New Home Construction in Aberdeen

Built in 2008 by Gese Construction, designed by Brad Ciavarella, this 2800 square foot home sits on the Moccasin Creek in northeast Aberdeen.

To address the needs of a growing community, several projects are in the works to add more housing to the community. Several large-scale apartment units are being built and new houses continue to pop up all over town. This house in the northeast corner of Aberdeen was designed by Mitchell, SD architect Brad Ciavarella of Ciavarella Design. General contracting was handled by the homeowners and the project experienced no major roadblocks during construction. This house was built in 2008 and was accomplished in 9 months. While there were substantial cost savings by generaling the home themselves, sole responsibility of the entire projects fell to the homeowners. The construction was handled, however, by reputable Aberdeen builder, Joe Gese of Gese Construction. As the primary builder, Joe assisted the homeowners with site management and sub contractor coordination. His expertise was invaluable, and his talent was masterful as he created a one-of-a-kind home in Aberdeen. This house sits on the Moccasin Creek and has had limited sump pump activity in the 13 months the owners have lived in it.

Why is this house featured on “I moved to Aberdeen?” Simply because this is our house. I was always the “old home restorer-type” but a beautiful lot on the creek caught my wife’s eye and we bought it thinking some day we’d build a new home on it. Some day came way quicker as we could not contain our enthusiasm. Needless to say,  we learned a lot about building a house without a general contractor. We asked so many questions and talked to so many people that we had everything lined up perfectly. People always ask us what we’d do differently. We can’t think of anything. I provided the architect with lots of reference photos of classic bungalows built around the early part of the last century. And I asked a lot of the builder, especially on the interior. We used all solid oak planking for trim and baseboard, which is really unheard of nowadays. But, we did our homework and determined it was cheaper to have solid oak boards milled and cut to size than standard off-the-shelf oak moldings. Who would have thought?

I can’t stress enough how living in this community has afforded us the things we dream about. In my line of work it probably would have been impossible for me to build a house like this in Los Angeles in my mid 40s; on the water, with .6 acres of land. Living in a relatively small town, the people know you, and reputations go a long way. Our mortgage banker was related to a client of ours, the builder was referred to us by a neighbor of my brother, and all the sub contractors seemed excited to be working on a house that was a little different than most.  In a small town like this, your reputation definitely does preceed you, and in our case, that was a great thing. My wife calls this our dream house. I call it the house for our 40s. — Troy McQuillen

Architectural details were difficult to engineer and build, but were well worth the effort.

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