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Behind the Build

Behind the Build: Pella Factory Tour

Custom-home builder and FHB brand ambassador John Hourihan provides a behind-the-scenes look at how the company's windows and doors are made.

By John Hourihan

While traveling around the country to visit builders and hear their stories about building extraordinary homes, John Hourihan made a stop at Pella’s factory to see the entire process of turning raw wood into beautiful, high-performance windows and doors. Each week, roughly 3 million board feet of wood (primarily Ponderosa pine from the Pacific Northwest) go in one door, and truckloads of new windows go out another. In this video, John discovers that even though this is a high-tech manufacturing facility, every step of the process is overseen or carried out by skilled technicians and craftspeople.

John begins his tour in the wood-processing plant, where Pella’s director of operations, Brad Jungling, explains that every usable piece of wood that enters the facility is incorporated into one of the company’s products, while anything left over is recycled. Finished parts head to a finishing line before being assembled into complete windows and doors. At the end of the day, John was impressed to hear that as many as 50 people are involved in the crafting of every window that comes out of the facility.

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  1. User avater
    PearlGWilson | Nov 03, 2018 01:36am | #1

    Great work. keep it up!

  2. dynamwebz | Dec 27, 2018 07:05pm | #2

    Why was I not impressed?

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