The same name on the sign since 1988.

How it started

Our founder, Joe Potts, came up through the construction trades in high school and at Vincennes, then went to work for a local builder doing carpentry and worked his way up to superintendent. He started Northwood Homes in 1988, remodeling on the side while he ran jobs for that builder. We built our first home in 2002, and in 2003 he went out on his own full time. When the builder he'd worked for went under, Joe bought the assets and finished six houses the owners had been left waiting on, which is still a fair summary of how we work: the house gets finished, and it gets finished right.

Two hundred houses, and a change of direction

From there we built a couple hundred more. Most of them were what you'd call semi-custom: ten or twelve floor plans people could choose from, with the interior layout modified however they wanted and whatever finishes they liked. They were condominiums and retirement homes in maintained communities, which meant the exteriors had to match: same brick color, same trim, same exterior lights across a couple hundred houses. We finished about half of one of those neighborhoods.

The last eighty or so were looser. Different brick, different trim, more room to move. We've since moved hard into full custom: houses drawn from scratch for one family and one piece of ground.

Two things stuck from the condominium years and never left. One is the aging-in-place habit: three-foot doors and four-foot hallways on every plan, because you learn something watching people grow old in houses you built. The other is that remodeling still matters. Kitchens, baths, additions and whole-house renovations kept the lights on here for decades, and they're still about half of what we do.

How a job runs here

Here, the person who draws your plan is the person who walks your lot, prices the job with the trade partners, signs the contract, and then turns up on site with a tape measure. There's no layer of project managers between a customer and the work, which is the entire reason the schedule and the price tend to hold.

The trades on your job are partners we have worked with for years, and they answer to one person. Our own in-house finish crew handles the finish work, so the part of the house you look at every day is done by people who work for us. We're fully insured and bonded on every job.

What we're bad at, since you asked

We're not a service company. We don't fix a fireplace, swap a faucet or chase a leaking disposal, and we'll point you at someone who does. We don't run emergency service. And we don't quote square-foot prices, which disappoints people every single week.

We also say no to jobs. Sometimes the site is wrong, sometimes the budget and the expectations aren't in the same room, and sometimes it's just not work we'd do well. You'll hear that on the first call rather than in month four.

The jobs worth remembering

A kitchen that started as a disaster: a bad water leak, followed by a remediation company that left the house worse than the water did. The family put a little money on top of their insurance and we took it all the way back: new cabinetry, walls opened up, new flooring through the main level. It ended up the nicest kitchen on the block.

And a lake house on a fully wooded lot with an eighty-foot cliff on one side, where the family had been struggling to find anyone who'd take it on. We nailed down a design and developed the whole property: well, septic, pole barn, and a long timber staircase down the cliff to a seawall.