Over the past several years, there has been rapid evolution in home design in the kitchen. For kitchen floors, first ceramic tile took the place of vinyl, then hardwood took the place of ceramic tile. For countertops, granite soared to the lead, replacing solid surfacing and laminate, and now quartz is making big inroads into the granite market.
The most recent acceleration in this evolution is in cabinet styles and finishes. Flat panel doors, while long considered a low-cost option compared to raised panel doors, have now gained greater acceptance and represent more than a third of new single-family home installations and a large majority of multifamily installations.
Each year, Home Innovation Research Labs surveys more than 100,000 U.S. and Canadian households and get very detailed information on their home remodeling, repairs, and upgrades. You may assume that most remodeling or home improvement activities are conducted primarily by those who’ve either been in their house a long time and are looking for/need a change, or those who recently bought an existing home and want to do things to make it more “their own.” Our robust consumer data challenges that assumption.
There’s a mystery surrounding wood floor joists in new homes that keeps getting deeper—literally! In 2004, more than half of wood floor joists in new homes were 10 inches or less deep. Now, more than 60 percent are 12 inches or deeper.
The housing rebound continues, but its effect hasn’t been evenly distributed across the spectrum of housing types and price-points. In 2006, Multifamily represented only 16% of residential starts but surged to 35% of starts in 2015, bringing a new character to the market for home building materials. In 2016, however, while we saw a modest return to pre-2006 markets when Move-up and Starter homes ruled, Multifamily began inching its way back down from its peak the year before.
Like most data points in the building industry, insulation material usage varies widely by geographic area, the size and type of builder, and types of homes. The national survey of builders we conducted in February, 2017 sheds further light on usage patterns—confirming some stereotypes about insulation usage in new homes, but it also seems to refute others, lending insight into the market for insulation materials and systems.
The results of Home Innovation’s annual survey of 110,000 U.S. households are in. Helped by declining prices in recent years (and the fact that Mother Nature knows how to produce some beautiful countertop material), granite is still the best-selling kitchen countertop by a sizeable margin – accounting for about 40% of home countertop replacements in 2016.
Recently, I shared results from our builder survey on foam wall sheathing and how its use varied by builder type, price point and type of home, and geographic areas. Now I’d like to share a few things we learned about usage patterns in thickness of foam sheathing in the same survey.
Over the past few years, a lot has been said and written about continuous foam insulation in new homes, including the writing of the new building code requirements.
Bloomberg New Energy Finance says solar will be the cheapest source of energy in the 2020s. Why wait to experience the benefits of solar?