by Rachel White After nearly forty years as the owner of Byggmeister, Founder Paul Eldrenkamp sold the company to us, its employees. The sale capped off a seven-year planning process including a leadership transition in 2018. During the transition process, Paul started on his next chapter as a business consultant and coach with HELM Construction Solutions…. Read more »
by Rachel White This is the first in a two-part series on Byggmeister’s conversion to worker ownership. This post shares the perspective of the company’s new owners. The second shares Founder Paul Eldrenkamp’s perspective. On October 8, 2021, Byggmeister’s employees purchased the company from Founder Paul Eldrenkamp and incorporated as a worker cooperative. According to… Read more »
by Rachel White This blog post was originally posted in January 2016, before we fully understood the issues of embodied carbon in construction. That research has led us to reduce but not eliminate our use of spray foam. In some cases – old basement walls, for instance – spray foam is so superior to any… Read more »
by Rachel White A wide-open attic with no storage and no mechanical equipment. I can’t remember the last time we worked in an attic like this. Most of the attics Byggmeister retrofits already house an air handler. Or they will soon, as the majority of our projects include at least partial electrification, and attic space… Read more »
by Rachel White In 2018, the International Government Panel on Climate Change put the world on notice: to avert catastrophic and irreversible climate change we would have to hold global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. And to hold warming to this level, we would need to cut global emissions roughly in half… Read more »
by Rachel White It’s hard to remember a time when I have felt as riven by conflicting emotions as I have these past couple of months. Despair and hope. Conviction and doubt. Joy and sadness. And just as it felt like we were coming through the first dark leg of our journey through the pandemic,… Read more »
by Rachel White and Paul Eldrenkamp Even before the September 2018 gas explosions in Lawrence, Andover, and North Andover, we were encouraging homeowners to wean themselves from the gas grid. To be honest, we weren’t all that concerned about explosions, and we still aren’t. Although we don’t want to diminish the tragedy that occurred, we… Read more »
by Kristina Eldrenkamp This past fall, Byggmeister organized a workshop for lead carpenters on project management. The goal was to exchange ideas and best practices for launching and running an on-time, on-budget job. The event’s attendees were lead carpenters and project managers from the peer-review business network that Byggmeister participates in, Bottom Lines. The Bottom… Read more »
by Rachel White Over the course of our 30+ years in business we could count on two hands the number of renovations where acoustics played a major role. While we have occasionally been asked to provide sound isolation, on the vast majority of projects acoustics aren’t even discussed. To some extent this makes perfect sense;… Read more »
by Rachel White Designing a renovation is a collaborative process at Byggmeister. Between the time we first visit a house and sign a construction contract, several members of our planning group will have had a hand in developing the project. For more than a decade Karin Mahdavi has been a key member of this team. An… Read more »
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