The Most Common Problems When Building a Custom Home — and How Precision Addresses Each.

The truth is plain: there are many builders in the custom home industry who are in it for one reason only — to make money. They don’t have a process that guides their customers, and they don’t gather the information needed to build a real custom home. What they miss is that making the build a positive experience is how a builder both earns a profit and creates a customer who tells others about it.

At Precision, we bring the education, experience, and knowledge to guide each customer through the entire process. Every customer goes through our pre-construction process — walking through design, specifications, and selections before they sign our construction agreement. By the time you sign, you know exactly what you’re buying and why.

The initial site meeting is a required step in our pre-construction process. We work with the owner on the ground to determine which areas are to be cleared, discuss every utility that needs to be brought in, and identify the locations of the driveway, the house, and the septic system.

We also look for what should be avoided — creeks, ponds, rocky areas, and large trees worth preserving. We then box out the exact location where the house will sit, and that becomes the basis for the house location plan that drives the rest of the build.

This problem is common because most builders have too much on their plate — or they’ve quietly handed quality control to the subs. At Precision, we limit each site superintendent to four houses, which gives them roughly two hours a day per house.

Our superintendents visit each home every day. They physically inspect the work, complete a written quality checklist at every phase of construction, and send a report with photos back to the office. Over the course of a build, our site superintendents complete more than 3,000 individual quality checks.

Allowance items are typically used so a builder can throw together an estimate and get the contract signed quickly. A builder may even set allowances artificially low to make the estimate look more attractive — but that only leads to frustration later, when the real prices come in.

We require homeowners to obtain real quotes on all allowance items during pre-construction — cabinets, lighting, plumbing fixtures, flooring, countertops, tile. That takes the guesswork out of allowances and lets us understand what each homeowner actually wants to spend, before a contract is signed.

No one wants frequent change orders during construction — not even the builder. The only way to keep them to a minimum is a thorough pre-construction process. During that process, the design is reviewed and modified, the specifications are discussed and documented, and the selections are finalized.

If a customer doesn’t fully understand what is included in the design, specifications, and selections, change orders pile up — and so do costs. We guide each customer through this process and verify that you understand everything included in the contract. The result is dramatically fewer change orders once framing starts, and a final cost that lines up with what we quoted.

A house plan may show a column on the front porch, but it typically does not specify the material. That column could be pressure-treated pine, PVC, cedar, white pine, or something else entirely — and they’re all priced differently, age differently, and look different. A plan will show where the porches are but won’t specify the porch ceiling material — which could be plywood, beadboard, tongue-and-groove pine, nickel-gap pine, and on and on.

We provide 12 pages and more than 300 written specifications with each custom home. Every material on every surface, named. Nothing is left to the subcontractor’s interpretation or to a phone call during framing. If a question can be asked, we’ve answered it in writing — before you sign.

We design our homes in 3D from the start. The entire house can be walked through virtually before the plans are approved — every room, every ceiling height, every sightline. You see how the kitchen relates to the great room, how the morning light falls on the porch, how tall the stair feels next to the entry.

Our final house plans include many 3D views built right into the drawing set, so both the buyer and every subcontractor share the same mental picture of how each area is supposed to look. Surprises during framing — “I didn’t realize it would feel that way” — get caught while they’re still cheap to fix.

We schedule every job on Gantt charts — all the way through to the certificate of occupancy. Each trade, each material delivery, each inspection has a date and a dependency. The schedule isn’t aspirational; it’s the way we run the build day by day.

Because the schedule is real, we can typically give subcontractors a two- to three-week heads-up before they’re needed on site. That gives the trades time to plan their own crews and materials, and it gives the homeowner a completion date that means something. When the date moves — and on rare projects it does — we know exactly which trade and which material caused the change, and what to do about it.

A builder must be able to communicate with the buyer daily when necessary — and the buyer must be able to reach the builder whenever they have a question. Anything less makes a 12- to 14-month relationship miserable.

We have a dedicated customer service representative in our office who handles calls, texts, and emails during business hours. She is able to answer most buyer questions on the spot; if she doesn’t know an answer, she will find out and get back in touch. That single point of contact means you’re never waiting for a callback that doesn’t come — and it means the answer you get has been verified before it leaves the office.

Many builders don’t want to take the time to develop an accurate estimate. Estimating software is readily available, and a builder can build their own custom spreadsheets that cover every cost of construction. Yes, it takes time — but it is critical, so the buyer doesn’t end up in a situation where they can no longer afford their own house.

We maintain a database of the cost of all labor and materials used in our custom homes, and our estimator is very accurate. We include waste factors, tax on materials, and all of those “hidden costs” — permits, site work, soft costs — in the build. The number you see is the number you sign — and the number that holds.