Wegher builds high-end custom homes

Those under middle age or non-sports fans often just thank Wegher for building them a fine home.

Wegher excelled at East High, then earned football letters at South Dakota State University before playing for the Calgary team of the Canadian Football League in 1985-86.

Then in 1986, realizing it was "just time to move on" from football, Wegher founded Wegher Construction. He"s served as the sole owner for the last 21 years, although Jeff Petersen joined in 1987, and Wegher calls Petersen "a partner of the company ever since."

Wegher"s father was a mason, and Rick Wegher said "I kind of branched out" in his own construction direction, which has been building custom homes. While he"s helped Siouxlanders living within about an hour radius of Sioux City have reason to move into new digs, that"s a step Wegher Construction has also taken. The firm just moved within North Sioux City, from 600 N. Derby Lane to 125 Gateway Drive.

Said Wegher, "We just wanted a little more space and wanted to create a design center, where it would be like you could walk into a store and all the products you would need to build a home are right here, so you don"t have to go all over town." In the design center are all the home options available from Wegher Construction - flooring, cabinetry, lighting, millwork and so on. Wegher explained, "we"ve had a design center the last five years, but it wasn"t large enough to support all the products we wanted to put in it."

A big challenge in home construction lately, Wegher said, has been dealing with rising material costs, so now he buys materials farther in advance before prices rise.

Wegher Construction has about 20 employees, many with tenures of over seven years.

"Our turnover is incredibly low," he said. Wegher added that he"s had the opportunity to work with many of the same subcontractors on homes, since "the way we manage projects makes them happy."

The first custom home Wegher built in 1986 was on the southeast edge of the Morningside area, with hundreds of homes constructed since then.

Wegher Construction now custom builds roughly 30 homes a year, about 15 of the Presidential variety homes that run about $200,000, sometimes as spec homes or presold spec homes, and 15 homes that may have a value of about $1 million.

Wegher said the thing he really enjoys is taking ideas that are somewhat nebulous in a person"s head and turning them into the home envisioned. "We do a lot of homes that run up through a million dollars. ... The large custom homes have been very, very strong," he said.

Those building such homes "expect a very high end of quality," Wegher said.

Another prime goal is to build them on schedule. He said a starting $200,000 home can be custom built in about four or five months, while "the very high-end custom homes, those that cost a million, a million-plus, can take nine to 12 months."

Wegher is also president of Wynstone Development, which is building homes in a gated community west of Jefferson, S.D. near the Missouri River. The site was initiated in 1997 after Wegher immediately took to the area - after seeing it in blizzard conditions on a tip from a colleague.

Wynstone is in the final phase of construction. Of the 209 lots, 119 homes have been built on 147 lots, and the final 62 lots are for sale.

"We do a lot of building in Wynstone," Wegher said, but added that the firm has branched out throughout Siouxland, particularly in Le Mars and Yankton, S.D., over the last five years.

Wegher has created numerous homes in the North Greenview Estates Subdivision near the Le Mars golf course and overlooking the lake and bluffs near Yankton.