Looking Back: Finding our builder

Back in the 1940’s, Woody Guthrie wrote a song for his children called, Bling Blang. The second verse goes like this:

Bling! Blang! Hammer with my hammer
Zingo, Zango, cutting with my saw.

I’ll grab some mud and you grab some clay
So when it rains it won’t wash away
We’ll build a house, it’ll be so strong
The wind will sing my baby a song

Bling! Blang! Hammer with my hammer
Zingo, Zango, cutting with my saw

Choosing a builder is the most important decision when starting a new house. All of the good ideas and knowledge in the world can’t build a house. It takes hammers and nails and shingles and sweat and being at the job until it’s completed. It takes the right person and the right spirit and the right sub-contractors to put all of the pieces together and end up with a beautiful, strong house on the last day of the job. It takes knowledge and experience and a lot of perseverance and patience, not to mention a sense of diplomacy and tact, as well as a good dose of hard work and good luck. We have all of these things in our builder, and this is how we found him. It makes you realize how much sheer good fortune has influenced so many things about our house…or was it magic?

For the week of the new millennium, Vince rented us a condo on the beach in Duck. While there, we decided to hunt for a builder for our eventual house. Starting from scratch, we made a list of names by looking around in the phone book and from seeing the signs near new construction on the beach. At the time, we knew we wanted to build a strong house, and we knew that it would truly be a custom house…not someone else’s ideas. It would have been hard to imagine how far our dreams and Vince’s research would eventually take us in terms of building specifications. Vince knew the constraints given by the physics of construction in a high velocity hurricane zone, though he had only just begun to scratch the surface of what would be learned over the next eight years. Needing some kind of instrument for comparison, we decided to use a test question for each builder that we interviewed.

Some years back, during Vince’s career at the Naval Research Center in Annapolis, he worked on the design of a fire suppression system for submarines. The design was like a sprinkler system that releases mist, rather than streams of water, so that the fire is smothered and extinguished with a relatively small amount of water damage. It’s a system that would work well in a private home, so we decided to tell each builder that we wanted to install a system like that in our house and to ask if he could so that for us. If the builder listened with interest and responded with curiosity, that company would be a reasonable prospect. The first stop was an interview with a large, well-known construction company. It did not go well. The representative began by telling us all the things that we would want to put in our house. When Vince responded with some of the things we really DID want to put in our house, the man said, “Oh, no. You don’t want that. You want blah blah blah.” When it came time to ask the test question, we already knew this would not be our company, but Vince asked it anyway. The response was, “You don’t need that.” End of conversation.

For many companies on the beach at that time, a custom design meant that the home owner could opt for one of a few given layouts and also choose what colors would be used in the house. That was it. Most of the houses being built were to be used for summer rental programs or vacation homes, and not many were being built for year around residence. That’s true today as well, though not nearly as many rental houses are going up. Neither Vince nor I had ever lived another person’s plan of any kind, and we had seen some wonderfully individual houses, so we knew someone was out there for us!

One of the construction companies on our list was “BC Custom Builders.” Since the word “custom” was in the name of the company, we had high hopes and made an appointment to see them. Walking into an office in Kitty Hawk we saw a Christmas tree decorated with little houses. We met a man named Ben Cubler, who was/is the founding president of the company. With Ben was his son, Karl, who formed the company with his dad in 1989, and Karl’s wife, Elizabeth, who worked closely with them. Vince and I liked them all immediately. Ben and Karl were clearly committed to quality construction. Both were extremely knowledgeable about building houses up in our area of the beach, having vacationed and explored there since the early 1980’s. In recent years, Karl and Elizabeth had built a house in the north part of Carova Beach and knew it well, so their experience was in depth and first hand. Ideas for the house were met with nods and good counter-questions, and finally…Vince asked the test question. Karl said, “What a great idea. I think we can do that!” Good answer.

On New Year’s Day, Karl drove Vince, Addie and me around to look at some of the houses that they had built. The work was beautiful. One house had a juniper ceiling that was perfectly stunning, and we saw different choices for siding and interior finishes. Karl had an obvious level of involvement and friendship with the people whose houses he built, and it was good to see.

In the years that followed, while we planned the house and planted the dune grass, Vince and I rented a couple of BC’s houses up in Carova, so that we could have some experience with actually staying in BC houses. We wanted to try out the plumbing and to see for ourselves if things that were wobbly or awkwardly put together. Everything that we saw affirmed our initial impression of BC’s good work.

Over the next three years, we worked with Ben, Karl and Elizabeth to get a basic plan for the house and to schedule when we would build. Their experience and input set us firmly on the path of the research that has been done ever since: Reading FEMA reports, learning about materials and technological advancements for this kind of construction, understanding CAMA, on and on. BC spent a tremendous amount of time with us finalizing our original design plans and conferring with our architect, Cathy Cherry. Vince was reading myriads of information about Coastal Construction and sending reams of documents to Karl and Ben. Finally, in the fall of 2003, we were ready to break ground in early November, and then came Hurricane Isabel.

I will never forget Elizabeth’s phone call when she said, “You have to understand that there is nothing left. No dune. No grass. It’s flat, like a pancake…like the desert.”

And so here we are again, five years later with a new sand dune and a lot of grass, working with Karl and Elizabeth and actually building our house. Ben Cubler is happily retired. BC has taken huge strides in the last 8 years, always looking ahead, learning more, and expanding horizons. Karl frequently tells me that “we are all flawed human beings, doing the best that we can to make something wonderful happen. We work together. We try hard, and it usually comes out well in the end.” How fortunate for us that they chose to put the word “custom” in the name of their company. (http://www.bccustombuilders.com/)