Helter Shelter
For the last couple weeks, I’ve been shouting out warnings about the low quality of new-house construction. This week, I’m going to explain some details of how they just don’t build ’em like they used to.
Foundations
When I look at the foundation of a house built in the mid-’60s or earlier, I usually see foundation walls that have few, if any, cracks. I see floor joists resting directly on top of the piers, just like they’re supposed to. As a result of the careful labor back in the day, most old houses have floors that are reasonably solid, and close to level. Houses 80 years old and older, and houses that have been neglected, are exceptions.
When I look at a new house, I often see out-of-square foundation walls, out-of-plumb piers and floor joists shimmed up with scrap wood. Yesterday, my remodeling buddy Mott called me, out of pure frustration and a need to vent. “Jowers,” he said, “I just saw a foundation crew trying to level up foundation piers with a cheap-ass laser level from a hardware store—one of those things that you’re supposed to use to hang pictures on the wall.” Add up unskilled labor, hapless municipal code inspectors and a crew that relies on a picture-hanging level, and you’ll probably end up with a house that has rolling, out-of-level funhouse floors.
Exterior cladding
I’ve seen hundreds of 1940s and ’50s brick veneer houses without a single crack, and dozens of crack-free 1960s houses that have perfectly good weep holes and flashings. The brick courses are usually straight, with no scrap pieces anywhere.
With precious few exceptions, the brick veneer on new houses is wretched. Courses are crooked, there are no functional weep holes or flashings and there are scrap pieces of brick used as filler. Local codes inspectors and private home inspectors routinely bless this sorry work, even though there are nice graphics in the code book that show how it ought to be done.
In my turn-of-the-century neighborhood, most of the windows, windowsills and wood trim are intact. That’s because it’s all old-growth wood, and it was back-primed; that is, painted on the sides that nobody will ever see.
Best I can tell, nobody backprimes exterior wood anymore. They just paint the sides that show. On new houses, the wood is usually forced-growth lumber, with a lot of sapwood and not much heartwood. It rots fast. It’s hard to find a 10- or 15-year-old house that doesn’t have some rotten window trim. Builders can buy and use better wood, but it’s expensive. Don’t expect high-quality wood on your house unless you ask for it—and pay for it.
Unskilled labor with guns
All that said, the most pernicious evildoers on a new-house construction site are the nails guns, and the people who use them. Back in the glory days of home building, real carpenters used real hammers. Those carpenters could work in tight spaces, judge the angle of their nails, and feel when the nails hit knots, metal or rotten spots. Of course, those carpenters wore out their elbows, wrists and fingers, but they were the all-time champs of fastening.
Nail-gunning is all about quantity. At the framing level, there is no quality nail-gunning. At the finish level, it’s not much better. Says remodeler Mott, again in vent mode: “I just pulled off an 8-foot section of baseboard. It’s got at least 80 nails in it, and none of them found a stud.”
Believe me when I tell you: if you hear a roofer popping off two or three shots a second, he is messing up your roofing job big-time. He’s not aiming. He’s missing. I’ve been in hundreds of attics where I could see hundreds of nails that were meant to fasten the roof decking to the rafters, but missed the rafters by inches. In those same attics, there were usually several rafters that were splintered by excessive nail gunning.
Those nail-gunners are the same people who shoot nails into your roof shingles. Nailing roof shingles requires a fair bit of knowledge and skill. Roofing manufacturers publish standards that show exactly where shingles are supposed to receive nails. Miss those spots, shoot the nails clean through the shingles or shoot the nails crooked, and some of your shingles will fall off, or leak.
Right behind the nail guns and nail-gunners, the second most destructive force on a new-house site is the caulker and his caulk gun. My peers in the home inspection business derisively refer to the caulker as “Caulk Boy.” The caulker is usually the unskilled and untrained low man in the pecking order, who rarely hangs on at the jobsite long enough for anybody to learn his name.
Ironically, Caulk Boy might just have the most important job on the site, which is keeping water out of your house. Fifty years ago, there would have been a skilled sheet-metal man on the site, fabricating and installing metal flashings that would keep water out of the roof and walls.
Today, the waterproofing job falls to an unskilled guy with a tube of goo. Goo that will last four years if you’re lucky. More irony: in Tennessee, builders don’t have to fix—or pay for—their mistakes on houses that are four or more years old.
And you wonder why people are finding mold in their walls. More on that in another column…