Spring 2020 was not an obvious time to begin building a custom home.
The country was shutting down. Supply chains were uncertain. Nobody knew what the next six months would look like, let alone the next two years. The sensible advice, from nearly every direction, was to wait.
Ashley and Greg did not wait.
A Family Decision Made in Uncertain Times
With a family of six and a house that no longer fit the life they were living, Ashley and Greg made a decision that takes more resolve than it might appear: they chose to stop waiting for the right moment and start building toward the life they actually wanted.
This is not as simple as it sounds. The pull toward deferral is strong, especially when external conditions are genuinely uncertain. But Ashley and Greg had arrived at a kind of clarity that is more important than favorable timing: they knew what they wanted, they understood what it would take to get there, and they were ready to do the work.
That readiness is what makes a custom build work. Not the market. Not the interest rates. Not the construction climate. The commitment and clarity of the people driving it.
Why They Chose Custom
For a family of six, a custom home is not a luxury — it is a functional decision. Production homes are designed around statistical averages. They optimize for the median family in ways that serve no particular family especially well.
Ashley and Greg wanted a home built around how they actually lived. How six people move through a kitchen in the morning. Where homework gets done. How the outdoors connects to the indoors for a family that uses both. These are not details you can retrofit into a floor plan that was not designed with you in mind.
They connected with Springhouse and found a firm that approached their project the way a custom project should be approached: starting from who they were and what they needed, rather than from a set of existing designs waiting to be slightly adjusted.
What Happens Before the Drawing Starts
Before any design work began, there was a conversation. Not about aesthetics — about alignment.
At Springhouse, we call it the budget alignment conversation. It comes before the drawings, before the site planning, before any of the work that clients typically imagine when they think about the design process. It is the moment where the project stops being theoretical and becomes real.
What do things actually cost? What are you actually working with? Are those two numbers close enough to build something meaningful together?
This conversation is not comfortable for everyone. But the projects that skip it — that defer the hard numbers until the design is already emotionally loaded — are the ones that stall. Or compromise. Or become something different from what anyone intended.
Ashley and Greg had the hard conversation early. That is one of the reasons they moved in when they did.
From First Conversation to Front Door
The project ran from spring 2020 to December 2021. One year and eight months, for a fully custom home for a family of six — a disciplined timeline by any measure, given what was happening in the world during those months.
That timeline is not the result of luck or favorable conditions. It is the result of doing the foundational work correctly at the start: aligning on budget, establishing a clear brief, making decisions efficiently when they needed to be made, and trusting the team to manage what needed managing.
Ashley shared that working with Springhouse felt different from what they had expected. Not in terms of the house itself — that was what they had planned. But in terms of the process. They had expected it to feel heavier than it did.
The Clarity You Get When You Choose Right
There is a version of the custom home process that is overwhelming, contentious, and endless. We have all heard those stories. They are real, and they tend to share common causes: misaligned expectations, deferred hard conversations, or a firm that is not truly oriented around the client’s outcome.
Ashley and Greg’s version did not go like that. The decisions were hard sometimes — all significant decisions are. But the process supported the decisions rather than creating additional friction around them.
Their home in Versailles, Ohio is exactly what they set out to build. For a family of six. Planned during a pandemic. Completed in under two years.
If you are ready to have a real conversation about building a home for your family, start with a consultation with Springhouse Architects.