03
Professional Home-Building Teams

2026-02-03 · 455 words

A quick post tonight because I should already be in bed.

A lower-bound estimate for the number of calories the average adult American expends exercising a day is about ~150 calories per day (spent working out over the course of 30 minutes). According to the US Census Bureau, there are around 200 million Americans between the ages of 18 and 65. Multiplying these numbers, American adults expend 30,000,000,000 calories a day doing exercise. (Yes, that’s 30 billion calories).

I had a dream the other day where I was a part of a competitive home-building team. We competed against other teams to build identical houses to certain size and quality standards, as volunteers, instead of going to the gym. Hauling lumber, driving nails, raising roofs, rolling carpet, painting walls. It was a little surreal and very intense. Are competitive home-building teams a real thing? Unclear.

Anyway, according to FRED, the median sales price for a house is currently $410,800. That amounts to, on average, a 3 bedroom house with 2 bathrooms, around 1,800 square feet. Based on data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the National Association of Home Builders, a home of this size would take around 3,600 labor-hours to complete, if the workers worked very slowly.

Building a home can can cost 200-600 calories per worker per hour, depending on the difficulty of the task; we can average that out to 300 calories per worker per hour. Which also matches our earlier estimate for calories/hour for exercise. Multiplying these two numbers, the median home takes about 1,000,000 calories of human labor to build. (Yes, that’s 1 million calories.)

  30,000,000,000 (calories / day)
÷      1,000,000 (calories / home)
----------------
          30,000 (homes / day)

If resources were no bottleneck, and everyone built homes instead of exercising, we could build 30,000 homes per day! According to the Census, there are ~140 million homes in the US. With some asterisks, at a rate of 30,000 homes per day, we could double the current US housing supply in about 13 years. And as a side effect, everyone would be super ripped and very skilled at all sorts of crafts, of course.

Oh, in other news, I think I have an idea for a new type of gym…

---

I hope you enjoyed these fun facts!

Tangentially, I have this big list of articles and blog posts that I’ve read that I enjoyed. To share the love, I’m going to start including a random one in each of my daily posts, for your further enjoyment. If you’re here for the technical content, why not read this post next?