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| Building homes a family affair | |
| Bay Homes sisters Jodi and Kelly have taken reins of business from dad - who's trying to retire | |
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Sisters Jodi Cheek Easton and Kelly Cheek have built houses together for nearly twenty years, and when they part ways after a work site visit they still tell each other "I love you". Such feelings and emotions have helped their company, Bay Homes, become one of Bluffton's leading luxury home builders. "This is a custom built homes, truly custom built," Jodi said as she walked through a Colleton River Plantation house Bay Homes is building. |
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The owner, she said, "has played a leading role in its design and its features" including a non-traditional front yard that has no conventional sidewalk, a flying spiral staircase just inside the front door and a breathtaking 38-foot ceiling accentuated by massive beams that were built on site. Jodi and Kelly's father, Buddy Cheek, who founded Bay Homes and is now semi-retired, even had a hand in a design feature: a secret staircase hidden behind a second story library bookcase. Kelly softly pushes the bookcase revealing the stairs that lead down to a "bonus room" above the three car garage.When they sign contracts with owners or build on speculation - houses they sell - the sisters get to work with their long-time subcontractors, engineers, landscape architects and architects. "Every job is personal and individual," Jodi said. "For example, we try to save as many trees on the property as we can and incorporate them in the overall design. We sometimes have to nestle the house right in among the tress." One house the sisters are building on Colleton has a tree that seems to reach right up to a second-story master suite bedroom window. "This is one of my favorite rooms in the house. You look out the window and it's like you're in a tree house," Kelly laughed. |
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| They have also built -
and are building - houses in Windmill Harbour, Sea Pines, Oldfield,
Riverbend, Dataw Island and Hampton Hall.
Jodi, Bay Homes' vice president for sales and marketing, and Kelly, vice president for operations, live in Rose Hill Plantation. |
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| By the first
of the year - and they hope sooner - Jodi, Kelly and Buddy will break
ground on a new development they're building with the Abraham Bruin
family in Old Town Bluffton: Polly's Place, a commercial and residential
community on five acres at Goethe Road and Hildebrand Street.
The women, who have taken over much of the business' daily affairs from their father, are even delving into a fairly new way of building: steel framed houses, including one in Colleton River Plantation. Visit www.bay-homes.com
on the internet and click "Under Construction"
and you can see several homes in various phases of construction.
Jodi and Kelly also encourage their clients to check on the progress
of their homes on the web site. |
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