Custom Home Builder Experience

When it is time to decide whom you will count on to create the custom home of your dreams, is experience important to you? It should be. I have designed and built more high-end, custom homes in the past 9 years than any other custom home builder in Appleton and other parts of the Fox Valley, Green Bay, Oshkosh, and Fond du Lac.

I have extensive experience building on beautiful, often complicated sites

Included are wooded, golf course, waterfront, ravines and other steep sloping sites, wetlands, in or near flood plane, low areas with high ground water, sites with unusually shaped and sized building footprints, large country properties.

As an experienced custom home builder, I know many ways to achieve walk-out basements or to maximize the exposure for large basement windows on, even modestly, sloping sites.

I have successfully worked with municipalities, the state, the Army Corps of Engineers and the DNR to receive variances or to change the designation of wetlands, environmentally sensitive areas and floodplanes.

I have experience as a custom home builder in poor soil conditions and in bedrock.

Of course, I also have great experience taking advantage of the positives while minimizing the negatives on more average sites.

I have designed and built many of the largest, most complex and attractive luxury homes in the area using cutting edge materials while keeping in mind "Value Engineering".

There is no substitute for experience when designing a gourmet kitchen or elegant master suite. You don't want your indoor pool or home theater to be built by someone who is "figuring it out" for the first time nor your full-court basketball gym built underneath the garage. You also don't want to move into your new custom home to find that your stairs feel too narrow or there isn't enough space for a king size bed in your master bedroom.

My custom home builder father, Len Backus, has been specializing in site evaluation and design for 25 years.

Over the years, and the many custom homes, I have gained a great understanding of the proper size and proportion for different spaces and design elements in a custom home. I have also learned which materials are best suited for different applications and that new, unproven materials can be used successfully as long as the proper questions are asked and the potential negatives are considered. This is especially important because creating a "unique" luxury home often involves using the newest available materials.

Value Engineering involves figuring out the most cost-effective way to achieve a certain look or feel - comparing the relative costs of different ways of achieving the look or feel and choosing based on cost vs. value. When designing and building a custom home, the importance of "Value Engineering" cannot be overstated. Because I have designed and built many high quality custom homes, I have a vast amount of data to help make these cost vs. value decisions.