Government
Coleman Consulting LLC is uniquely positioned as Building Envelope specialty engineering and consulting firm with minority/woman-owned business enterprise certifications at both the State (Maryland) and Federal levels. Our government contracting experience extends back to the 1990s and includes work both direct-contracted to various state and federal bodies for Building Envelope work and as subcontractor to larger primes in multidisciplinary projects.
Government contracting officer? We can assist you by filling a valuable niche as a highly-qualified, experienced firm dedicated to Building Envelope diagnostics, design, engineering and consulting work. Refer to this page for our certification numbers and approved NAICS codes.
Prime with a Government contract and trying to fill your minority percentages? We can provide high-quality investigation, design, construction phase, and/or commissioning services. Check out our certifications page for our Maryland (MDOT) and Federal registration numbers and NAICS codes.
Past government projects include building envelope conditions assessments (single building and site-wide), roof replacement design, window replacement design to meet ATFP blast-resistance requirements, and investigation of water infiltration problems with remedial design to address our findings. We also worked with the US Army Corps of Engineers on some of their initial air-barrier installations, helping to develop specifications and test protocols.
Institutional
Our experience with institutional owners, particularly those with large building stocks, affords us insight into the needs of this market. We have a natural synergy in this area because institutional owners seek long-term solutions. This suits our philosophy well – we have never been content with the approach of many commercial and development-focused companies that put initial cost as the only metric worth considering. We understand and can work within your budget but will always push for consideration of life cycle cost, particularly when the life of a material or system bears more relation to the total time of ownership than the typical 5-10 year budget planning cycles.
College and university campuses, hospitals, museums, and corporate facilities typify this market. These owners know they will own their buildings essentially forever. The motivation to ensure that the building occupants have a comfortable, stable interior environment and good indoor air quality, all thing closely tied to the performance of the building envelope, is also high. This leads to a strong focus on high quality envelope systems.
From century-old campus buildings with brick mass-walls and slate roofs to modern high-rise hospitals with fully-glazed, pressure-balanced curtain wall systems, we bring to your project the expertise necessary to ensure many decades of building envelope performance. In recent years we have performed projects ranging from design for replacement of an exterior plaza waterproofing system at the Baltimore Gas & Electric Company headquarters in downtown Baltimore, MD to drawing and specification peer review, including development of improvements in the documents, for a new building at the Charleston VA Hospital.
Multi-Family
The sensitive nature of multi-family residential work presents a unique challenge, particularly in condominium settings where numerous owners with divergent viewpoints are involved. Diagnosing moisture intrusion issues is our most common task with multi-family residential buildings and our successful track record, with numerous repeat clients, is testimony to our dedication to success in this realm.
Property management firms, such as Thornhill Properties and Victory Management, return to us over and over because they trust our expertise and know that we will make them look good with their clients. We also work directly with condominium boards who, like Tudor Arms Apartments, often return to us year after year as new roof, wall, windows, and foundation issues arise.
Failure Analysis and Diagnostics
Water infiltration, air leakage, interior condensation and poor thermal performance are all failures of the building envelope to perform as required and as expected by the Owner and occupants. Failure analysis/diagnostics is our single most common task and the challenge we most relish. We are often called in to provide accurate answers when other design professionals and/or contractors fail to correctly diagnose a problem with the building envelope. The challenge is invariably some variation of a simple question: where? Our task is to make that determination correctly and with minimal disruption to the building occupants.
We bring a rigorous, evidence-based approach to our investigations. We will both identify the specific location of the failure – answering the “where” questions – and address the “why” that often accompanies a project of this type. Was it a failure of original design? Perhaps a mistake by the construction contractor? Simple age-related deterioration? We will make this determination in order to ensure that the repair work we recommend properly accounts for the cause of the failure. Our conclusions and recommendations are always well-supported and clearly documented in order to provide a clear path to and support for a remedial plan. Design for the remedial work is then the next logical step.
Design
This is where we take all the lessons learned during our failure analysis work and combine it with years of experience and the best of modern engineering and materials to create a lasting building envelope solution. Whether a retrofit for a system at the end of its lifespan, such as a roof replacement, or an integrated, full-building air barrier system our goal is the same: high performance.
Industry best-practices are but a starting point in our design work; our target is far above industry norms with the clients budget in mind. We leverage extensive experience in construction inspection and testing to ensure that our designs are constructable, warrantable where needed, and will perform to expectations.
Our design work is usually performed under contract directly to the building Owner in a retrofit/remediation project, or as a sub-consultant to the lead Architect for new construction projects. We also occasionally will provide design assistance directly to a Contractor, such as for a value-engineering proposal, a design-build project or when envelope systems are specified solely on a performance basis.
Commissioning
Long used in the mechanical/electrical/plumbing (MEP) engineering world, commissioning has spread fast into our realm in recent years to describe a holistic approach to a collection of services we provided for years before the term “commissioning” moved from the MEP world into ours. This move can largely be attributed to the need for Owners and Contractors to reduce risk in new construction projects. Why focus on the envelope? Roughly 80% of construction related claims in the U.S. stem from moisture penetration issues. This figure alone shows the value in including Building Envelope commissioning in your next project.
Trends in modern construction make an even stronger case for commissioning. Performance-critical envelope systems are less forgiving of seemingly minor errors in construction. Air barriers, in particular, are highly sensitive to incredibly small breaches in continuity. These systems cannot overcome ill-conceived design decisions once in the construction phase and they require a level of dedication to quality assurance during construction that must be adopted by all involved.
A typical scope of services for Building Envelope commissioning includes development of Owner’s Project Requirements and proceeds from there through design-phase review of Construction Documents, bid and submittal review, participation in pre-construction coordination and meetings, review and performance testing of mock-ups, ongoing inspection of construction, and Owner training. Certain projects will have additional job-specific requirements aimed at particular aspects of the building, local environment, or Owner’s requirements.
Construction Document Review
Architects and Contractors wanting to improve their product and reduce risk lean on our years of experience and depth of knowledge in the Building Envelope field. As noted above, Construction Document review services are an aspect of commissioning. However, they also function well as a stand-alone service. The difference is typically found in who the client is: commissioning is usually done under contract directly to the building Owner or Construction Manager while Construction Document review is typically performed under contract to the lead Architect or General Contractor.
A typical Construction Document review for an Architect begins in the design development phase where basic decisions are made to fulfill the Owner’s Project Requirements. We assist with interpretation of the requirements and selection of main systems. From there we review roof, wall, fenestration, and foundation systems in each additional document version and provide an exhaustive comment matrix to facilitate comment tracking by all parties.
With a Contractor as client the process changes some – typically we don’t have access to documents until deep in the design phase, perhaps even after completion of the Construction Documents. Our focus then must shift from ensuring that the design is complete and correct to identifying document issues and assisting with planning, issuing RFI, sequencing/scheduling, and avoiding specific pitfalls during construction. We can also create shop drawings where needed, particularly at the interface between systems where manufacturer and fabricator shop drawings often fall short.
Construction Inspection
The old saw, “Don’t expect if you don’t inspect” was never more true than in the construction industry. From Owners who have the experience and sophistication to understand the value of a well-structured inspection routine to General Contractors wanting to reduce risk and construct higher quality buildings with fewer punchlist items and reduced call-backs, we have the experience and people to assist.
Whether the project requires full-time staffing or just occasional drop-in or on-call visits, we have the experience needed to allow you to expect the best in your next project. Our people have knowledge and understanding of historic structures and practices as well as complex, modern systems. We provide written reports of each site visit detailing everything from the weather conditions to specific observations made and issues discussed with on-site personnel.
Let us design an inspection routine for your next project that will accomplish your goals and fit within your budget.
Legal Forensics
A logical extension of our work in failure analysis and diagnostics, we occasionally find that the problem(s) we are looking at point to responsibility on behalf of either a contractor or design professional previously involved with the building. In these situations our role sometimes evolves into providing expert witness testimony and the associated preparatory work. Alternately, we are sometimes asked to begin an investigation by a building owner or their legal counsel who have a suspicion that the building problems they are experiencing are attributable to negligent or faulty work by others.
No matter the circumstances, we bring to the table decades of engineering experience almost exclusively outside of the legal realm. While we have experience and success providing legal forensic support, our credibility as experts comes from the balance of our experience. We offer honest assessments of the conditions in questions and expert opinions based on the facts available.
References to law offices we have worked with in the past are available on request.
Condition Assessment
Visual observation is used, often with the help of binoculars and/or boom lifts or swing scaffolds. For more information we team with a contractor to make (and repair) test cuts to determine underlying conditions. An infrared technician is also often enlisted who can provide a picture of hidden water infiltration on roofs and exterior walls. We report on general conditions, conformance with expected standard of care, expected remaining life span of materials, priority of remediation, and develop repair scenarios.
Whole Building
Building envelope elements generally are defined by the area of the building they cover, such as roofs, but current design practice and modern systems dictate “whole building” thinking in some cases. In particular, air barrier and vapor control layers. These must maintain continuity in all areas including, for example, at the roof/wall junction and the perimeters of windows. These are the areas where trouble is most likely to occur either from design errors or lack of coordination between trades in the field.
| A. Air Barriers | |
|---|---|
| 1. ASHRAE 90.1 (2010) | 2. USACE – Air Leakage Test Protocol (version 3) |
| B. Vapor Control Layer(s) | |
Roofs
We handle the full spectrum of available materials, as listed below, along with the associated engineering calculations (wind uplift, snow loads, thermal requirements and stormwater sizing), tapered insulation/roof slope layout, and code ratings (FMG/UL). Considerations for a typical project include insulation type (isocyanurate, expanded polystyrene, extruded polystyrene, perlite, wood-fiber, etc.), traffic and maintenance durability, and fire resistance.
| A. Low-slope/commercial (flat roofs) | ||
|---|---|---|
1. Built-up
|
2. Single-Ply (each can be adhered, mechanically attached or ballasted; coating systems sometimes used)
|
3. Modified Bitumen (smooth or granule surface, occasionally coated; typically two-ply, variations exist)
|
| B. Steep-slope/residential | ||
1. Metal (Structural or architectural; standing seam, face-fastened, shingles, and other)
|
2. Slate | 3. Asphalt Shingles Architectural 3-Tab |
| 4. Cedar shake and shingles | 5. Tile (flat, interlocking, mission/barrel and other)
|
|
| C. Non-traditional | ||
1. Plaza decks
|
2. Green roofs (low-sloped or steep; intensive and extensive)
|
3. Inverted roof membrane assemblies (IRMA) |
Walls
Building walls – the architectural element most observed – can be constructed of a near-infinite combination of materials. Many are common, like brick, but still come in a dazzling array of assemblies that appear outwardly similar yet are vastly different under the skin. Often the difference is in the age of the building. Newer construction is lighter and uses pressure-balancing and hidden drainage cavities to achieve the expected performance levels. Insulation can be placed at any number of locations within an assembly of this type, sometimes in multiple locations/layers. By contrast, historic buildings may simply be brick through-and-though – called multi-wythe construction – with only a layer of plaster and paint on the interior. These perform, in contrast with modern walls, by allowing the mass of the wall to accept thermal and moisture loads and then slowly releasing them over time. Design and analysis of these vastly different paradigms requires different ways of thinking to achieve one’s goals.
| A. Modern: drainable and pressure-balanced rainscreen | ||
|---|---|---|
1. Brick veneer cavity walls
|
2. Glazed or metal-clad curtainwalls | 3. Exterior Insulation and Finish Systems (EIFS. sometimes known by the trade name “Dryvit”) |
| 4. Various siding types | ||
| B. Traditional/Historic: mass walls and barrier systems | ||
| 1. Multi-wythe brick | 2. Brick over terra-cotta | 3. Three-course stucco over wood framing |
| 4. Wood clapboards | 5. Cedar shake/shingle | |
Fenestration
Every opening in the walls and roofs (don’t forget skylights) deserves the same level of consideration as the main surfaces they fall within. Additionally, the joint between the fenestration elements and the surrounding systems must be designed to accept the same loads and to resist air, vapor and water penetration to the same degree as the balance of the building.
| A. Modern: thermally broken and multiple-glazed | ||
|---|---|---|
| 1. Aluminum | 2. Clad-wood | |
| B. Traditional/Historic | ||
| 1. Wood | 2. Steel | |
Foundations
Once installed, the below-grade elements of the building are the most expensive elements to diagnose and repair at a later date, by far. This means that the emphasis on correct material selection, design and execution is greater than any other building envelope element. Yet, once buried, the foundation waterproofing is soon forgotten by all until something goes wrong.
| A. Blind-side/cast against – sheet membranes | ||
|---|---|---|
| 1. Aluminum | 2. Clad-wood | |
| B. Finished wall systems | ||
| 1. PVC & similar heat-welded sheets | 2. Self-adhesive modified bitumen or butyl-based sheets | 3. Bentonite clay systems |
| 4. Fluid or mastic coating systems | ||