The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Housing shortcuts short homeowners
By Rick Badie, This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it |
Monday, January 30, 2006

I didn’t buy her a diamond ring. Or wine and dine her.

All I did to become King for a Day in my wife’s eyes was repair the garage door. It’d been squeaking, squawking and threatening to come unhinged for days. OK — months.

It would stop midway between up and down. It might go all the way down, then creep upward again as soon as it touched ground. Our garage door was possessed.

And I fixed it, baby.

With WD-40, no less.

So we didn’t have to have a repairman make a house call.

This time.

Rest assured, though, there’ll be other malfunctions that demand more than a squirt of oil. And chances are great it will be something that wasn’t built right or installed properly from the get-go. Stuff like defective wood, creaky floors and sagging walls. Things that require the expertise of a plumber, electrician or some other repairman.

Anecdotally, it’s a common occurrence in Gwinnett, where houses sprout like kudzu. We live in a county that attracts more than 25,000 people a year. Schools are top-notch. Jobs are plentiful.

Because of growth, we need houses — thousands of new ones every year.

Of 17,182 building permits issued last year, 6,632 were for single-family residences, according to the 2005 activity report compiled by the Gwinnett County Department of Planning & Development.

When some contractors work at breakneck speed to meet demand while juggling several projects, mistakes happen. Shortcuts get taken. Quality plummets.

And we, the homeowners, pay for it, literally and figuratively.

“The most common complaint we hear with the new homes is with the painting and the drywall,” said Chris Davis, president of Fair and Square Home Services. “So many companies use these guys they pick up on the corner. They’re amateurs, and it’s detrimental to the industry. For repairmen like us, though, it keeps us busy.”

When I moved here in 1997,the number of advertisements for handymen and all-purpose crews astounded me. Now I know why.

We hired a contractor to turn my basement into an in-law suite. We learned that there was no insulation behind the drywall. Our plumbing sprung leaks inside the walls. We learned the pipes were made of a material that had been the target of a class-action lawsuit — decades ago.

When repairmen or service technicians show up at our 20-year-old house, I ask them the same two questions:

What do you think about the general quality of homes in Gwinnett? And is a $400,000 house crafted any better than one that costs $200,000?

Their answers are uniform. Quality is a very hit-or-miss proposition. It doesn’t discriminate by ZIP code, either. A Gwinnett McMansion can be just as defect-prone as an abode in a cookie-cutter subdivision or modestly priced neighborhood.

“Forty percent of our repair work is on houses less than five years old,” said Harvey W. Roberts Jr., the plumber who installed new water pipes in my crib. “And I work in houses that range in price from the cheapest to over a million. That’s not good.”

Actually, it’s a crying shame. Because a can of WD-40 can do only so much.

http://www.ajc.com/metro/content/shared-blogs/ajc/badie/entries/2006/01/30/housing_shortcu.html