Floor Plans.

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.

A custom home is a long relationship with whoever builds it. You’ll talk to me more in eighteen months than you talk to most people in your life, and a good portion of those conversations will be about things that didn’t go to plan. That’s normal. Weather moves, materials arrive damaged, an inspector reads something differently than expected. What matters is whether the person telling you has a plan attached to the news, and whether the same person is still answering the phone a year after you move in. One family has brought me back for a fourth project. That only happens if the earlier ones went right.

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.

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.

Nothing gets covered up that I wouldn't want to look at myself in five years.

The houses that still look right in twenty years were run this way.

Nothing gets covered that I wouldn’t be comfortable looking at in five years. If something needs to be redone, it gets redone before the drywall goes on.

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.

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.

Soil testing is not optional here and it should not be a formality. The geotechnical report drives the foundation design, and a design built on an optimistic assumption is the most expensive kind of savings. I want a real report, from a real engineer, before anyone prices a slab.