I decided to start a new category about “if I only knew.” It has been 2 years since we built our house and every month I discover items in my house that were not done correctly or scratch my head, and say, “what were they thinking?’ Plumbing pieces put on backwards, holes left in inconspicious places, doors not painted on top, and so on . I know if you are reading this post, you have to be shaking your head and saying, “yeah, I have been there.”
Don’t get me wrong. My house was built very well by an amazing builder; however, he hired subcontractors to do parts of the job and “stuff” happened. Not crucial but annoying.
During the building process, there were so many “if you only told me” moments .
To give you an example, my heating/air conditioning vents were installed in the floor. I always assumed that I would have wood vents to match the floor. Every new house I saw had wood grates covering their floor vents.
When it came time to order the vents, I spoke to my heating/air conditioning subcontractor about receiving a credit from what he was going to buy for me. I told him I was going to purchase wood vents. He replied, “oh, no, you can’t order wood vents. I would have sized the vents bigger if you wanted wood vents. You should have told me from the beginning.”
Thinking, why would that matter, I answered, “why does it matter?” He then explained to me that the wood vents would decrease the volume of the air coming out of the system. So, how would I have known to ask this question from the beginning? Were the wood grates in the other house installed improperly? Is it because I have a geothermal systems? Anyone??? Needlesss to say, I was not happy.
Here is another example; look at my picture above. I was trying to be energy efficient by installing a Heartland Energy Saving dryer vent, and sealing around it with foam insulation. When my handyman sprayed the foam, it got inside the vent. I guess he did not take that extra step to check after he sprayed or the foam had a life of its own after he left. Later, I could not figure out why there was so much lint all over the floor and the floor was moist. When we disconnected the dryer and its vent, we found the foam, which was blocking air that was coming from the dryer.
The purpose of this article is to provide other homeowners’ with advice. You know. “The if I know what I know now advice.” Your comments does not have to be green necessarily because I view any job that had to be redone wasteful.
So let the comments rip!
Marisa says
I designed our house using a pencil, a ruler and graph paper. We moved out to the garage with our 5 kids while my husband began tearing down the old house and rebuilding this one in it’s place. Not the typical way to do it but we didn’t want to leave our neighborhood.
If I knew then what I know now, I never would have overbuilt for the neighborhood. I could not imagine ever wanting to leave here but now I want so badly to live near my mother and sisters. We will never get the money from this house that it would bring elsewhere, so we’d never be able to buy or build another comparable home in a different place.
Other than that, I would have designed the kitchen counter coming from the right side of the room instead of the left side, just because it would have been better for traffic flow.
Laura says
I’ve been there… I have had a couple of problems with my house and not always the house builder assumed his mistakes.
Green Talk says
Laura’s blog is http://soleflor-en.blogspot.com/. For some reason the wordpress plug-in does not seem to reveal everyone’s blogs like in the case of Marisa’s blog above. (You don’t have to have a blog to comment! I just want my readers to know a little something about my commenters and if they want, they can go visit their websites.)
Laura-2 questions-can you tell us what were your problems and how did you remedy them?
Angie says
OMG! That was awful…Have you taken any legal action against the contractor or subcontractor. I’m sure you can get them for something!
Green Talk says
No. I just fixed it. It wasn’t that hard to fix. The more people post their own stories, the more others can learn what to watch for. Angie, do you have any repair stories? Anna