Vocal Point : Along with buyer beware, buyer be proactive
Starry nights and dreams are the things homes are made of but home-building can be a positively uncivil business.
Did you know the city is not required to enforce its own codes? The city is complaint-driven and isn’t out looking for violations. It’s up to you. The city’s position is they intend to protect the health, safety and welfare of the general public, but in fact no one in particular. The responsibility for compliance rests on the permit applicant and their agents. I assume this is an honor system of sorts, so I took the tour of the new development nearby to see how well this is working.
These unsuspecting home buyers paid more for these larger lots believing they would have room for their children to play and all the other things more land promises. The landscaping challenge was noteworthy. Farm fields had been transformed like a sea. The land sloped this way and that, from one yard to the next. One new neighbor invited me to see his backyard. The first thing I noticed was a mountain of dirt that looked like a small Stonehenge. Ingeniously, this family had incorporated literally tons of rocky dirt the developer had left behind by clearing a flat spot for their children and created a climbing park out of the rocky mass they couldn’t afford to have hauled away. They had been quoted $6,000 to remove this excess of rocks.
Topsoil was not a strong feature of this development. The contractor was as unyielding to help the unsuspecting buyer as the rocky mass they’d left behind. While these yards begged to be made level, I was told these yards had been engineered to somehow tip the water between the houses. I couldn’t see a channel but this phantom channel was to carry the water away from the foundations to somewhere out yonder in the front. Yet, these buyers were supposed to take on faith their foundations were safely out of water’s way. I’m sure as buyers looked at the lots in process; they never dreamed they’d be left with this much unfinished landscape after final grading. Buyer beware; never assume. What you see may be what you get.
Unlike Liberty Lake’s Street of Dreams, this was more akin to the Street of Nightmares. Unresolved problems abounded, only topped by a general abhorrence of the conflict needed to gain resolution. Occupant complaints ranged anywhere from major to minor finish work, plumbing problems, broken new appliances and furnace problems, while their warranty seemed to guarantee one full year of headaches begging for relief.
One newcomer left to their own devices tried to take care of water coming off of their roof and installed a rain gutter with the drain pipe pointed directly at the neighbor’s home barely 5 feet away. This is the part where city inspection probably doesn’t go beyond the front yard swale, if you are lucky.
Where is this tale of two developments leading? Be proactive. City standards are minimums, and offer little protection. Higher standards will be up to you and whom you hire to build your home. Pay attention to yard details. These are costly to fix. Create a record throughout the process of what was agreed upon and what was promised. Log and keep in a notebook any conversation with the project manager. Keep a copy for yourself and send a copy to your contractor to ensure you both understand the agreement so corrections can be made and misunderstandings avoided.
If you want to ensure the quality of the home before you move in, you should pay for a private inspection. Problems you have with omissions or adverse changes become your personal civil legal problem. Pay attention to changes happening next to your property. One man’s solution may be your nightmare.
British author, Jerome K. Jerome, sums this up well. “I want a house that has got over all its troubles; I don’t want to spend the rest of my life bringing up a young and inexperienced house.”