The Owners Ran It

What does it mean to run your own construction project as the owner?

Leslie Gratz walked the work and held the trades accountable every day on site. His wife Terry Matias ran the programme — invoicing, change orders, schedule — and made every decision about how the finished rooms would look. Both of them were owner-builders in the plainest sense: on the job, through all of it.

Two jobs, one project

Leslie Gratz spent a working life in Overtown, in an apartment portfolio he built, owned and ran himself. When he built his own house he did not step back from it. He was on site every day — in a very good mood or a very bad mood, the build team noted, but always fair. He walked the work himself and held the trades accountable directly. What you did not do was try to bluff him. That got dealt with early in the morning, and once was enough.

The programme

Terry Matias is Leslie’s wife and the co-owner of the house. She ran the programme: every invoice, every change order, every scheduling decision. The construction team called her the centre console of the entire project. Change orders stayed controlled. Scheduling ran like clockwork. If a trade did not show up, Terry held them accountable for it. She did not miss a single invoice through the length of the job.

The interior

A builder hands over a shell with services in it. What turns that into a house is a thousand decisions that no drawing specifies — stone, furniture, the way the light sits in a room at night, what goes on a wall and what is left empty. On this job every one of those decisions was Terry’s. The artwork through the finished rooms is her own: she painted it. The house is finished in her taste, not a decorator’s.

The punch walk

At the end of the job, the owner-builders went room by room writing down every defect that had to be put right — a mark on a jamb, a reveal that was out, a line that did not hold. It is the least glamorous work on a job and the reason a house reads as finished rather than nearly. Terry did the punch walk with the foreman, and neither of them was in a hurry.