Mobile City’s custom home builder.

Soil moves here. Drainage decides where water goes for the life of the house. Orientation sets what every window looks at and how hard the west side works in August. Those three get settled before framing, because they can’t be fixed after.

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.

Clay soil in this part of Texas moves with the seasons. The foundation design isn’t a formality here, and neither is the drainage that keeps water away from it.

The foundation is the part of your house you’ll never look at and never stop depending on. In this part of Texas the soil is heavy clay that swells when it rains and shrinks when it doesn’t, which means the slab is designed for movement rather than pretending movement won’t happen. That means real engineering, correct moisture conditioning before the pour, post-tension cable laid where the drawings say and not where it’s convenient, and drainage that carries water away from the perimeter for the life of the house. Skipping any of it saves money in month three and costs a great deal in year eight.

I will tell you about the mistake before you find it. That's the whole arrangement.

That’s how Rick ran his jobs, and it’s how I run mine.

Wood, stone and steel all start imperfect. The job is refining them, not pretending otherwise.

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.

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.

Trees change a plan more than people expect. A mature oak worth keeping sets the house back, which moves the drive, which moves the drainage. I would rather redraw around a tree that will be shading the back porch in twenty years than take it out for the convenience of a rectangle.