About us

"Experience matters.

Whether you are building your dream home, garage, a backyard she shed or tackling a home improvement project, having an experienced team on your side can be the difference between success and failure.

In more than 40 years of experience being contractors and builders, Joe Strama and Jesse Laher have seen just about everything when it comes to construction. They know what works and what doesn’t and the difference using the right materials for the job can make.

They are taking those decades of experience and have pivoted away from working in the field to being a resource in the community selling building products and design assistance to contractors, do-it-yourselfers, and other customers who need supplies.

WLC Building Systems is located just a few miles west of the city of Medford on Hwy 64. WLC offers full lumber yard and building materials services along with a store area with a variety of building products. Strama explains that they have chosen the products they will sell based on their experience and knowledge of what will work.

“We're a full-service lumberyard as far as building homes. We're not a hardware store, but we have everything you need to build,” Strama said.

The products they are selling are just one aspect, ultimate value is in the decades of experience members of their team, Strama, Laher and Jon Blomberg bring to working with customers.

This partnership with their customers starts at the design phase. They have the capability of doing custom design work in-house and are able to generate building plans and a complete list of building supplies needed to get the job done.

Having design done by people who have real-world experience in the field can be  a major time and money saver. Strama gives the example of being able to shave off thousands of dollars in expenses without skimping on quality on past projects he has worked on by working with the customer to refine designs based on his experience building homes.

“When we talk to a customer, we can offer them advice. Real-world experience is what we are value adding to our products,” Strama said. “We provide the proper materials with the proper installation techniques to get a project done and completed correctly.”

One of the innovative products that WLC Building Systems offers is panelized materials. For example, if someone is building a garage, rather than getting a load of lumber and materials to a job site, they can have prebuilt sidewalls constructed by WLC and delivered to the job site ready to be erected and secured in place.

Laher noted that this can make the on-site construction process go much more smoothly and quickly with the knowledge that walls are square, with studs in the right places and window openings the correct size for installation. He noted that using that system, a customer with a crew could get a three-bedroom, two car garage totally enclosed and weather-tight in under a week.

“This is available to any homeowner, contractor, do-it-yourselfer. It's available to anyone. We pre-number all the panels. Give you that plan. It's all color-coded, matched up. It's kind of described to other people like putting a piece of furniture together. Here's your plan. Here's your pieces— glue it and screw it together,” Laher said, explaining the panelized system that are built in-house by WLC.

Strama and Laher noted that if something unexpected happens or goes wrong on the job site, they are just a phone call away to provide real-world advice and suggestions, drawing on their decades of experience as contractors.

“We've been there, we lived it, we know what worked what didn't and we're helping everybody move forward, with best process we've found,” Strama said. “If you come in here and go ‘Hey why would you use this product?’ we know why you'd use it and how to use it. We thrive on giving you the correct information, say if it's an installation technique for siding, or how to install a window properly, in detail.”

“We'll provide you with the knowledge, literature, instructions, whatever the need be to do it properly. We just don't want to sell you a product and say ‘Good luck,’” Laher said.

“We also stress to any customers that we're a phone call away. We're here to help you. We're here if you have a question. We're not just selling you something and now you're on your own,” Strama said.

The help and support are not just for those doing big projects. “If you come in want to buy two 2x4s, we'll sell you two 2x4s. You want some screws, nails, we'll sell you that,” Strama said. WLC also sells windows, doors, custom siding solutions and other building needs.

WLC is a dealer for Weather Shield windows and is able to sell any Weather Shield product. Strama explained that they have built off the relationships they developed in years of being a contractor to be able to offer high quality products to their customers. They selected the products they sell based on their experience in the quality and value to consumers.

“We have everything you need in a lumber yard, but with a smaller building center scale. It gets you more personal service,” Laher said. That service extends to coming to customer’s homes to get the proper measurements for window replacement products and providing instruction on how the windows need to be installed to meet warranty specifications.