I still remember the first time I stood in front of the site for our inaugural multifamily project. The plans were printed, the financing was secured, and yet I couldn’t shake off that familiar twist of nervousness in my stomach. We’d built dozens of single-family homes before, some modest, some ambitious, and we prided ourselves on our efficiency and precision. But this? This was a whole different animal. A multifamily building doesn’t just scale up your workload—it multiplies your assumptions, complicates your timelines, and exposes gaps in your planning you didn’t even know existed.
Take framing, for instance. On a single-family home, framing is a four-week affair at most. We plan our bank draws accordingly—submit for payment at the end of framing, pay the crew, order the next wave of materials. It’s a rhythm we know well. So on this project, I followed that same logic. What I didn’t consider is that multifamily framing is not a four-week sprint—it’s a four-month marathon. The cash flow gap hit us fast. Thankfully, our company had the liquidity to float the difference, and our lender was accommodating enough to issue an off-schedule progress payment. But I still remember that anxious week, staring at payroll numbers and framing invoices, wondering if I’d just made a rookie mistake in a much bigger league.
The scale doesn’t just slow you down—it forces you to think differently about space. When windows arrived for our typical houses, unloading them takes an hour. On this job, it took two full days just to get them off the truck and placed where they needed to be. We had to designate an entire unit just to act as temporary storage. That’s when I learned that managing logistics on a big site is not just about trucks and cranes—it’s about choreography. If you don’t plan it like a ballet, you’re going to get chaos.
And then there’s the little things that become very big problems. I once had a guy spend nearly 40 minutes walking across the site just looking for a misplaced laser level. On a single-family home, that’s just a two-minute stroll to the garage. On a 20,000-square-foot multifamily shell with three floors under construction and ten different trades working simultaneously, it’s a wild goose chase. After that day, we invested in labeling systems, rolling tool carts, and color-coded storage areas. We even got an intern to act as a “site librarian” for the first month just to keep track of where everything was. It might sound excessive, but when you're burning hours chasing screw boxes and misplaced junction boxes, every bit of organization pays off.
It didn’t stop there. Cleaning a large job site is a full-time job in itself. We’re used to giving the site a good sweep at the end of the day, maybe a deep clean before drywall. On this site, it felt like the dust had its own zip code. We had to budget not only more time, but more people, more bags, more vacuums, more everything. There’s a kind of psychological effect too—when the site is clean, subs work cleaner, and that ripple effect improves quality across the board. Mess breeds mess. And on a big job, mess becomes disaster.
If there’s one thing I was deeply grateful for throughout this project, it was having the right design team involved from the very beginning. On smaller projects, you can afford a little design-as-you-go. On a multifamily build? That luxury disappears fast. Constructability becomes a minefield, and even small design misalignments snowball into schedule delays or costly changes. I’ve heard horror stories of builders getting halfway through rough-ins only to realize the plumbing conflicts with ductwork no one thought to model in 3D. We were lucky. We’d worked with River Architects before, and their passive house expertise proved invaluable. They didn’t just draw pretty elevations—they thought like builders. That kind of collaboration doesn’t just save time, it saves trust. And in a project of this magnitude, trust is everything.
One area where we really had to catch up fast was fire protection. In single-family homes, sprinklers are rare and fire alarms usually amount to battery-powered smoke detectors. In multifamily buildings, you're dealing with full sprinkler systems and addressable fire alarms with pull stations, annunciator panels, and strict compliance codes. I’ll admit, I was intimidated at first. But we hired a solid fire protection contractor early, someone who knew the systems inside and out. He sat down with our team, walked us through the install process, flagged potential layout conflicts, and helped us price it correctly from the start. Because we had him in the room early, we avoided the usual mid-design panic where nobody knows how to fit a sprinkler riser without tearing through structural beams. It also helped us qualify for relaxed fire ratings between units—our doors only needed to be 20-minute fire rated, which simplified procurement and helped us stay within budget.
Coming from the high-performance building world, we were confident in our whole-building airtightness strategy. Getting to 0.6 ACH50 was well within our comfort zone. We had our control layers, our sealed penetrations, our continuous envelope detailing. What we didn’t anticipate was how tricky unit-to-unit air-sealing would be. The code requirement of 3 ACH50 between units sounded easy—until we tried to meet it. Turns out, sealing between units isn’t just about slapping drywall and insulation in a partition. It’s about tracing every single joint, every open-web joist, every plumbing and electrical chase that dares to cross the divide.
We spent more hours than I care to admit crawling through interstitial spaces with foam cans and caulk guns, sealing tiny leaks that added up to major air exchange. Our biggest lesson? Treat the demising walls with the same detail and respect as your exterior envelope. Pre-planning blocking locations, coordinating with the truss manufacturer, even oversizing your mechanical penetrations slightly to allow for better sealing—all of these small changes made a big difference. If you assume unit-to-unit sealing will “just happen” on its own, you’re going to be chasing leaks for weeks.
Sound insulation was another area where the stakes were higher than we anticipated. In a single-family home, we might throw some batts between floors or use resilient channels if we’re feeling fancy. In a multifamily context, good acoustics aren’t just a nice-to-have—they’re code, they’re quality of life, and they’re something tenants notice. We defaulted to using mineral wool batts for its dual benefits: it performed well for sound attenuation and also supported our fire separation goals. The bonus? We already had double-stud walls between units for air-sealing reasons, so we got an acoustic benefit essentially for free.
One of the bigger mental shifts was dealing with common spaces. You can’t rent them, but you sure as heck have to build them. Hallways, stairwells, package rooms, bike storage—each one represents an investment with no direct ROI. And yet, they’re what tenants remember. They're the front door, the first impression, the mood setter. We used to just wrap these costs into per-unit budgeting, but that always left us underestimating. Now, we treat common areas as their own cost centers—with their own line items for finishes, lighting, and security.
Lighting was a good example of where a little strategy went a long way. Instead of leaving hallway lights on 24/7, we installed basic fixtures on a permanent circuit and supplemented with occupancy-sensing lights that kicked in when movement was detected. It saved on utility bills and reduced fixture burnout. For flooring, we went for industrial-grade LVP—not the prettiest option, but after seeing what three months of muddy boots did to a sample patch of carpet tile, we knew we had to prioritize durability.
Looking back, what stands out most isn’t the technical complexity or even the budget management—it’s the human scale of the thing. One evening, just after drywall was complete, I walked the job site alone. The sun was setting, and through the dusty light, you could start to feel the bones of a community. Kitchen islands taking shape. Bedroom closets ready for backpacks and winter coats. Balcony doors waiting for planters and morning coffee rituals. It reminded me why we do this work—not just to build, but to give people places to live their lives fully.
This project pushed us in ways we didn’t expect. It humbled us, challenged us, forced us to evolve. But it also made us better. More careful planners. More deliberate designers. And, above all, more human-centered builders.
So if you're making the leap from single-family to multifamily construction, here’s my advice: respect the scale, build the right team early, don’t underestimate the logistics, and always—always—remember who you're building for. Because at the end of the day, these aren't just units. They're homes. And that's a responsibility worth rising to.