Eighteen weeks, five acres, one soapstone island. What we'd do again, what we wouldn't.
We finished Bitterroot Bend in April. Eighteen weeks from foundation to finish, on a five-acre river-bend lot outside Lolo. Sold in nine days at asking, cash. The kind of close that lets you exhale and pour something nice on the kitchen island.
Some notes from the build, while they're still fresh.
The soapstone
We almost went with quartz for the kitchen island. The client had a Pinterest board full of Calacatta. We talked about it on a long walk and landed on soapstone instead — Vermont Soapstone, honed, sixty inches by ninety-six.
Two reasons:
- Soapstone takes a knife and a hot pan and looks better in ten years than it did on day one.
- The veining in quartz is engineered. The veining in soapstone is geology.
The client called me three weeks after closing to say she'd already cooked Thanksgiving on it. That's the whole brief.
The covered porch
Twenty-eight feet long, ten feet deep, cedar tongue-and-groove on the ceiling. We oriented it west so the porch catches every sunset.
If I'd done one thing differently I'd have run it across the whole back of the house instead of stopping at the corner. The east side has its own little patio but it doesn't connect — you have to walk down four steps and around. The clients use the porch every night. They use the east patio twice a month.
Lesson, written down so I remember: if you're going to put a porch on a Montana house, run it the full length. People will sit on it more than you expect.
What weather did to the schedule
Two snow events in week eleven and week fourteen pushed cladding out by nine days total. We planned for six. The Bitterroots are the Bitterroots — you build the buffer in or you fall behind.
A house built in Montana is built around the weather. You don't fight it; you schedule with it.
Next build, the buffer is twelve days. We'll see.
Cost reality
Original budget: $1.45M all-in. Final: $1.58M. The delta:
- +$48k — soapstone slab vs. budgeted quartz
- +$31k — upgraded windows to Marvin (the original spec couldn't handle the snow-load on the north-side picture window)
- +$22k — extended covered porch (above)
- +$29k — cabinet upgrade from stock to local millwork
Worth every dollar? The first three, yes. The fourth — probably. The client had to have the rift-cut white oak and you can tell.
She listed it at $1.65M and got asking on day nine. The math works out.
What's next
The next project — Meadow House in Florence — uses a similar formula at a different scale. Twenty-eight hundred square feet, twelve-acre meadow lot, charred-cedar cladding instead of board-and-batten. We break ground in May.
If you're thinking about a build of your own, the configurator is the fastest way to start the conversation. Eleven decisions, about thirty minutes, and you'll have a real storyboard at the end.