Enterprise Invitation
Nate,
Good milestones on our side for replicable house construction of the Seed Eco-Home, where we are 75% of the way done to proving a build model with $60k in materials and $25k in labor by extreme optimization of modular design, documentation, and swarmable workflow. The industry standard equivalent comparing apples to apples is about $180k compared to our $85k. This is just build cost (materials+labor, not land/legal/enterprise costs) for stick-frame construction, but it is a good start for solving housing.
For Ukraine, I'd like to see if we can train a cohort of 16 students in the full ways of OSE, while building housing. As an extension of OSE to Ukraine, and a permanent OSE facility there which would be our first replication if we pursue this at this time. It can start with 50% learning and 50% building, and would be a 4 year program. This is what we're creating in the USA - a replicable model for cohorts of 24 students built around a dedicated theme of Solving Pressing World Issues. To be clear, we would build from day 1, which would meet the local needs. We can build stick frame efficinently now, but we should probably build CEB. Depends what's needed locally - or if any of these are feasible at all in Ukraine. However, we have no replicable product in CEB (just one-off examples), so we would need to come up with a quality design that matches the efficiencies and performance of the stick built Seed Eco-Home.
Rough budget would be fund land and a facility, fund 16 students and 4 staff who start on reconstruction. That would be current OSE Seed Eco-Home, stick frame. If we do CEB, that would be in my estimate a typical startup budget of $1-2M for design/prototype/enterprise proof with 12-24 full time designers/developers for about a year, which is what I would estimate it would take to develop a CEB version of the Seed Eco-Home which would be buildable efficiently (nobody in the world can build cost-wise competitively with CEB) as in providing real homes for real people as opposed to a fringe project. But i would do that all within the framework of a School. This is because we are developing business models not based on artificial scarcity scarcity. That means - creating collaborative design/enterpirse culture is the first missing ingredient hence we need to create it. We create it by 4 year immersion, that's our current thought on how OSE would grow.
Here we are a few months from a 16-student, nonresidential apprenticeship comparable to above, bootstrap funded with house sales. It would be just for the current stick frame Seed Eco-Home. The CEB version coming up as soon as we have traction on the stick built, which would be a minimum capacity of 10 stick builds per year. Our goal here is replicable operations at the 240 student-builder crews, essentially a small campus that cross-subsidizes greater world work. As a replicable unit of operation for anyplace worldwide. Goal for that is within 2 years or so for the 240 person scale here.
Let me know if you have any thoughts on this or if you think this could be relevant to Ukraine, and if we can find the support for this. If foundations want to support this, I think the basic 24 crew could grow to about 50 homes per year after 1 year of learning. And it could do about 1000 homes per year once the core crew moves into swarm management, as the modular design of our house allows for swarms of 100 semiskilled and unskilled people to build each house in a week up to finish trim. We've proven the week swarm builds with 48 people up to structure years ago, now we're finishing with a similar time frame for complete interior finishing in about the same time frame or about 1000 man-hours per 1300 sf 3bed/2bath with trained poeple, double that for unskilled. So Ukraine could be a great scenario for rebuilding using our swarm-build methods. The design, build, and enterprise process is 100 percent modular, so this can be replicated as quickly as we can train people in the above model. For 1000 houses per year, we would need 3 of our CEB presses working at capacity. We have never done it at that scale, just single builds, but the block output is not an issue of machines - but rather trained people and logistics.
MJ
