The Kansas City Star March 15, 2007
By Jason Noble and Bill Graham

Day 2 And Counting - Quickly
Makeover requires extreme coordination

When the story of the Jacobo family and their new home is told on “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition: later this spring, viewers won’t know the half of it.
Or even a quarter.

For viewers, the story of the Jacobos’ new home will begin with a morning call from series star Ty Pennington on a bullhorn and speed along through demolition, construction, decoration and unveiling in a pat 60 minutes. The true process of constructing a house in a single week, in front of a crowd, for a television show, is a feat of almost mind-boggling complexity.

“We do six months’ work in six days,” said Diane Korman, senior producer for “Extreme Makeover.”

To start with, on episode usually requires nine days of filming, she said. A crew of 75 goes to each town to produce the show and to help organize volunteers.

“We probably spend $50,000 to $75,000 a day,” Korman said, including for fuel and food.

Once demolition is finished, construction goes on 24 hours a day until it’s complete, regardless of the weather she said.

“The weather in Kansas City, 70-degree days, is really helping us with this project,” she said.

But even before those nine days of filming, builders are busy for weeks working behind the scenes, laying the organizational and bureaucratic groundwork.

“I’ve been working on this for about the last 30 days,” said Kevin Green, the Parkville homebuilder leading construction on the Jacobos’ home. “Since then, we’ve been working through the building process, the designing of the home and working with the subcontractors to build this house in record time.”

Green and his company, Kevin Green Homes Inc., was responsible not only for designing the house, but also for securing building permits from Kansas City and arranging for inspection once construction began.

The city requires inspections at key points in the construction process, including at the completion of the foundation and with installation of electricity, plumbing and other mechanical elements. Because these projects were to be completed in a matter of hours, rather than days, contractors had to create a detailed schedule of when each element would be finished so officials could inspect the work and give the ok.

“We had to determine what the city’s requirements were for setbacks and height and make sure the house was within those constraints, because we knew there wouldn’t be time for appeals or variances,” said Greg Franzen, manager of inspections for the city.

Once construction began, builders, too, worked on tight and intricate schedules.

Wednesday’s work was dominated by framing – the construction of the home’s wooden skeleton. Volunteers from Advantage Framing Systems Inc. of Blue Springs began arriving on site about 6:15 a.m., anticipating a 12-hour workday to take the project from a concrete hold in the ground to a two-story home.

To finish the job in such short time required about 80 workers – more than five times the size of a regular crew, said Russ Wittekind, one of the framers.

Advantage was involved in the construction of the last “Extreme Makeover” home in Kansas City for firefighter Stephen Johnson in 2005. That experience provided valuable lessons, said Ben Alexander, project manager for the company. On the Johnson house, the framers took on the project as a single unit.

“This time, we’re taking a much more orchestrated approach,” Alexander said, pointing to color-coded teams that tackled specific responsibilities – erecting wall, laying floors, etc. – in shifts.

The framers’ tightly choreographed routine is one of many – from Monday’s demolition to the interior design work coming later in the week – that will allow the house to take shape.

And all the while, of course there’s a TV show being filmed. Making was for retakes and close-ups played into the project’s logistical considerations as well.

On Tuesday, for example, work was slowed as film crews shot multiple takes of show stars Paige Hemmis and Michael Moloney driving pickups. The cables attached to the old house had pulled out chunks of the front wall, but they were towing nothing during the retakes.

A bulldozer and a front loader eventually pushed down the house from behind as the camera rolled.

Then the film crew shot multiple takes of designers Pennigton, Hemmis, Moloney and Tanya McQueen giving each other hugs and high fives to celebrate the collapse.

Despite those slight delays, Alexander said, the timetable is always moving forward.

“It’s a well-orchestrated plan,” he said, “and the orchestra is playing.”