"We felt a very personal connection and believed we had found a team we could trust..."

Dear Jeff,

As you know, after renting in Cape Shores for about a decade and spending endless evenings debating whether we should buy our own place, we finally decided to build our beach home.  Once we secured the lot we were determined to find the right builder. We had already built 2 custom homes and both had been very good experiences for us. This time, however, the construction site would be several hours from our home, and would involve the unique challenges of a beach home.  So we talked to many people in the area, and we met with several of the "usual suspects" as part of our search process.

We chose Lane for 3 reasons:
1. Everyone we talked to had nothing but great things to say about the Lane team.
2. When we walked through one of your homes, we liked what we saw.
3. From the minute we stepped into your office, we knew we had found the right match.

We felt a very personal connection and believed we had found a team we could trust to treat us fairly and deliver on the promise of building us a great home.
Our confidence that we were making the right choice was immediately reinforced when you offered us the opportunity to work with your designer to turn our wish list into a set of plans.  We build with you, no charge; we build with someone else, we simply pay for the plans.  In the end, our experience with each of your subcontractors and suppliers was great. We really did not expect to be on a first name basis with most of Southern Delaware but so it goes.  Without question, the entire building process, as well as our home, exceeded our most optimistic expectations. As you reminded us (on several occasions), although not the biggest home in the Lane portfolio, it was one of the most complicated. When the steel beams (to support our open floor plan) arrived, our neighbor joked that he thought a small office building was going up next door.  

We were incredibly fortunate to have Rick run our job. In all our experiences building homes, we had never worked with someone who took the level of ownership that Rick did. It is one thing to be responsive to homeowners' requests, it is another to correct things because he didn't think something was quite right. Add to that his dry sense of humor, and his uncanny ability to stay calm when the inevitable "bumps" occur, we have nothing but praise for Rick's management of the construction process. To give you just one example, Betty noticed that a seam in a piece of Kitchen trim was in an odd place, not enough to be a problem, or even something to make an issue, but just not quite what she expected. When we returned a week later, it was re-done. No complaints, no issue, just Rick doing his Rick thing.  

We love our home. It turned out exactly as we hoped. We nailed the bay views (designed when we were 30 feet in the air with you on the Cherry Picker), and we got every inch (literally) of ceiling height we could. Now that we are in, we really can't think of anything we would change.  

We have a friend who was concurrently building a home on the Jersey shore. For every good thing that happened to us, the opposite happened to him. It really shined a light on the quality  of our experience.  

Lastly, a comment on the financial side. As is usually the case when you build a custom home, we discovered that there were things we wanted to add and the budget expands as time goes on. Notwithstanding, we really had no surprises. When we sat down with you to close the books at the end of the process, our estimates of the final tally matched within a few hundred dollars.  

And so it is, we join your long list of satisfied clients and unequivocally recommend the Lane team to anyone considering building a new home.

 

Gratefully yours,

Jay Adelsberg and Betty Bard