This board gets plenty of amusing (and terrifying) stories about spec houses from hell, clients from hell, subs from hell, and contractors from, well, guess where. As a counter balance I thought I’d pass on the incredibly positive experiences my wife and I had when we had a custom vacation house built this past year. In short, everything went smoothly and the whole experience was only moderately stressful (there’s no stress-less way to pick out tile). Most importantly, I gained something personally. I made some good new friends and learned first hand about the quality and integrity of the people in the home building industry.

Our general contractor finished the house on budget to the penny and on time to the day. Not only that, but he was an absolute pleasure to work with. I looked forward to our meetings and phone calls (and many emails, which turned out to be a very useful tool). Because the house was four hours away from our permanent home, we could only be there on weekends. We really had to trust our contractor to build it the way we wanted it. He did better than that: he gave us what we wanted plus made many many suggestions for little improvements that we never would have thought of, based on his years of experience.

The local planning department–after an initial glitch while they were hiring a new plan checker–went out of their way to help us keep to schedule. On several occasions the building inspector came to the site after hours and on weekends. When we called in the dead of winter to request a final inspection of our snowbound house, he arrived a day later on cross country skis!

The subcontractors (with one exception) all did work that exceeded our expectations. Again, because we were hours away, they were often working on site by themselves, without supervision from us or our general. We depended entirely on their personal integrity to do quality work and we were consistently rewarded. Our tiler, for example, we dealt with entirely by phone and fax. We faxed him a sketch of the bathroom, told him the style of slate that we wanted, and then gave him the address of the house and told him where we hid the front door key and crossed our fingers. A week later we finally came on site to see our new bathroom slate and it was stunning. It was clearly the work of a professional, someone who cared about quality for its own sake. He could have gotten away with a sloppier job but he chose not to.

Lessons learned:

Check references!!! We did extensive reference checking on everyone and it paid off. The one sub we didn’t check because he was such a nice guy turned out to be a big problem.

Use locals!!! The general, the subs, the architect, the lumber yard, the planning department, the utilities, all knew each other and had worked together before. They knew how to work together and where potential problems might lie.

Accept guidance!!! Mostly we accepted the suggestions from our subs. A few things that we didn’t do later on we wished we had.

Show them the money!!! We tried not to nickel and dime our builders on their estimates and we paid promptly. We kept the design within what we could afford and accepted guidance from the builder and architect as to where we could cut costs. We cut costs in the design itself (i.e. eliminating or postponing fancy stuff) rather than squeezing the builders estimates. We were rewarded with prompt, quality work, no cost overruns, and a relationship of trust that I still value.

The big lesson learned: working with builders can be a personally rewarding experience. I’m in the software business, an industry with a (well-deserved) reputation for poor quality and a focus on easy profits. It really was a revelation for me to work with people who cared about the quality of what they did for its own sake, and who valued the trust that their clients had in them. If you are that kind of builder, I bet there’s a special place in heaven for you.