Mudd pleases home buyers’ tastes by design

La Plata custom builder living his dream

Friday, April 25, 2008

Click here to enlarge this photo Staff photo by GARY SMITH La Plata builder Andy Mudd is living his dream of custom designing homes for customers throughout Southern Maryland. E-Mail This Article | Print This Story

Mudd started Southernwood Building Services LLC in his home in 2001 and a couple of years ago he moved the operation to a suite of offices on St. Mary’s Avenue in La Plata. Mudd’s brother, Frank, operates an arm of the enterprise, Southernwood Framing LLC, out of the same location.

Crafting custom homes is something Mudd said he has wanted to do since he was a teenager.

‘‘All the way through high school I had an opportunity to work with a lot of local builders,” he said. ‘‘After I finished college, I decided to go into the business.”

It’s nice to stand back after a job is done and view results that will be around for a long time, Mudd said.

‘‘I get to see the outcome of my work and deal with all of the people involved in the project,” he said. ‘‘I get a lot of pleasure out of it. Every day I get to see what I’ve accomplished.”

Mudd said that 99 percent of his business is building custom homes. Samples of his work are in Swan Point in Issue and the Albion subdivision in Ironsides.

Putting the ‘‘custom” in customer: Customers are offered the opportunity to work with Mudd from drawing up blueprints until the finishing touches are done to their home, he said.

‘‘Customers have got a choice in everything that is going to impact their home,” he said. ‘‘I share a lot of decisions with them to make sure that they get what they want.”

Sometimes, prospective homeowners bring their own set of blueprints for Mudd to work from and at other times he uses photographs and building plans that customers bring him from architectural magazines.

‘‘Eighty percent of the blueprints I draw are from scratch,” he said.

‘‘Sometimes, people draw out a floor plan that they like; they kind of know what they want. It’s definitely an intricate process.”

A touch slow: The current sluggish real estate market has slightly impacted his business, Mudd said.

‘‘I’ve definitely seen a slowdown, but during the past 30 days I’ve gotten a lot of calls,” he said. ‘‘The market is coming back. At this point a lot of younger couples want to build homes on land that they’ve inherited.”

Most of his business is in Charles County, but he has also built homes in St. Mary’s, Calvert and Howard counties, Mudd said.

Starting a new business is very time consuming and it takes a lot of work ahead of time to ensure that it will slowly grow and remain strong in a competitive market, Mudd said.

‘‘Starting a business is definitely difficult,” he said.

‘‘Fortunately, I had family and friends who had enough stuff for me to do to get started.”

Establishing any business takes a lot of patience, humor and courage, Mudd said.

‘‘You need a lot of patience, for sure,” he said, laughing. ‘‘In my business, you’ve got to be willing to listen and you have to try to help people to visualize what they want. It’s hard sometimes.

‘‘The most important thing is to not give up on your dream,” he added.

‘‘There’s great satisfaction in working for yourself. In this industry, there’s something different going on every day, and when you finish a project you end up making somebody’s dream house.”

Nancy Bromley McConaty

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