There’s nothing more disappointing than buying something new and having it break, get stained, or otherwise ruined right away. Your latest Amazon purchase arrives broken. You spill wine on your new white shirt. Your shiny new car has. a. SCRATCH. Devastating. It’s even worse when that new purchase is a house. The stakes are much higher, and we have a higher level of expectation that the finished product will be perfect. And yet, there are relatively few built-in checks and balances when you build a home in D-FW from the ground up.
Depending on when you come into the process, you can have a home inspector do Phase Inspections during building, to ensure that any mistakes get corrected along the way, and to do a final inspection before you do your last walk-through with the builders. Most home builders will also offer a one-year Builder’s Warranty, and it’s a good idea to have a Builder’s Warranty inspection before that policy is up, so you can take care of anything that may have gone wrong during the first year.
Here are some examples of things we’ve found in new home construction inspections:
Wonky Windows
In the first picture, the bricks above the window weren’t anchored properly and detached in the middle. In the second picture, it looks like one of two things. Either they purchased the wrong size window and had to add bricks, but didn’t have any more matching bricks. Or they measured the window opening wrong, to begin with. Either way, not what you want on your shiny new house.
Nothing To See Here
I like the way he builds the suspension in this video. What’s it gonna be? This is an easy fix, but it’s not the kind of thing you want to find out the hard way. This would be checked by an inspector in Phase 2 and 3 if you have Phase Inspections when you build a home in D-FW.
What We Have Here is a Failure to Communicate
I’m no builder, so I don’t know how the jobs are divided up on a work site, but in this case, I picture they gave one dude the doorstop job. They gave him a floor plan, marked all the doors, and said, “Go get ’em, Door Stop Guy!” Whether it makes sense or not, every door gets a doorstop. Whoever purchased the appliances did not make note of the fact that they’d built the space for a counter-depth refrigerator, either. So we have the too-large refrigerator door banging into the pantry door, and a completely pointless doorstop. Not the slick-shiny-new-construction-home look that you’d want.
Secret Attic
It’s so secret, in fact, that you can’t ever go into it. They just literally forgot to make an attic access door.😲
To be clear, this is not a post about bashing home builders! We work very closely with home builders to ensure homes are safe and sound for people to move in. Builders are human, just like everyone else, and mistakes can happen. And every team occasionally has its weak links, like ol’ Door Stop Guy. You aren’t insulting your builder if you hire a Dallas Phase Inspector — many builders encourage it. You can find out more about doing Phase Inspections or Builder’s Warranty Inspections in D-FW at the link.
