Growing up in the industry
A childhood spent in the yard and on job sites.
Jeff's father owns Structural Wood Systems, a specialty structural lumber yard and design business in Bellingham, MA. Growing up, Jeff was around the work constantly from a very young age: riding to job sites, walking through homes at every stage of construction, and seeing how a set of plans becomes a finished house.
By high school he was working at the yard, and he kept at it through his Civil Engineering degree at UMass Amherst, working summers and winters between semesters. Those seasons were split between the yard and the office: cutting I-joists and beams, running saws and forklifts, stacking framing packages for delivery, creating material lists, reading architectural plans, and drafting and designing framing plans. He learned the business from the material up.
Learning Residential From Every Angle
From the drafting table to the framing crew, and back with more to give.
After graduating college, Jeff joined Structural Wood Systems full time as an engineer in training, designing single family homes. After a year as an EIT he left the desk to frame houses with GVN Construction, thinking that there is no better way to understand construction than to do it himself. The framing sequences, the trade conflicts, the gap between what reads clearly on paper and what actually works on site: he learned all of it firsthand, with his hands. Designing plans is one thing; building homes with your own hands teaches you what you never learn at the desk.
He came back to engineering wanting to learn faster, working at Structural Wood Systems full time while also working part time for another firm, DWD Engineering. Jeff sought out all of the best teachers he could learn from, to learn this industry as well as he possibly could.
He then spent over four years at Siegel Structural, again specializing in high-end custom homes alongside some podium and light commercial work. Those years were spent collaborating with well respected and award winning architecture firms across the region, which is where Jeff developed a genuine fluency in how architects think, what they protect, and what preserving design intent actually requires in practice.
JGray Engineering
A practice built around one kind of work, done well.
In 2023, Jeff earned his PE license and launched JGray Engineering LLC. The decision was deliberate: to build a practice focused on the market he knows best, working with the architects and builders who care most about getting it right, in the places where the best custom residential work in New England happens.
JGray is not a generalist firm. It is a specialist practice, built around one type of project, one standard of work, and a way of engineering that comes from having spent real time on both the design side and the building side of a home.
