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Part 2: Becoming A Builder/The Nightmare Of Buying A House In Johnson County, Kansas
Keith grew up in one home, where his parents still live today. When he moved into the house he built for himself in Johnson County, Kansas, 15 years after leaving his parents' home, Keith had built 5 houses for himself and bought 4 others.
Keith's childhood home was in the middle class suburb of Maplewood near St. Paul, Minnesota. He was raised a Catholic. In high school he met and began dating Sheri. She was and still is an Evangelical Christian.
After five years, Keith and Sheri married. By then Keith also had become, as he calls it, a Christian. Partly because of his new found faith, he had given up the smoking and drinking he had started in high school.
Keith and Sheri did not have the money to buy a home, so they built one themselves:
"I was 21 years old and about to get married. I decided to go out and research what it would take to build a house. The only way I knew of at that time was to go out and get some books. So I went out and bought some books on building houses and learned through that. Just the basics, but it gave me enough confidence to go forward. Started building that year, it must have been '80 when I started, just before I got married."
"That house actually took us, because we built it literally all ourselves with some help from friends and a few other people.... It's kind of the old classic, you build what you could afford. So weeks would go by and you'd buy a door. We kind of went that way. We lived in the basement the first year, we didn't even have a roof. You talk about basics, we lived in the basement the first year and the second year we moved upstairs. I was doing a lot of it on my own, but Sheri would help when I needed her to, whatever, it was a joint thing. Anyway, I built that one and finally got it done, like 2 years later. It literally took us two years duration."
"And then I guess I went into my mode of 'Let's do that again'. So we literally sold it right away and started another one, but I didn't do as much of the building myself. I kind of moved into contracting at that point. I hired some friends and people. So really, the second one was my first real delve into just contracting land, you know, find your subs and all that stuff. The second took me only five months, six months. Did it in a normal time frame."
Keith was working for Burlington Northern Railroad and was transferred to Springfield, Missouri, then moved back to St. Paul again. Then he moved to Texas and back again. Then to Atlanta, where he worked for Coca Cola. Each time he came back to St. Paul, he built another house. His family grew. His first daughter, Bethany, was born in 1984. Adam arrived in 1985, Benjamin in 1987. So each of the houses was a little bit bigger and with some nicer features.
Each time he moved away Keith bought a house instead of building one himself. After Atlanta he moved to Johnson County, KS, in 1993, where he now lives. He was not happy with the houses he bought:
"Every time I was very disappointed in what I got. Because I knew, obviously, going in, what kind of quality, what kind of materials they used. I mean it was just very poor. And if I would have stayed in any one of those places long enough I would have ended up building another one over time just like we did here because we were so dissatisfied with what we got."
"And again, when I moved here I didn't have that much confidence to build it, because again, your talking a whole new set of subs. Different styles and all that. Bought an existing house. That was a nightmare. I mean, we signed a contract with that one going up with just the foundation there. So I actually got to monitor the whole thing."
Keith and Sheri's experience in their first Johnson County home was so bad, that Keith wrote a memo to the Certified Master Builder Organization summarizing what had happened.
"That memo summarizes everything I went through on that one."
But actually, the memo glosses over some of his treatment. At one point, Keith went into his unfinished home and found a message scrawled across the drywall. The message included four letter expletives. Keith chose not to pass on the filthy language in his letter.
"Anyway, we were only in the house about a year and a half. Same things happened. We were just very disappointed in what we got. We were already going into maintenance mode. I was already out touching up paint and re-caulking stuff."
"I told Sheri then, 'That's it. I'm going to go out and find a lot. We're going to build again.' And I think the thing that made her nervous was - I haven't done this now in reality for about three, four years. You know, a period went by where she thought I had kind of got out of that mode."
"So we did it again. We went out looking at lots and we were fortunate to find an acre lot there on Pflumm and started building in, I guess it would have been Fall of '94. We finished up in Spring of '95. We moved in. We were happier with that one, since we built it to our standards."
"So going through that experience again, and seeing the quality that was here in Kansas City - I really thought a lot about - for me, I've always had the dream to be a custom builder, but I've never really had the - I guess two reasons: courage to do it full time and maybe the confidence at the same time. But here I thought maybe there was really an opportunity - at the expense of the consumer, because they built such poor houses - I thought this would be a good market to introduce a different quality and a different standard."