Built to Crumble
Homebuilders rely on a few too many myths, mistakes and outright lies
by Walter Jowers
When it comes to the house-building and house-fixing business, lies are born faster than baby possums, in numbers greater than cicadas, and they spread faster than a termite swarm.
I've heard some whoppers in my time. My favorite lie came from a builder who sold a man a new house on a swampy sucker lot. The lot, and the house, flooded every time it rained. The builder told the homeowner that the flooding would stop soon, because the house was built on a floating slab. Every time it rained, the builder explained, the slab would float up a little higher, until it got so high that the water wouldn't reach it anymore.
Of course, anybody who knows anything about building—and lying—would recognize this as an obvious lie, and an artless one to boot. But to a lot of naive homeowners, a tale like this might just sound plausible. People who've paid good money for a house want to believe that their builder is honest and their house is solid. Builders and remodelers have picked up on this little bit of psychology, and the unscrupulous ones spend their days telling folks that bad house parts will heal themselves. The curly, lumpy roof shingles will lie down nice and flat once the weather warms up. The windows will stop leaking as soon as the house settles. The humps in the walls and floors will flatten out. And that poopy smell in the crawl space will go away.
To make things worse, some local codes-enforcement folks have joined the liars' club. The most comical recent lapse of civil-servant honesty involves house wrap. That's the weather-resistant sheet material that's put on the outside walls of a house before the brick veneer goes on—and it's required by law. One of my frequent co-workers, a construction-defects lawyer, went to take a look at a troubled house in a nearby county. There, she met a codes official and asked him why the house didn't have the required house wrap. He explained that the wrap was there, but it was "invisible." Sweet Baby Jesus! Here's a codes guy—who's supposed to be working for the home-buying citizens of his county—sticking up for a builder so faithfully that he'll try to convince a savvy observer that he has seen, and heartily approved, invisible house parts.
Me, I just want to go down to this house and watch the workers unload the invisible house wrap off the truck. "Just feel for it, bubba. It's there...." I want to watch 'em stretch the stuff out and stick it up on the walls. Better yet, I want to see 'em patch the rips.
Lately, I've been impressed by the local myths surrounding brick veneer. Believe me when I tell you, the quality of brick-veneer work in our part of the world is miserable. Whether it's on an $80,000 starter house or a fancy $2 million house, the workmanship varies from wretched to let-me-poke-out-my-eyes-so-I-won't-see-it bad.
There's a right way to install brick veneer, and there's the all-messed-up, assbackwards, sloppy Middle Tennessee way. The Middle Tennessee way is to leave out or mangle the flashing, which is the part that keeps water out of the walls. That's important, because water makes things rot. Even so, a whole lot of local builders, brickers and codes guys will tell you that flashing is actually dangerous and could cause the brick to fall right off your house. Heaven help 'em, I think they believe it.
You brick folklorists, listen to me: the brick sits on a foundation, so it's not going to move down. Gravity's got a hold of it, so it's not going to just shoot up into the air. Brick ties keep the bricks from moving in and out, or side to side. I'm amazed that I have to explain this.
In our part of the world, we've got two time-honored traditions that don't fit so well into homebuilding. First, we're self-reliant and determined to figure things out for ourselves. Second, we like to tell tall tales. The downside to this combination is that some folks just make up building as they go along, then invent tales to cover their mistakes.
I don't want to sound harsh, but it's pretty clear to me that a whole lot of Middle Tennessee builders and codes enforcers should spend less time dreaming up building shortcuts and excuses, and more time studying the right way to put a house together.
Once a person knows the right way to do things, he doesn't have to guess his way through his day's work, or make up stories anymore. I think a little pride in workmanship and a healthy dose of truth-telling would help the up-and-coming wanna-builders craft better houses. That would be good, because if the current generation of new houses do what I think they're going to do—which is rot to the ground—we'll be needing some better housing stock, and soon.
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