If all goes well, Deveryle Jones, his wife, Sheree, and their three young daughters will move into their new house in the Baldwin Hills district of Los Angeles next month.
The contemporary, slant-sided house at 5378 Weatherford Drive is the first house they've ever owned, and the Joneses think it's something special. It is. It's framed in steel, just like the big office buildings in Century City and downtown Los Angeles that Deveryle Jones can see from his deck on a clear day.
Jones, 33, and his 31-year-old wife operate Suncrest Homes, a distributor of steel-framed buildings manufactured by Tri-Steel Structures, Dallas.
TechnologicaL Advances
To those who point out that steel-framed single-family houses are nothing new--the Lustron houses of the 1940s were steel framed as was the celebrated Charles and Ray Eames house built in Pacific Palisades in 1949--Jones is quick to say that technological advances in house building are long overdue and that steel framing produces a better house than the conventional 2-by-4 stick-building approach.
Jones began construction on the house in January, 1988, putting the steel beams of the house together like pieces of a giant Erector set, and was installing siding when he showed a reporter around. The house has about 3,600 square feet of living space, four bedrooms and a 20-foot-high ceiling in the living room.
Thanks to the steel support beams and 2-by-6-inch wall studs, Jones will have R-30 insulation values in the ceiling, and R-19 in the walls; a stick-built house in the Los Angeles area typically has ceilings with R-19 values and walls with R-11 values, he added. (The higher the "R" numbers, the more effective the insulation.)
The steel support beams allow a bigger clear span--more open spaces with fewer supporting walls--than all but the most sophisticated wood-framed house, Jones said.
Hillside Building Lot
"That's why steel has become the almost universal material in commercial buildings like warehouses and supermarkets," Jones said.
Jones said that although some of the delays in construction have been due to the unfamiliarity of plan checkers at the Los Angeles Department of Building and Safety with the Tri-Steel system, most are due to the 88-by-130-foot pie-shaped down-slope hillside site.
"It (the lot) needed extensive retaining walls on all sides to be a buildable site," Jones explained. "The walls will be on three sides of the lot."
