The Question I Hear More Than I Used To
Five years ago, most of my first conversations with clients started with square footage and layout. Now they start somewhere else. People want to know what the house will cost to run, not just what it will cost to build. They ask about insulation before they ask about countertops. They want to know if the house can handle solar later, even if they are not ready to add it now.
That shift did not happen overnight, but it has changed how I approach a project from the first meeting.
Wiring for What Is Not There Yet
The biggest change is not in what clients are putting into their homes right now. It is in what they want left ready for later. I run conduit paths for solar before a roof goes on, even when the client has no immediate plan to install panels. I size electrical panels with extra capacity so a future EV charger or battery system does not mean tearing into finished walls.
This is a different kind of planning than I did a decade ago. Back then, you built for what the client wanted today. Now you have to build for what they might want in five years, without knowing exactly what that will look like. I would rather run an extra conduit line that never gets used than tell a client we have to open a wall because I guessed wrong.
Why I Stopped Treating Energy as an Upgrade
For a long time, better insulation, high-efficiency HVAC, and tighter building envelopes got sold as options. Pay more, get more efficiency. I do not frame it that way anymore.
Running an HVAC company alongside the home building side of what I do has given me a different view of this. I see the utility bills. I see what a poorly sealed house costs a family over ten winters compared to one built tight the first time. The upfront cost difference is real, but it is smaller than most people assume, and it does not compare to what you pay back in heating and cooling a house that leaks air for thirty years.
So instead of presenting efficiency as a line item to add or cut, I build it into the baseline and let clients choose what they want to add on top of that. It changes the conversation from “do you want to spend more” to “here is what a well-built house already includes.”
What This Means for the Bid
This shows up directly in how I put numbers together now. A bid five years ago separated structure, finishes, and mechanical systems into clean categories. Today I have to account for infrastructure that supports things the client has not decided on yet: extra panel capacity, pre-wired spots for future smart home controls, plumbing stubbed for a water heater upgrade down the road.
None of that costs much to include during the build. All of it costs a lot to add after drywall is up. I would rather explain an extra few hundred dollars on a bid line than explain to a client later why we have to cut into a finished ceiling.
Building for a Client Who Is Not Sure Yet
A good amount of my job now is building for decisions that have not been made. A client might not know if they want solar in year one or year five. They might not know which smart home platform they will land on. I cannot build to a decision that has not happened, but I can build so that decision stays cheap and simple whenever it does happen.
That means fewer assumptions baked into the structure and more flexibility left in the walls. It is a different mindset than building strictly to a finished spec, and it took me a while to adjust to it. But it matches where clients actually are right now. They are not asking me to predict the future. They are asking me not to make it harder on them when it arrives.
I expect this to keep moving in the same direction. The specifics will change, the platforms will change, but the underlying ask will not. Clients want a house that can grow into whatever comes next without being torn apart to get there. That is the standard I build to now, and it is the one I expect to be building to for a long time.