What would you do if your love of your work was so intense you couldn’t possibly share it with enough people? If you’re Wes Vollmer and you build concrete homes, you’d try to put it on national television.
And he just might pull it off.
For many people in the industry, concrete home construction is a way of making a living, possibly an avocation. For Vollmer, it almost seems like an understatement to call it a passion.
Get him started and you’ll see.
“When people think of concrete they think of the driveway, and that’s not what it’s about anymore,” says Vollmer, a San Antonio-based decorative concrete contractor of 14 years. “We make concrete look like nothing you can imagine, and I want to wow people with what you can do with concrete, and show that we can build a concrete house that looks good, but it’s also a green building.”
Vollmer plans to bring his message of concrete evangelism to the nation through the airing of the “Concrete Home Challenge,” a reality television concept in which Vollmer and a team of builders will seek to complete a concrete home in 150 days.
Getting “Concrete Home Challenge” on the air will depend largely on the efforts of George Siegel, whose company, J.E.L. Communications, is negotiating with HGTV, Discovery and PBS for an opportunity to air the program in six hour-long segments—targeted for the fourth quarter of 2007.
Although Siegel says the initial response from all three networks was positive—including their request to send sample video—the process at this point is moving slowly. He hopes the success of two locally produced shows he did with Vollmer will help grease the skids, in addition to the possibility of a major supplier stepping forward as a sponsor.
Inherent in the challenge for Siegel as producer is to create a program that sends the desired message about concrete construction while also providing the kind of scintillating television that makes people want to come back and watch again.
That was a major factor, Siegel says, in the assemblage of the building team, including construction team leader Dale Sauer, designer Kelly Scully and architect Stephen Colley.
“If the people watching aren’t into the drama, it won’t have an effect on them,” Siegel says. “If you have people that nobody is interested in, people won’t watch. If you watch some episodes of ‘The Apprentice,’ it depends on who is vying for the job. If you have six boring people, it’s going nowhere. You know what Wes’s passion is. It bleeds off the phone. Dale Sauer is terrific—he’s not afraid to say what’s on his mind. He gets in there. He’s good. He’s going to make the show even better. We’ve got a good mix of personalities, and we went out and selected six people we thought would make good television.”
The selection of six “good television” people, of course, could not be made at the expense of building competence, especially given the tight timeframe of 150 days to build the house.
That’s half the time it normally takes to construct one, but the timeframe is considered normal for Dale Sauer, a San Antonio custom homebuilder who says he typically finishes homes that fast.
“It’s a matter of scheduling people, “Sauer says. “If you schedule people and pay people, if you’ll take care of them, they’ll take care of you. And if you schedule them and get them in to do their jobs, and pay them when they want to be paid, they’ll do what you need them to do.”
There is one twist, however, for Sauer. He has built many custom homes, but this will be his first concrete home. But because he sees major similarities to the process of building with Structural Insulated Panels (SIPs), where he has extensive experience, Sauer does not consider the new venture to pose difficulties with respect to preparation.
“A lot of the construction is very similar to the SIP panels construction method,” Sauer says. “I’ve built four SIP houses over the year, and depending which system we use, we think it may actually speed the process rather than slowing it down.”
Vollmer hopes to follow up on the San Antonio project (“It’s right in my hometown, so I can keep an eye on it”) with one in Louisiana and one in Mississippi to highlight the superiority of concrete houses for withstanding a disaster like Hurricane Katrina.
“My feeling is that we should be building more houses out of concrete rather than wood,” Vollmer says. “And I’m not saying wood is not good. I’m saying that in some of the areas in the United States, it should be mandatory for these homes to be built out of concrete. If 50 percent of the homes in New Orleans were built of concrete, they wouldn’t be rebuilding from scratch. You’d just put a new roof on it, put new windows on it and you’d be done.”
But while Vollmer emphasizes the safety factor inherent in concrete building, he does not want people to think the choice of building a concrete home should be made solely, or even primarily, out of safety considerations. Vollmer is a big booster of decorative concrete, and got his first chance to promote it when working with Siegel on a commercial for a restaurant he owns—constructed from concrete, of course.
That led to the Vollmer/Siegel collaboration on two local programs similar to the one they hope to put on nationally. Vollmer also hopes the program will help teach others in the industry how to more effectively tout the benefits of concrete construction. “I’m a member of the American Society of Concrete Contractors, and I make presentations at the meetings,” Vollmer says. “Sometimes there are 200 people, sometimes there are 500 people. We put on a little show about decorative contracting, telling people what we do, and I wanted to do a show about decorative concrete, which kind of escalated into this show. I didn’t want to make it an informercial, but that’s how it was perceived.”
Sponsors for the first of the two San Antonio broadcasts, Vollmer says, were satisfied enough to sign up for the second one, and he has high hopes for good sponsorship for the national program. He also has an investor lined up to pay for the costs of the home to be constructed, and plans to sell the home in order to return the investor’s money.
If the future shows in Louisiana and Mississippi happen, however, Vollmer hopes to give those homes away.
And after that? With his first program focusing on hurricanes, Vollmer hopes to turn his attention to another force of nature—tornadoes—and build a concrete home in Tornado Alley. There, he wants to continue spreading the word about the aesthetics, as well as the structural superiority, of his passion.
“For a lot of craftsman and artists in their trades, a lot of these guys, and the manufacturers, see the advantage of making it look so incredibly realistic, and say, hey, I want that,” Vollmer says. “No one knows about decorative concrete. I’ve been doing it 14 years and people say, ‘Wow, that rock looks good.’ You just want to look at it and say, ‘That tile really looks pretty.’ Well, I guess I did such a good job that it looks just like tile, or with some of the stamped concrete, we did such a good job that it looks just like rock.”
Soon, he hopes to have a national television audience thinking the same thing.
Issued: September 5, 2007
Page: pp.25, 27
Copyright: Copyright 2007 R.W. Nielsen Company