Quick home additions

Scott Ukrop and Jay Hugo have an ambitious plan.

They want to shorten the amount of time it takes to complete a home addition.

The co-owners of Grace Street Home Additions hope their plan can be carried out initially in 40 days.

The Richmond-based company, which has designed and constructed nearly 100 home additions and renovations since its founding in 2002, now spends an average of four to five months on each of its additions and renovations.

But Ukrop and Hugo have worked out their plan for a 40-day addition on paper, and they expect to build them for at least two clients in 2009.

"Grace Street is always striving to deliver faster than most of the market," said Hugo, the company's chairman and chief design officer. "Now, we're thinking in days, rather than months. It's really a paradigm shift."

Ukrop, the company's chief executive officer, sees the project as an important step toward meeting its long-term goal of offering customized home additions at or below a neighborhood's selling price per square foot and delivering the addition to a homeowner in 30 days.

"What's unusual and promising about Grace Street's model is that it's combining good architectural design with a fast delivery process," said Vernon Mays, a Richmond writer and editor-at-large at Architect, a national design magazine.

Two construction systems help Grace Street speed up its work: fabricated panels and a patent-pending foundation system created by Hugo.

The foundation system uses helical piers in conjunction with pre-cast concrete spandrels, which are typically used in parking-deck construction. It can accept a brick veneer on the outside so it looks like a traditional foundation.

Using panelized construction is an active trend, Mays said.

But what makes Grace Street different is using those panels in home additions that are designed by in-house architects. The company has architects in its South Richmond office as well as its West Coast office in San Francisco.

That combination is "still pretty unusual in the design-build marketplace," said Mays, a former curator of architecture and design for the Virginia Center for Architecture. "It should be very appealing to homeowners because you don't get nearly the length of disruption."

Because it expects to dramatically reduce the amount of time it takes to build an addition, Grace Street plans to offer those services at lower rates.

"If we can sell an addition at a cost below the prevailing market rate, it makes sense to add on to your house," Ukrop said. "For many homeowners, investing in their house rather than buying a new one is a good decision, especially in a market like this."

. . .

Though Grace Street doesn't have a client signed up for a 40-day addition yet, Ukrop said the company has two interested clients who are talking with lenders.

In the meantime, the company is about to begin working on a two-story spec addition in its staging warehouse in Henrico County.

The project is a way to test the company's plans for a 40-day addition.

"There's a lot we can learn by doing it ourselves in a controlled environment -- like staging, assembly and panel sizing, for example," said Ukrop, the former marketing vice president at the family-owned Ukrop's Super Markets Inc.

Grace Street also hopes to determine the best methods for disassembling and transporting the addition.

"We want to find out what we need to have lined up in advance" to meet the company's long-term plans for building additions in 30 days, Ukrop said.

Once it's finished, Grace Street will market the spec addition to interested buyers. After it sells, the company will disassemble the addition in its warehouse and transport it in sections to the job site.

"It's a spec addition, but it can be customized for the house it's going to be attached to," Ukrop said. "At 900 to 1,000 square feet, it could be a master suite over an informal living space. There's a world of choices you can make within that footprint."

It will be the first time the company has built a spec addition.

But if the company finds there's a market for off-the-shelf additions, offering spec additions could become a part of the company's business model, Ukrop said.

. . .

The majority of Grace Street's projects have been additions.

"Renovations can have unforeseen dimensions," Ukrop said, such as a bathroom remodel that reveals extensive water damage to the subflooring or wall studs.

"If you're building a distinct addition on the back of a house, you can narrow the unexpected down. By taking an addition-centric focus, we can control cost and schedule."

The architectural styles of the company's additions include Tudor, Craftsman and colonial.

"We want to match the appropriate style for the house," Ukrop said.

The average Grace Street project costs between $175,000 and $200,000, if no kitchen is involved. The company has completed bathroom renovations for $50,000. On the high end, one project topped out at $750,000.

"Their market tends to be people who like the integrity and character of older houses," Mays said. "They help bring vintage houses to a contemporary standard" with features such as larger closets and master suites.

Chuck and Kris Marchant hired Grace Street to build an addition onto their house in Richmond's Museum District.

"We chose them because they're a turnkey group," Kris said, referring to how Grace Street handled everything from concept to completion. "This was our first time going through this, and the fact that they could take care of us from start to finish was important."

The company designed and built a two-story addition for the Marchants, with a breakfast nook and a half-bath on the first floor and a master suite on the second.

"It was exactly what we needed," she said.

Work began in November 2007, and Grace Street finished the project in March -- on schedule.

The relationships she and her husband built with Grace Street's staff may have been the most satisfying part of the process, she said.

"They really took the time to know us and make us feel taken care of throughout the process," she said. "And we're especially happy with the results."

. . .

Grace Street has undertaken between 20 and 25 projects in each of the last two years.

But as the economic doldrums continue into next year, the company expects the number of projects to drop off. But it plans to use the slowdown to give it time to refine the 30and 40-day addition processes.

"This gives us a chance to hone our system and our plans for a 40-day addition," Ukrop said.

The company will focus on refining the design and construction process of addition models that are particularly popular with clients, such as having a master bedroom suite on the second floor with informal living space on the first floor.

"It's not a one-size-fits-all model," Hugo said. "It's a highly customized and customizable product with an efficient process behind it."