Making It Big: Young Couple Creates Home Building Business from Scratch


Waukesha Freeman, Thursday, August 31, 1989
By Catherine Ellingboe

PEWAUKEE - A pair of 1981 Waukesha North High School graduates made it and made it big in the home construction industry.

The husband and wife team of Ann Rodrigues, 26, and David Rodrigues, Jr., 27 of N33 W23727 Fieldside Road, created David & Goliath Builders, Inc. in 1984.

Since then, the company has specialized in designing and building custom homes with the customer in mind.

A third member of the business is Goliath, the couple's black Labrador-German Shorthair mix. Goliath follows David to all his construction sites and only recently slowed down after a cancerous shoulder led to amputation of the dog's left front leg.

A confident David, the youngest member of the Metropolitan Builders Association of Greater Milwaukee, said designing homes comes naturally. A past resident of seven different states, he brings the influence of many different regional designs to his work.

Although he majored in political science and philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, his heart was always in home building.

Since the age of 16, he worked on repairing and remodeling homes.

David says he saw many mistakes by builders during those early years because it was his job to correct them.

He strives today to create new homes that won't need such correction in the future.

Design flaws and structural errors are costly, so he said he uses techniques that make a home new right at the beginning.

With the goal of getting a home to look exactly as a customer wants, David and his employees offer three unusual and important features to the homebuyer.

First, his rough and finish crews are the same. David said the advantage is that the workers don't allow flaws in the roughing that will have to be covered up later.

They make it easy on themselves by doing things right from the bottom up, David said.

Beneath all the beauty of design and texture, David is one of the few builders in the area to start with compacted soil.

He explained that much settling of a new home is avoided when a compacting device beats the foundation soil.

In the end, a buyer receives five hours of interior design assistance from Joanelle Jordann, allied member of the American Society of Interior Designers.

Jordann coordinated the colors and patterns used in David & Goliath's 1989 Parade of Homes model as well.

The model, called the New Haven, reveals a number of David's architectural ideas.

He said he would have liked to go modern, with hardly a right angle in the house.

"Milwaukee's housing market is too conservative for that," he said, so he toned down the unusual while remaining different.

With architect Paul Schultz of Sunarc Studios, David decided on a country look for the parade home. Ann showed off the fieldstone outside and on the fireplace. Cathedral ceilings and an open look is a trademark of David & Goliath home.

Ann majored in mass communication at the University of Wisconsin- Milwaukee, and helped computerize the business.

The Parade of Homes model has neutral wall colors and splashes of color in the drapes and carpet.



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