Design Consultation.

The trades who do this work have been with me for years. I don’t put a job out to the lowest bidder and hope. The cheapest framer is expensive twice.

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.

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.

Roof geometry does more work than almost any other decision. It sets the massing you see from the street, the volume you feel inside, where water goes, how much attic you have and what your framing costs. A complicated roof photographs beautifully and introduces valleys, which are where roofs leak. I’m not against complexity, but every plane should be there for a reason you can name. The simplest roof that gives you the rooms you want is almost always the one that ages best.

You'll get the bad news early, when it's still cheap to deal with.

It’s ordinary discipline, applied consistently, which turns out to be rare.

I keep the number of concurrent builds low on purpose. Being on the job is the entire value of hiring a builder rather than a broker.

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.

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.

Existing structures complicate everything. A teardown means demolition, disconnects, and finding out what is actually under the old slab, which is never what the survey said. Budget the unknown honestly or the first month eats the contingency you were saving for finishes.