Rains don’t dampen Parade of Homes Fall Classic event
CHOCTAW — It’s not unusual for homebuilder Prinston Wilson to mix business with pleasure, working in a home tour or two while on vacation.
But especially with this year’s Parade of Homes Fall Classic wrapping up, he is keenly interested in what he can learn on an upcoming trip to Seattle.
“One of the things I want to learn is how you build in an environment where it’s always raining,” said Wilson, founder and president of Legacy Construction & Development in Midwest City. “Rain delays everything from concrete to framing to the work inside the home because people can’t get in to deliver to the house.”
The Parade of Homes Fall Classic, presented by the Central Oklahoma Home Builders Association, continues Saturday and Sunday with 100-plus new homes open free to the public from 1 to 7 p.m.
The parade, presented by the Central Oklahoma Home Builders Association, showcases more than 100 new homes across the metro area. Maps are available at www.paradeofhomesok.com. Parade booklets also can be picked up at metro-area Louie’s and Fidelity Bank locations.
Rain, rain, go away
Recent rains have dogged homebuilders all over the metro area, washing away sod, dragging out curing times and canceling some work outright.
Evidence of that abounded in Choctaw’s Forest Glen neighborhood, northwest of SE 29 and S Hiawasse Road. Rains left some yards raw, their washed-out sod staining the streets red. The sound of power saws pierced the air, and craftsmen picked their way around puddles.
At his company’s show home, 2525 Shady Hollow Drive, Wilson studied the still-soggy yard and shook his head. “I really wanted to get some sod in here by now,” he said, probably echoing the sentiments of many area homebuilders.
Wilson’s Legacy Construction & Development, Mirage Homes of Oklahoma City, and Westpoint Homes and Home Creations, both based in Moore, are featured builders in this year’s parade.
Whatever the weather brings doesn’t much matter once through the door of Legacy’s 2,430-squarefoot show home. With three bedrooms and two and half baths, the feel is both old-world solid and fresh contemporary.
The home features twotoned kitchen cabinets, plenty of natural light, and doorways and windows decked in elaborate wood trim. The floor tile in the master bath forms a herringbone pattern, and the built-in makeup vanity features an LED-lit mirror.
Wilson said those kind of touches are standard for Legacy’s homes, but every home is different.
“We try not to use the same floor plan over and over,” Wilson said. “We’ve built all but maybe a couple of the houses on this street, but it looks like it could be a bunch of different builders.”
Smart, safe, efficient
There are certain givens in a Legacy home: It will feature app-accessible technology such as dimmable light switches, Nest Learning thermostats and Ring doorbells.
There will be bright, energy-efficient LED lights wherever possible. There will be a storm shelter built into the garage floor, though Wilson said Legacy is moving toward building aboveground safe rooms into closets.
“That’s a question we get a lot — ‘Can you do an aboveground (shelter)?’ — so we started incorporating those into our houses,” he said. “We’re primarily tailoring for the baby boomers.”
The master bath shower here, like in all Legacy houses, features not a mere shower head but a shower tower: a stainless-steel control panel that allows for a variety of water options.
And in the parade home, a Bluetooth speaker is
mounted in the ceiling near the freestanding tub and makeup vanity.
“So if you want to relax while you’re taking a bath or even just doing makeup, you can have music right above you,” Wilson said.
Wilson grew up in Yukon where his father, Wilson Chacko, was a homebuilder for years. He went into remodeling in 2006, then founded Legacy in 2009.
His parade home represents a decade’s worth of construction and marketing experience including standard features that are out of sight but offer benefits — like attic fans.
“Those were really popular in the ‘80s,” Wilson said. “But they have built-in thermostats, and I found out that when you turn it on in the summers, your energy bill goes down 15 to 20 percent. That’s something I learned a couple of years ago from just testing it out. If your attic stays cool, your house stays cool.”