00] project? What consequences are there to removing the interior walls that we're talking about?

Who checks to see if the walls are load bearing and what happens if they are? Is uplift a factor in my area? Are the soils I'm building on suitable? So this gets really good because you are now enlightened, empowered and protecting you to meet your expectations. There they are again.

All right. I have a lot more questions I could tell you about, but I'm going to put those in the show notes so you can look at those on your own. Because it, it can get quite, it's quite involved. Let's just talk about, lastly, as we close up here, how structural engineers charge. Normally, your architect will coordinate that as I recommend, and structural engineers will usually price the project per project.

So they'll look at the size of the home, the complexity of the home, the complexity of the site, and they'll come up with a fixed price. Sometimes they'll do it on an hourly basis, although I wouldn't recommend that [00:51:00] you can expect to pay structural engineering anywhere from, it could be as little as 1% and maybe all the way up to 5% of the cost of the construction of the project.

If you wanted to try to figure out like a budget for structural engineering, they don't necessarily charge like that, but this helps you get a sense of what to budget for structural engineers. And of course, in the Bill Quest application I'm developing, it's going to already be programmed in there for you so you don't have to worry about it.

So remember, you're the conductor of this orchestra. You may not know how to play the violin. But you sure know when it sounds funny. I just love that line. Understanding structural engineering and the verification process gives you that trained ear. But here's the key. Conductors don't teach individual musicians how to play together.

They hire musicians who already know how to harmonize. Let your architect manage their structural engineer [00:52:00] relationship. What assumptions have been made and what can we do to resolve them? Ask that question, and you've transferred accountability back to your design team where it belongs.

So next time in our world of design series, the doctors of your home, we've just covered the skeletal doctor. The design of your home, we're going to get into what's called MEP, engineers and designers, and that's mechanical, electrical, and plumbing. And this is like your respiratory system, your circulatory system, and the waste system of your home.

I know it's not the big sexy pictures that you see online of your home, but these are the four components of the four main design consultants that supplement your architect's work. And the idea here is to just give you a little bit of information so that you can ask the right questions, [00:53:00] just enough to poke your head in the door and say, Hey, how we doing?

Do we meet our goals? Are we meeting my expectations? Is everybody accountable? I don't want to get in the middle, but I want to know what's going on. That's all I have. I know that was a long one today, but I'm Bill Reid. This is The Awakened Homeowner Show. Thanks for listening.