The Five-Year Check-In: How Our Homes Are Aging

Every five years we visit homes we built. We call to confirm a time, drive out, sit in the kitchen with the client, walk every room, and take notes. We have been doing this since around 2010, and the houses have started telling us things the bid never could. The patterns across visits have changed how we build today.

What we look for

The visit is not a warranty inspection. We are not looking for things to fix on the company's dime. We are looking for what is failing on the home's end, what is aging well, what the client now wishes had been done differently, and what the client is glad they pushed for. The honest answers to those four questions are gold.

We bring a moisture meter, a flashlight, a notepad, and a digital camera. We open every closet, look at every roof valley with binoculars from the ground, run the systems, and ask the client what's been bugging them lately. We don't promise to fix anything that's outside warranty. We just want to know.

What ages well in the Southeast

Stone, properly laid. Standing seam metal roofs, properly installed. Real cedar shake, when it gets the recoat at year seven. Cement-board siding, painted with the right primer-paint stack. Quartzite countertops. Solid-core interior doors. Heart pine flooring, refinished once around year ten.

Less expected: the homes we engineered for acoustic separation are the ones we get the most love for. Clients describe the quality of quiet specifically when we walk through, and they remember it as the design choice that mattered most. Whisper acoustics is a luxury most people can't articulate but appreciate every night.

What ages poorly

Anything cultured. Cultured stone fails at year seven and looks tired by year ten. Cultured beams, with their machine-applied distress, look obviously fake by year five and worse every year after. We stopped specifying both around 2014.

Engineered hardwoods that rated themselves for full bath wet exposure. The good ones are fine; the marginal ones cup and gap. We have moved to porcelain tile or natural stone for primary baths since 2018, with an exception for half baths and powder rooms where the moisture exposure is minimal.

Painted cabinetry, on its second decade, is rarely as crisp as it was new. Stain holds up better. We tell clients this, and they make their own choice; many still choose paint, knowing they will repaint at year fifteen. That is fine, as long as the choice is informed.

What the clients say they're glad they pushed for

Almost universally: the screened porch they almost cut from the program. Almost every client mentions it, almost every visit. The screened porch is the most under-budgeted, most-loved space in custom homes. We almost never let a client cut it now.

Frequently: the bigger pantry. The smaller-than-they-thought primary suite. The wood-burning fireplace they were going to skip in favor of gas. The mudroom with two doors. The kitchen island that's six inches deeper than standard.

Less frequently: the gym, the wine room, the home theater. These are program items that turn out to get less use than the client expected. We don't talk anyone out of them, but we always size them to be convertible later.

What we have changed because of these visits

The check-in feedback has changed our specs in real ways. We now require the screened-porch budget to be present in every initial cost discussion. We have moved to porcelain tile in primary baths as a default. We engineer acoustic separation as a baseline, not an upgrade. We frame the elevator shaft on every two-story home larger than 5,000 square feet, even when the client has no plans to install one.

None of these changes came from a magazine. They came from sitting in a kitchen with a client we built for, eight years ago, asking what they would do differently. That conversation is the closest thing custom building has to a feedback loop. We take it seriously.