BUILDING HOMES: BUILDING PROBLEMS

UCF team did inspections for 6 months

By Dan Tracy
Sentinel Staff Writer

October 31, 2003

Industrial-engineering students from the University of Central Florida inspected 406 houses for the Orlando Sentinel/WESH-NewsChannel 2 investigation of the quality of new-home construction in the region.

The 15 students were trained by Ron Resch, a 56-year-old former general contractor and certified building inspector from Lake County, and two UCF associate professors, Mike Mullens and Ahmad Elshennawy.

The university was paid $30,000 for the project; Resch, $2,500. The first house was checked April 4, and the last was inspected Oct. 4.

As part of their major, the students participate in the Housing Constructability Lab, run by Mullens and Elshennawy, and study production techniques.

Quality consultants

The professors consult about quality-control and production issues for a dozen companies that manufacture housing components and ship them to builders for assembly on site, primarily in the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast.

Resch, whose Total Building Consultants and Inspectors Inc. was retained to check out 1,200 new and used homes in 2002, began working with the students in February.

Along with Mullens and Elshennawy, Resch took groups of students through new houses in the Avalon Park community in southeast Orange County.

With the students in tow, Resch climbed onto roofs, crawled through attics, tramped around yards and walked through interiors, pointing out what was right and wrong in the houses, all built in 2001 or 2002.

He also showed the students how to fill out an inspection form, based on the one he uses in his private business.

The practice homes showed many of the same problems found in the 406-house sample: cracked foundations and walls; leaky windows and air handlers; rooms that were too hot or too cold; and poor craftsmanship, such as corners that were not square and archways out of round.

After the initial training, Resch and the professors turned the students loose for practice inspections.

Resch and the professors also checked the houses, then compared notes with the students.

'They were conscientious'

By April, the students were deemed ready to go. But Resch and the professors remained deeply involved, meeting with the students regularly to check their findings for errors and to answer questions.

Resch also gave his cell-phone number to the students, allowing them to call him with concerns while they were going over a home.

"They did find a lot of significant problems in the homes," Resch said. "They took their job seriously. They were conscientious in what they were doing."

The 406 houses inspected by the students were all built in 2001, the last full year for which data was available before the project was conceived in 2002.

The owners were contacted by phone from a list of names and addresses selected at random from the databases of property appraisers in Orange, Osceola, Seminole, Lake, Volusia and Polk counties.

Zack Haeussner, a 22-year-old UCF senior, conducted the first inspection, of a house in Oviedo. He found a shaky staircase railing, trim around the attic door falling off, a garage ceiling with a large hole in it and a wavy ceiling.

Homeowners ask: Why?

Such discoveries, he said, quickly became common. And homeowners, he said, often asked the same question: "Why? Why would they [the builders] do it that way?"

Mullens said he expected to find some flaws -- "These are done by people" -- but was surprised that only 1 percent of the houses, four in all, were found to be problem-free.

Buyers, Mullens said, are partly to blame. While they will reject a product in Wal-Mart because its wrapping is torn, they will not object when their house has bowed walls.

"We're extremely accepting because we don't think we have the right to do better," he said. "I think we should have a better understanding of what we want and should have in a house. We should have the conviction that goes along with that."

Dan Tracy can be reached at 407-420-5444 or dtracy@orlandosentinel.com.

Copyright © 2003, Orlando Sentinel

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