Ok, this is ridiculous. Do home builders just not care?
I've done my share of moaning and groaning about how well (or how poorly) my house was built. Errant pipes here, wires run underneath ceiling joists in the basement, massive pipes protruding from various walls and supports, the non-squareness of the walls, etc. I know that the builders are working with imperfect supplies and wood bends. Sometimes the easiest approach looks like the best one. Sometimes it is. I don't think that's always the case.
I try to cut them some slack. Coming in and doing work after someone was already there can be tricky and daunting. It's a lot like software. It's in pretty much every industry.
But today I found something in my house that is making me livid (and I don't usually get mad; frustrated, yes, annoyed, sure, but mad, rarely). We've had issues with our air conditioning ever since we moved into this house. The house gets pretty hot in the summer time. For a long time we've attributed the problem to the air conditioner not working or needing more coolant, or whatever. We've paid for people to come out every year (yes EVERY YEAR) and fix it. The fix has been temporary at best. There has always been one vent (in the small bathroom) that hasn't ever really worked. I always assumed that there was blockage.
Well, to help mitigate the problems we've been having we hired a duct cleaner to come out today and do his magic (it's been long overdue anyway). In attempting to clean out the bathroom duct he noticed that he wasn't getting any suction. He reached his hand in and felt insulation. No, it wasn't insulation that was in the pipe, it was insulation because the pipe wasn't connected to the boot. He could see light through the vent. Grrr.
Now it just happens that we just finished (and by just I mean yesterday) drywalling, taping, mudding, and texturing the walls in the basement. This wasn't looking good. The only bright point to this whole rant is that there is just one place in the whole basement that isn't finished: the utility room. The bathroom happens to sit right above the utility room. Thank heavens!
So we went down to have a look. Sure enough, the boot is sitting there attached to the bathroom floor in the ceiling. There's also a pipe that should be attached. It's just sitting there. The end closest to the boot had duct tape on it. At the other end of the pipe was an elbow. The elbow should be attached to the main air conditioning shaft. Upon inspecting the elbow, however, it was never dove-tailed, cut, taped, screwed anything - it looked as pristine as it would be in the store. Frustrated, I then felt around for a hole. Sure enough, there it was.
But it gets better. It wasn't that it wasn't connected - that would be an easy fix. The builders, in their great wisdom, saw fit to run a floor joist smack over the middle of the hole - right in line with the boot to the vent in the bathroom. There is no way it was ever connected, nor could it be.
Now it turns out that this hole is the hole nearest to the air conditioning unit. Naturally it would receive the greatest amount of air pressure. For seven years we've been venting the majority of our air into the insulation below our bathroom, robbing the rest of the house of much needed cooled air. No wonder it's never really cooled off the house and our electrical bills have been astronomical.
I don't know how this ever passed inspection. I wonder if it was even inspected. I wonder how someone could just not care enough to finish the job. I guarantee that had it been the builder's house things would have been different.
Chalk that up for yet another problem :-(
- The entire circuit breaker was wired backwards (we had incessant breaker tripping for years just running the microwave and a blender at the same time) which had led to countless computer hardware issues and crashed drives because of surges.
- I had to furr down almost the entire basement because of pipes and wires running beneath all of the joists.
- Air conditioning ducts never even connected. The pipe was just laying there, never even connected - venting the majority of air into the insulation beneath the bathroom.
I know that there's pressure to get stuff built. There are time constraints, but do we just not care about the quality of anything anymore? Everything is disposable, nothing is made to last. This is ridiculous to saddle someone with a half-baked, not even working product and call it good with a clean conscience. Had I not been doing this inspection I never would have known the problem and would have lived on, ignorant of the problems within the system, tolerating the output.
It's a lot like crappy software. I'm sick of a lack of quality. Where's the pride in what we do?