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Serving Weatherford, Aledo & North Texas · Building since 1995(817) 736-6323
Home · Process

Our Five-Step Custom Home Process

A transparent process refined over 100+ custom homes. No pricing tricks, no allowance shell-games, no project managers handed your file mid-build. From the first coffee to year ten, you work with one builder.

  1. Step 01

    Consult

    A coffee, a conversation, no pitch.

    We sit down with you and your spouse - at your place, our office, or your land - and talk through your vision, your lot, your budget, and the dozen things you know you do not want. There is no presentation. No sales pitch. No three-tier proposal. Just an honest first conversation about whether we are the right builder for what you have in mind.

    • Free 45–60 minute consultation
    • Walk-through of your lot if you have one
    • Honest read on feasibility and timing
    • Transparent ballpark cost range
  2. Step 02

    Design

    Plans drawn for your land, your family, your life.

    We bring in our architect (or work with yours), our structural engineer, and our interior designer to draft a plan around your lot, your sun line, your views, and the way your family actually lives. You sit with the team. We iterate. We price the plan in real time so you are not in love with a build you cannot afford. By the end you have a permit-ready set of construction documents and a contract with hard numbers.

    • Schematic design with 2–4 revision rounds
    • Structural engineering & MEP design
    • Interior design coordination
    • Real-time value engineering as the plan develops
    • Permit-ready construction documents
  3. Step 03

    Select

    Hand-pick every finish with Dan beside you.

    Custom homes are made of thousands of decisions. We do them with you - stone, beam, window, fixture, paint, knob, faucet - in the showroom, with Dan present, against your real budget. No allowance games. No surprise upgrades. No "that's an additional charge" three months into framing. The number we hand you is the number you pay.

    • Showroom selections, in person, with Dan
    • Material and finish specifications written into the contract
    • Allowance line items priced to your actual selections, not artificial lowballs
    • Locked-in cost before ground breaks
  4. Step 04

    Build

    Daily oversight from the owner.

    Ground breaks. Dan is on your site every day. We walk you through the build weekly - typically the same morning each week - and you can text or call him in between. Trades are scheduled tightly. The site is clean. The schedule is honest. Most of our homes deliver within two weeks of the original target date because the schedule was real to begin with.

    • Daily on-site presence from Dan
    • Weekly client walk-through and update
    • Tight trade scheduling, clean job site
    • Transparent change-order process (rare on our jobs)
    • Inspections at every milestone
  5. Step 05

    Deliver

    Punch list before closing, warranty in writing.

    We do a full walk-through punch list before the closing, not after - because if we wait until you have moved in, the small things never get fixed. You walk in to a home that is finished. The warranty is in your hands in writing on day one. And in year five, when you have a question, you call the same builder who built it.

    • Full punch-list walk-through before closing
    • Move-in ready home, finishes complete
    • 1-year workmanship warranty, in writing
    • 2-year systems warranty
    • 10-year structural warranty
    • A builder who answers the phone in year five

Year Five Is the Real Test

One number to compare us against: most of our clients hear from us in year five.

We are not interested in being the builder who hands you the keys and disappears. The way we run a project - fewer jobs at a time, the owner on every site, warranties in writing - is also how we keep being the builder you call when you have a question in year five. That is the entire point.

If any part of the process above does not match what you have heard from other builders, that is intentional. We have refined this process over thirty years specifically to fix the parts of custom home building that everyone hates: pricing surprises, missing owners, missed schedules, and warranties that are not worth the paper they are printed on. The cost of doing it our way is that we can only run a small number of jobs at a time. That has been our entire business model since 1995, and it still is.

Let's Build the Home of Your Dreams

Quality. Craftsmanship. Trust.

Three words that have defined Open Prairie Custom Homes for over thirty years, and the only three you need to look for when choosing the builder for your forever home.

Call Dan, (817) 736-6323