Exterior Styles.

I price the site work honestly, including the parts nobody enjoys paying for. Dirt, drainage, drives and utilities are where the surprises live, and I’d rather put real numbers on them in month one.

Site work is the single most underestimated line in a custom build. Clearing, cut and fill, the driveway, drainage structures, the septic field if you’re on one, and the utility runs from wherever the service actually is to wherever your house will be. On an easy lot it’s modest. On a hard one it can rival the cost of framing the entire house. I put real numbers on it before you’re committed, because discovering it later is the most common way a budget comes apart in the first ninety days.

I price the site work honestly, including the parts nobody enjoys paying for. Dirt, drainage, drives and utilities are where the surprises live, and I’d rather put real numbers on them in month one.

Change orders aren’t inherently bad. They are how a house adapts to what you learn while standing in it. What is bad is a change order you find out about after the work is done, or one priced as a favor and settled at the end. Mine are written before the work happens, with the cost and the schedule impact stated, and you sign them or you don’t. That’s it. It keeps the conversation about the house rather than about the invoice.

If something goes wrong, you hear it from me first, and you hear the plan to fix it in the same conversation.

That’s the standard, and it doesn’t move depending on the size of the job.

You’ll see the house at every stage, and I want you on site during framing especially. That’s the window where changes are still cheap and still possible.

Most of what people think of as builder quality is really trade quality. The framer who keeps walls plumb, the plumber who thinks about access before he thinks about speed, the finish carpenter who cares what a return looks like from four feet away. I don’t rebid those relationships every job to shave a percentage point. The trades on my sites have been with me for years, they know the standard I’m going to hold them to, and they know I will pay them fairly to meet it. That isn’t sentiment. It’s the only reliable way I know to make good work repeatable.

Energy performance is mostly decided in the walls, not the equipment. Insulation that’s actually installed to its rated value rather than stuffed around wiring, an air barrier that’s continuous instead of theoretical, windows specified for the elevation they sit on, and ductwork inside conditioned space where it belongs. I run thermal scans on my jobs because a camera finds a gap that a walk-through never will. A house built tight and ventilated correctly is quieter, more comfortable in August, and cheaper to run for as long as it stands.

Slope is the difference between a slab and a much larger number. A lot that falls three feet across the building pad can mean retaining, extra fill, a stepped foundation or a walk-out basement that turns out to be the best room in the house. Which of those you get is a design decision, and it is cheaper to make it before the plans are done.