Your Home AND Confidence Builder: The True Value of your Builder Partnership

Jarrett Svendsen
Jun 9
3 min read

Building a custom home is all about forging the right partnership to bring your vision to life with clarity, trust, and expertise. Many homeowners start their journey by gathering bids from several builders, hoping to find the best price. But when it comes to crafting a one-of-a-kind home, the cheapest number often hides the most risk.

Instead of treating your dream home like a commodity, approach it as a journey and the key is putting together the right team built on trust.

A Better Way: Partnership Over Price

At Ethos Builders, we believe in raising the bar for what a building experience should feel like. That starts with education, expectation setting, and building a process that puts clarity before construction.

Here’s how we help you move from a rough idea to a confident plan:

Our Refined Estimating Process: Bringing Your Vision Into Focus

Step 1: The Vision

We begin with an open conversation about your ideas, goals, and lifestyle needs. At this point, we provide a conceptual estimate—not a bid—based on high-level insights.

These numbers come from square footage goals, bedroom bathroom count, conversations about where you will want to spend more money, price per square foot numbers of the various trades and materials based on conversations.

Step 2: Conceptual Plans

With early floor plans and layouts, we start turning your vision into tangible spaces. This stage brings your ideas to life and gives us a better sense of scope.

This phase will help us understand room dimensions, ceiling height, window placement, etc. That will help us refine the allowances of materials to understand how much flooring, tile, light fixtures, plumbing fixtures, cabinetry, siding material, and many other features we will need to allocate dollars to.

Step 3: Design Details

We dive into materials, fixtures, and architectural elements. This is where your preferences shape the final product—and the estimate becomes significantly more accurate.

During this phase we will understand what kind of appliances you may want to purchase, what price point level you want to spend on the various finishes, what material we will look at for windows and doors, garage doors, plumbing and lighting fixtures, flooring, etc

This will also be when we have understanding from the site engineering done about site development costs. These include foundation considerations, lot clearing, water dissipation systems, utility connections, grading plans, etc.

Step 4: The Final Blueprint

Now we have a complete, customized plan: one that’s been vetted, value-engineered, and thoroughly detailed. This is your real number—the one you can move forward with confidently.

This estimate represents much more firm pricing from all of our trades as they can now bid accurately off of fixture count, square footage details, roof and floor truss designs, foundation depth, and the many more complex pieces that go into the architectural and interior design process. This is also when we can pursue the building permit and understand what those fees will be as well.

Why Bidding Alone Sets You Up for Frustration

On the surface, collecting three bids might seem smart. But in reality, you’re often just getting three guesses based on incomplete information. That’s because NO Builder has built YOUR house before. They want the work and are bidding on a project without doing the deep work: they haven’t brought in their HVAC team, electricians, framers, finish installers, and they don’t truly know your design preferences or performance goals yet.

Free estimating is often a race to the bottom—focused only on the number, not the value. And when numbers are based on generic assumptions and allowances, they will not match the final cost. This sets the stage for surprise expenses, missed expectations, and strained relationships.

Understand that this will be an expensive journey. You chose to build custom over buying a newly built speculative home and over buying a new construction home built by a production builder. Your relationship with the party responsible for bringing structure to your vision is essential and needs to be built on trust. You will be on this journey together and they will show you what things cost and what the process will be to get them.