CUSTOM HOMES
Custom home builder in the California foothills
THE PROBLEM
Most custom homes get expensive in the gap between the architect and the builder.
You hire an architect. Four months and a good deal of money later you have a set of drawings you love. You send them out to three builders, and all three bids come back well above the number you had in your head.
Now you are negotiating against your own house. The great room ceiling comes down. The second island goes. Every change means redrawing, which costs design fees, and rebidding, which costs weeks. Half a year in, you have spent real money and you are further from the home you wanted than the day you started.
Nobody did anything wrong here. The architect drew what you asked for. The builders priced what they were handed. The problem is structural: the person designing your home and the person who knows what it costs to build were never in the same room at the same time.
As a luxury home builder, remodeling contractor, and custom home designer we are constantly planning, designing, and bidding on new homes and renovations throughout the greater Sacramento area and the foothills. That means we know today's local construction costs for each component of a new home — or renovation project.
Professional pre-construction planning empowers you to consider various options and their costs, during the design stage. You will "see" and understand the big picture, key details, and building costs. Every key element of your home or improvement will be thoughtfully considered and selected — based on your budget, tastes, and priorities.
THE MODEL
Design-build puts both jobs on one team, under one contract.
Design-build is a project delivery method in which one company is responsible for both the design of your home and its construction. Instead of hiring an architect and then hiring a builder, you hire a single team that does both, carrying one contract and one budget from the first sketch to the final walkthrough.
The practical difference shows up in a specific moment. You are choosing between a 10-foot ceiling and a 12-foot ceiling. Someone in the room can tell you what the extra two feet cost, in framing, in drywall, in HVAC, and in the taller windows you are going to want once the wall is that height. You make the call with the number in front of you, in month two, instead of finding out in month six.
"90% of the success of a construction project is determined by the quality of the pre-construction planning."
MIKE SHERMAN · PRESIDENT
VALUE ENGINEERING
Value engineering, in plain terms
Value engineering is a phrase builders use often and define rarely. At Sherman it means this: while your home is still being designed, Mike Sherman and Ben Brown look for places where a different material, a different span or a different detail gets you the same result for less money. They bring you the alternatives with real costs attached. You choose.
Cost-cutting is a different exercise and it happens later. A bid comes in high, and something you wanted gets deleted. Value engineering happens while the design is still soft, and its purpose is to put your budget into the things you care about rather than the things nobody thought to price.
Say you want a vaulted great room ceiling and a walk-in pantry. You can usually have both. You may not be able to have both plus the roof pitch the vault implies plus the truss span the pitch implies, at the number you started with. Learning that in month two is a design decision. Learning it in month six is a crisis.
UNDER ONE CONTRACT
The professionals you would otherwise be hiring one at a time
A custom home takes a dozen specialists before a single board gets cut. In the traditional arrangement you hire, schedule and pay most of them yourself, and you learn the right order only by getting it wrong. Under one design-build contract, Sherman engages and sequences all of it.
You get one point of contact and one line-item budget that contains all of it, instead of fourteen invoices and a sequencing problem.
COMPARE
Three ways to get a custom home built
Design · Bid · Build
THE TRADITIONAL ROUTE
You hire an architect, take the finished drawings to market, and pick a bid. Pricing arrives after the design is finished, which is the reason so many projects get redesigned.
Best for: someone who already knows exactly what they want and has room in the budget to absorb a surprise.
Architect-led, separate contractor
Your architect designs, then administers the construction contract on your behalf. You get an independent professional watching the builder. You also get two firms, two fee structures, and two opinions about who owns a problem when one turns up.
Best for: complex or unusual architecture, where the design is the point.
Design-Build
WHAT WE DO
One company, one contract, one budget, from the first budget conversation to the final walkthrough. Design decisions get priced as you make them.
Best for: someone whose first concern is that the number holds and the schedule is real.
UNDER ONE CONTRACT
What you give up with design-build
There is a real trade-off here, and you should hear it from us rather than from a competitor.
In the architect-led arrangement, your architect works for you and reviews the builder's work as an independent party. In design-build, that check does not exist. The team designing your home is the team pricing it and the team building it. If a design-build company is not straight with you, nobody in the room is paid to say so.
Which means the only sensible way to evaluate one is to look at what they let you see. Ask three questions:
Do I get an itemized budget, or one lump number? A lump number is a company protecting its margin from your questions.
Can I look at the construction schedule myself, whenever I want, without asking anyone for it?
How many change orders were on your last three projects, and what caused them?
A company that cannot answer those three plainly is asking you to give up the independent check without offering anything in its place. Our answers are on the Our Process page, in detail, including the ones that are not flattering.
WHY SHERMAN
Thirty years of this, in this terrain
Mike Sherman has been building in the California foothills for more than thirty years, and Sherman Custom Homes has completed over 300 homes, more than 80 of them here in the foothills. Mike and Ben Brown are Master Carpenters, which in this market means the two people making the structural calls have spent decades building the thing they are drawing.
That matters at a specific moment. On a home at Winchester Country Club, the owners wanted a working cupola set into an already-complicated open vaulted ceiling, with windows that actually opened and light that actually came down. The architect and the engineer could not resolve the geometry. Mike showed them how to build it.
That is what having the builder in the room during design is for, and it is not something you can add later.
CA License #860172 · 5★ on Google and Houzz · 4× Best of Houzz, 2018–2021 · Tier 1 builder with Umpqua Bank and U.S. Bank · Placer, Nevada, El Dorado and Sacramento Counties