New Home After 6 Months: Man Plans and God Laughs

 

That's water that's come up from under the house and seeped into the concrete floor of the garage of our new home.  Our problems with the house have gone beyond the normal new home teething pains. We've had water leaking into the living space too. This sounds like a very Seattle problem, the kind I used to deal with in our tumble down house circa 1928, and something I never thought that I'd have to deal with here. Small amounts of water ooze through seams in the floor in select spots in every room and leave white crusty deposits of minerals behind. Above is what garage floor looked like in April.  After a rainstorm in May the garage flooded. Since then the moisture situation inside the garage and house has slowly improved, but it's certainly not gone or watertight.

I've repeatedly complained to the builder, sometimes loudly.  The builder had 4 large deep holes dug behind the house looking for water, they were dry. He had holes bored into the lowest part of the foundation hoping trapped water would flow out but that was dry too. The builder says that he's out of ideas and at this point says that it's our problem and our responsibility because he built the house on land that we purchased separately, ergo that's our water and not his so it's not his responsibility. The builder says that his preferred flooring company can take care of this, they'll move all of our furniture, peel up all of the vinyl floor planks to expose the slab, coat the slab with chemical goo sealant, put the floor back down and move our furniture back. Cost to us: $21,000, plus tax. I've had all the plumbing tested, the house independently inspected, I've talked to a lawyer, a hydrologist and various consultants, all not cheap.

I've also talked to local people in the building trades and have slowly come to learn that we are not alone, I've heard a few stories of people all over town with similarly afflicted houses, some new and some old, that have lost very expensive natural hardwood floors to discoloration and warping or had elaborately decorated floor tiles pop up and have their unique hand painted decorations on their floors ruined. Our vinyl planks are basically durable plastic fake wood and won't be harmed by exposure to moisture. What's happened to our house and others seems to be the direct result of the unprecedented record smashing wet winter we had last year. People who have lived here all their lives have told me they never saw anything like winter 2022-2023, it was one for the record books, it was wet winter without end. Water is trapped in the ground all over this part of the state and is slowly percolating up and being released as water vapor. The house is heavily insulated and sealed per code so the water vapor that comes up through the concrete slab has nowhere to go and accumulates in the house.
What to do?

• Improve drainage (swale work already in progress)
• Cross our fingers, do nothing and get on with our lives with the hope that weather patterns and precipitation amounts return to historical norms. Summer is the rainy season here and rainfall was below normal. Still, a long term drought starting right now would be most helpful.
• Have our lives disrupted and pull up the vinyl planks and seal the top of the slab with chemical goo sealant for $21,000+ as suggested by the builder and hope that it fixes the problem and doesn't cause new ones.
• I've purchased some humidity sensors and can remotely monitor moisture levels in the air inside the house and garage and open windows and doors as needed as weather permits.

To make matters even worse the increase in mortgage interest rates meant that our old house took 5 months to sell. The market here got very soft just when we needed it to be as strong and robust as it had been in the last few years. But it is what it is, the sale is finally done and now we'll have the money to landscape and further improve the drainage and overall appearance of the property.

Unless derailed by something else new and out of the blue the plan now is to get on with our lives. We've been preoccupied and grounded by a succession of Covid fears, construction and new house problems for almost 4 years now and it's time to put all of that aside and bust out. We're getting old, the travel window for us will soon close whether we like it or not. Because the time is now.

Hurry up and Wait, Planning a Custom Home

What did we want in a home?  The CC&R's for the property said that it had to be a minimum of 2500 square feet and had to have at least a 3 car garage.  After that it was completely up to us.

We called some local architects, they wanted around $15,000 to design a new custom home.  What did we want above and beyond what we already had?  She wanted a craft room, I wanted the house to have a whole house fan.  My Father built one into our house when I was a kid and I knew that a whole house fan was a great way to bring the temperature of a house down with the cool evenings around here.  And of course I wanted a big deck for a meal, a snack or just a snooze in the hammock.

In the end we picked a local builder and modified plans that they already had on their website.  Plans in place and a down payment made to the builder we were ready to build, right?  Not so fast, first it was off to the bank for a construction loan.

A construction loan is sort of like a mortgage, but for new construction.  As the builder completes a stage of the build and needs more money to proceed he makes a draw on the loan.  The bank sends an inspector to make sure that progress claimed has actually been made and if everything passes inspection the bank releases money to the builder.  At the end of the build the construction loan turns into a 30 year mortgage.  

How does one get a construction loan?  Simple, you just have to go to a bank and submit to a 3 month long financial colonoscopy.  Most every day the bank would send me an email detailing what financial information or documentation they required and each day I'd retrieve whatever personal financial information they requested, package it as a PDF and send it back and await the next request.  After 3 months of this our construction loan was approved, yay!

Now we're ready to break ground and build, right?  Not so fast, now the City's Building Department has to get involved and approve the plans because no construction can take place without a building permit.  We were told that between Covid and a crush of new construction the City's Building Department was seriously backed up.  Eventually the City wanted some minor changes and they also has a bizarre proposal from the Fire Department that we kill the view and build our home close to the street and build a road with a traffic circle on the hillside view part of the property big enough so that they could turn around a fire engine.  That's kind of  above and beyond our civic duty.  We said no. 

After 3 months stuck in building permit purgatory the City gave us our permits and we were ready to break ground and build, right?  Not so fast, the builder said that due to inflation and supply chain snafus he was unable to get construction supplies or labor.  Concrete was being rationed and he couldn't get any, he said.  Could we pick our garage door now?  That's because it could take a year to obtain one.  He also suggested that we start shopping for appliances immediately as they were nearly un-obtainable.  I started to get the feeling that we were building a dacha in the Soviet Union.

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In With the New