Building a new home - the worst experience ever!

Have you ever thought that it would be so cool to build your own home? Well stop thinking that!
Yes you get everything you want – the way you want it, but think real hard if you want all the headaches that go along with building a new home.
Now there are those home builders that slap houses together 50 at a time and probably have figured out how to make things look sufficient – but my wife and I didn’t want to just have another home that looks like the rest of the neighborhood. So we decided to build a custom home. Every little design detail was looked at and analyzed to setup the layout the way we wanted it. Then – since we weren’t going with your average home builder (Pulte, Lennar, etc) and choosing our own custom builder (McDonald Construction) we had the pleasure of picking out every last little detail for both inside and outside the home, down to every little door knob pull and shade of stain on the wood floors. All I have to say is if you stay married through this process, along with having a baby in the middle of it – you will be married forever! Now when I say pleasure – it was a nightmare – especially for the guy involved. No man should ever have to go through that – picking out different shades of carpet, paint, stain, etc … God love my wife, but I just don’t have the eye for that stuff, nor the patience.

Anyway – we finally finished picking everything out and construction started. This is where I really got excited. Stopping by the site EVERY DAY to see progress – and make sure things were being done to our satisfaction. We started last September – oh which ended up being the rainiest month of the year – and dealt with one set back after the other … our chances of being in by Christmas weren’t looking good. We suffered through the better part of four months living in a townhouse while we watched the progress of the house continue. Along come January and we were finally making our plans to move in on 1/29. With less than a week left, our mortgage company had issues, upon issues. Whether it be verifying income or trying to figure out how we were paying for closing costs, you name it, it happened. The stress alone was a killer – I just thank the lord our baby was already here! So we finally close on the house and are doing our final walk through with the builder and finding little things here and there that we want touched up – to the point that we are pointing out obvious issues with crooked walls, scratches on appliances, dents and scratches in the cabinets where the wood floor guys used a crowbar to pry their boards into position. All things that should have been addressed – but weren’t. What I found is that when you build a home – one subcontractor doesn’t give a rat’s ass about the others involved. The carpet guys dragged the rolls of carpet over the freshly enameled woodwork – leaving scratches everywhere. There were 1/8” gouges in our center island left by the guy sanding and staining the floors, baseboards were rammed into by something … all of which no one bothers to fix. So as we go through our walk through – the Project Manager has the balls, we’re talking major cahones, to tell us we are being too picky. Really?? We just spent an enormous amount of money on a brand new home – in the midst of a recession (maybe someone forgot to tell him us building this home means he can continue to take three week fishing trips) – and he has the balls to tell us we are being too picky about wanting it to look perfect before we move in. This isn’t some second generation home that we are buying from someone – this is our brand new dream home!

So we get them to “fix” most of the items – of which they agree to do – only to find them not to our liking still after their fixes? Come move in day – and they are still touching things up. So we move in and figure everything can go on our punch list for the 60 day walk through. One way or the other – we will get this the way we want it. Sixty or so days go by and we are making our list – it’s getting long – typed we are up to three pages listing out various things like nail pops (which they sold us that we would never have a problem with since they apply a special procedure – I call B S on that), paint touch ups, dents filled in, floor board creeks, etc. Their Service Manager comes out – walks around, says about five words in total – including when we point out that the columns holding up the front porch are hanging off the footings in some places up to 6-8 inches. Of which – when the ground heaves will twist and buckle our front porch. Their answer – well we can cut off the material (making the columns stand out and scream “CHEAP FIX”) to above the grade. Do they not remember this is a brand new home and we don’t want to look like some white trash ghetto fix’r upper?

Three weeks go by while we are waiting for them to schedule repairs – and they say they would need two days to get everything done. My wife takes the time off work to be home – and we are now on day two … and to date they have only patched a few nail pops and nothing else. No workers are there – nothing’s been settled on the porch. We are not getting any communication from the builder, and are now at the point of calling the owner of McDonald Construction to share our experience.

Whatever happened to the customer is always right? Getting what you paid for? Customer Service? Everything about our experience is marred with these hassles that we will be continuing to go through for months and years to come. I now understand the reaction we got when we told friends and family we were building a house and their only advice or words of wisdom were “Good Luck”!

Stay tuned … this story has only begun. What I can tell you though is – we will never recommend McDonald Construction to anyone again!

Bald Guy Out!