Helter Shelter
Sometimes it’s just plain hard being a professional construction critic. In the 20 or so years that I did home inspections, I ran across a lot of new houses that looked awful when I pulled into the driveway but, after close examination, turned out to be pretty dang good. And then there was the other end of the stick—I inspected hundreds of new houses that looked pretty good at first glance but turned out to be unbelievably, undeniably bad.
Telling 10 families a week that they’ve picked out a good house is a nice way to make a living. But telling any family that their dream house is a leaking, creaking pile of moldering crap takes a fair bit of the shine off a day’s work. It’s like being the guy who feeds the doomed chickens to the neck saw at the chicken-processing plant. No matter how much effort you put in, no matter how much pride you take in your work, at the end of the day, your contribution to the universe is a pile of lifeless chicken heads.
Given that legacy, you can bet that after a while, a home-inspecting man will naturally start thinking about his body of work. He’ll ponder whether or not he found all the cracked bricks, all the leaky pipes and all the rusted-out furnaces. He’ll think about whether he worked in his clients’ best interests or whether he was just a little too accommodating to the real estate agents who sent him referrals.
During my recent sabbatical from the home inspection business, I’ve been wondering if I was just a little too hard on the builders and tradespeople who built all the new houses I inspected. I’m sure I caused a lot of building superintendents to lose sleep, drink whiskey and kick some stray dogs. So, in an effort to settle my own mind, I called up my friend, construction-defects lawyer Jean Harrison, who is always willing to hit me upside the head with pure truth and perfect logic.
“Jean,” I said, “were all those new houses really as bad as I thought they were? I think I would’ve seen something in the news if they were falling down and crushing the inhabitants.”
“Some of them are falling down,” Jean said. “They’re just not falling down fast enough to crush anybody. I’ve got a client in a house south of town, and his windows are falling out.”
“Sweet baby Jesus!” I exclaimed. “I’ve heard the myth of self-flashing windows, but this is the first I’ve heard of self-removing windows. I feel better now. On my grumpiest, most paranoid day, I never told a builder or would-be home buyer that his windows would just up and fall out.”
“It’s hard to foresee that kind of thing,” Jean said. “Historically, once a window’s nailed into a wall and covered with siding, it stays put. But not these windows. And it gets worse. I’ve got another client whose whole house shakes every time somebody closes a door. Seems the workers left out some needed structural components—headers, beams, things like that.”
“Amazing,” I said. “It conjures the image of God taking out Adam’s whole rib cage and leaving him nowhere to hang his shoulders. But here’s what’s been troubling me since I took a break from house inspecting: if most new houses aren’t falling down or blowing up, and people are living in them without complaint, and those people are able to sell their houses for a profit in a few years, how bad could those houses be?”
“Well,” Jean explained, “a lot of new houses are OK, but a pretty good percentage—I’d say as many as 20 percent—have problems. It’s hard to know what’s going to happen after somebody buys a house and moves in. It’s like that scene in Dirty Harry where Harry’s got the bad guy at his mercy. Anybody who’s thinking about buying a new house needs to ask himself one question: ‘Do I feel lucky?’ Because when it comes to new houses, the roof on the house next door might be just fine, but the roof on your house could leak with the next drop of rain. The fate of the house and the inhabitants could depend on which way the wind blows and how much skill and experience the roofer had with flashing, caulk and nail guns. Knowing all that, I suggest that a would-be home buyer think about the rest of that Dirty Harry speech metaphorically and envision Harry shooting nails into the shingles. ‘Did he fire six shots or only five? In all this excitement, I’ve kinda lost track myself.’ ”
Best lawyer Jean and I can figure, about four out of five new-house buyers will end up in a house that might have a few problems, but the problems will be bearable. That’s fine for those four, but the unfortunate one out of five might just have to go around picking up falling windows and shutting doors very gently, lest the house come a-tumbling down. I might take a 20 percent chance of losing a hand of penny poker, but I don’t think I’d want to spend a quarter of a million bucks on a house that sheds parts like an old cat sheds hair.
I’d play it safe and find myself a nice mid-’60s rancher. I’d say there’s a 100 percent chance of it outlasting a new house.