About Solvara
Solvara was started by someone who has stood on the jobsite — not read about it in a brochure. The whole company is built around one belief: set expectations honestly, for everyone, from the start.
14
States set up to serve
~11 yrs
Founder's hands-on design & build experience
250+
Projects across the founder's career
Published
Honest budget ranges, up front
The single biggest thing the custom-build world gets wrong isn't that customers make mistakes — it's that too many projects start with disconnected pieces. Design moves in one direction, the budget in another, land questions go unanswered, financing stays unclear, and the builder conversation starts too late. That's where the confusion, the wasted time, and the costly early decisions come from.
Solvara was built around a simpler idea: bring the important pieces together earlier, so you can make better decisions before construction begins. We start with the plan, have the honest budget conversations up front, and connect design, budget, land, financing prep, and builder readiness into one clear path — instead of five that never quite meet.
The goal isn't just to hand you a set of drawings. It's to help you move forward with real alignment, fewer surprises, and genuine confidence in the decisions ahead — because that is how a family ends up in the home they've been picturing for years.
Founder
Roughly 11 years of professional residential and commercial design and construction experience, and about 13 years hands-on since he started formal training in 2013.
Jacob grew up on a farm, building birdhouses in the machine shed at eight years old. He went from working for a custom cabinet maker in high school to a construction-technology program, then spent more than a decade designing, estimating, purchasing, and managing residential and commercial projects.
He has worked across three building companies — materials sales and home design at Marcus Lumber, Revit and CAD modeling and multi-project management at Vision Builders (including sub-$300k and 55-and-older developments), and a year running the full preconstruction and design system at a barndominium-focused company.
He has personally performed nearly every trade it takes to build a home — the honest exception being plumbing (he comes from a family of electricians, including a brother who owns an electrical company).
Trades Jacob has personally done
On the tools
The hands-on experience behind the planning.
Real work, honestly framed
Solvara is a new company, so we won't dress up past jobs as Solvara client work. These are the founder's own projects — the kind of hands-on experience behind the planning.
Jacob designed the house himself, built multiple bid packages, priced every material, gathered local bids, and managed the project to completion — hands-on through the electrical, flooring, tile, siding, and wood ceilings. He designed to the budget they gave him and kept them on track throughout the whole project. Started early summer 2025; moved in by Christmas 2025.
This is the farmhouse Jacob's father grew up in. Jacob drew the plans, and the family took it from there — gutting the main floor, adding a main-floor and basement addition, and re-siding and re-roofing the whole house. Partway through, they uncovered the home's original thin-plank flooring, and rather than tear it out, they refinished it and kept it. That's the whole idea: honor what's worth keeping, and blend the old with the new.
More from these projects
The founder's own hands-on projects — not Solvara client work. A closer look at the two homes above.
Remsen, Iowa
Le Mars, Iowa
Honesty = trust
We're not a plumbing service. We're not a concrete crew. We don't design skyscrapers or large-scale commercial.
What we do is residential, light commercial, and agricultural — custom homes, barndominiums, design, preconstruction, budgeting, engineering coordination, and contractor connections. If you have plans and just need engineering, or everything and just need contractor bids, there's a path for that too.
