Tim Dooley

General

- My name is Tim Dooley, I'm signed up for the December crash course. I'm responding to your logistics inquiries from your previous email. I have my own compliment of hand tools, drill and driver, and cordless saw.

I'm a carpenter and spent about 5 years working for a remodeling company in Minneapolis. I'm familiar with the fundamentals of carpentry and framing, but no experience with plumbing, electrical, HVAC, ect. The aspects of the build I'm interested in are first, the design. I'd like to become proficient in using the freeCAD software with the intention of using it in my own work. Additionally, I'm interested in expanding my understanding of the various other trades required for home building. Overall, I'm eager to learn this system of home building, see it implemented, and hopefully I can take what I learn here and integrate it in my own work.

In my experience working in the trades, I've been pretty disappointed in how little I've learned about the home building process beyond the tasks of a carpenter. Each aspect of a build is so compartmentalized, it's hard to gain an understanding of how the whole system works together. Additionally, one of the draws for working in the trades was the value that building and fixing homes can bring to individuals and families, and by extension, communities and society at large. But in my albeit limited experience, the only people that could afford the kind of work the companies I've worked for offered were people that already owned homes. They just wanted nicer ones. There was never any prospect that the work I was would to provide value for people who didn't already have access to sufficient housing to begin with. In a relatively small way, I felt that my work was only broadening the socioeconomic gap that's preventing any real upward mobility for lower and middle class Americans. I left the company I was working for a while back feeling pretty disenchanted, and with a strong belief that in order to alleviate the issue of affordable housing, new systems will have to be developed, parallel to the existing ones, and outside the prevailing industry paradigms. I think the vision of your organization and the goals of this course align with my own ambitions, and I'm excited to learn as much as I can and see what happens next.