APEX -- Some men build tree houses, pounding thumbs with hammers. Other do-it-yourselfers aspire to sheds, decks and backyard chicken coops. For five years, Carl Suffredini slowly built his family's 4,250-square foot house - framing it, wiring it, installing the plumbing and scavenging much of the lumber from his own yard.
Nearly finished, the three-story home modeled on the Craftsman style stands as a monument to disciplined, almost obsessive, Harry Homemaker fever. It's one thing to design your dream home and get an architect to sign off on your plans. It's another to actually complete the thing and to move into your own home office made from oaks felled by Hurricane Fran.
He saved money. He gained space. But you get the feeling Suffredini would have taken on this project even if it hadn't been practical, even if it wasn't a model for resourcefulness in a down economy, even if it hadn't taken half a decade.
"I don't like to sit still," said Suffredini, 47. "This is a bit much for a family of three. In some respects, it's embarrassing. But it's what I've always wanted."
An IT consultant, he left IBM in the early '90s. Working on his own gives him a flexible schedule, but he muses in middle age about whether he should have built homes instead. In many ways, the work is more satisfying.
"In software," he said, "you're working on something that fits inside a computer. You can't see it."
This house wasn't his first mammoth job. A California native, he longed for a swimming pool. So he dug his own with a little green John Deere backhoe.
Then five years ago, he noticed the 1,750 square foot house off Holly Springs Road getting a little snug for him, his wife and their son. He thought about expanding, but the more they mulled the idea, the smarter it looked and cheaper it looked to move the old house over 200 feet on the six-acre property. So that's what he did, and three years ago, he poured the footings for the new place.
Much of what Suffredini built is invisible: the frame, the wiring, the pipes. He took a brick-laying class. He studied plumbing and electrical codes. He hired a lot of help, haunting Regency Park in Cary to find good trim crews and tile workers. Two-thirds of the trim on Suffredini's house came from his own land. More of his timber fills the wood-fired boiler that provides heat.
The place has the look of a house built a century ago: tapered columns, recessed shelves and nooks cut into all the rooms, high wainscoting, a pair of fireplaces - one of them original to the old house. Over five years, he spent about $500,000 - half what he figures it would have cost without his work. And now, he can use the old house as a rental.
What impresses his wife, Nancy Davis, is his ability to see the thing through. Tackling a job this large, and sticking with it, would have proven too much for most handymen, she said.
"It's extremely unusual," said architect Carol Rogers, who helped with the project. "He had it all planned out with very sophisticated graphics software. Really, the only thing we did was consulting."
But when Suffredini and his family move in, they'll know every inch of their house. They'll walk up the stairs and remember how hard they were to fit in place. They'll feel heat radiating through the floor and remember how it took four weeks to lay the pex pipe beneath them. When Suffredini takes on his next IT project, he'll do it in the warm red light of a room made from the tall oaks knocked down by one of North Carolina's most legendary storms - timber he milled himself.
He'll see his own work every where. The only question is what comes next.
