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You’re in what you thought would be your dream house — until it wasn’t.
The living room ceiling has been ripped out after sewage water backed up and flooded the upstairs bathroom. With the drywall gone, you can spot loose nails and concerning gaps between the floor joists. Rainwater seeps through the cracks around the front door.
Insects crawl through the window frames — even though the windows were reinstalled because they weren’t installed properly in the first place. And most of your bathrooms are unusable, awaiting repairs the builder promised more than a year ago.
It feels like a nightmare — but it’s reality, according to Danielle Antonucci, who invited a Hunterbrook Media reporter to the home she and her husband bought just four years ago in Sarasota, Florida, built by the nation’s largest homebuilder, D.R. Horton ($DHI). In an email provided to Hunterbrook, Antonucci desperately pleaded with D.R. Horton to address the numerous defects rendering their home nearly uninhabitable: “I keep getting the response that this matter has been escalated to the Sarasota office,” she wrote. “It has been 21 months!”
Oh man, let me tell you. We built our house a few years ago and it was an ordeal. After a while I just stopped asking the builder to fix things because I knew it would be faster and better to fix them myself or get someone else to fix them. It has added tens of thousands of dollars to the cost of the home, and all of that has come out of our own pocket, we didn’t get to roll all those extra costs into the mortgage loan.
Some of the corners they cut were unbelievable. They didn’t put any insulation in our attic. None. Our master shower drain was just draining directly into the crawl space, not hooked up the drain pipe at all. There was also no insulation in the crawl space, nor was there a vapor barrier. Poor workmanship everywhere, the floors especially are ass.
Several people have told me I should sue the builder, and I probably should, but I’d have to pay for a lawyer, and it would probably take months and months. It’s an expense and a hassle I don’t want, so instead I just tell everyone to never, ever use Taylor Homes of Nashville. Ever. Even though, every other builder is probably just as bad.
… It’s like we forgot, as a whole society, how to build houses. What the fuck is wrong with us. Jesus fucking CHRIST.
I’m never giving up this house. My grandparents bought it in 1953. I can’t imagine any “production” house will ever be as good as this one and it’s not like this one is even particularly great. Basic competency is becoming rarer by the year.
We as a society did not forget how to build good houses, write good software, design good vehicles, or anything like that.
We just stopped caring about it because the core purpose for any business is to increase revenue, decrease costs, grow, and absorb market share (exceptions being niche and boutique places that price accordingly). And may of us as individuals think we should run our own finances in a similar way.
For instance, let’s say I can build 100 shitty crooked houses with the cheapest and non-background-checked workers, with the same time and money invested that it takes you to build 50 beautifully crafted and solid homes with your team of experienced carpenters. I can sell my shitty homes for 20% less than you since the home buyers are also mostly shopping on price and stats, then I am going to win and once you’re out of business I will be building 150 shitty crooked houses at a time.
