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.

Home Run

We've received the keys, now for the hard stuff.  Conventional wisdom says that moving is difficult and I'm here to tell you that it's wisdom indeed.  We've been putting in 12 hour days shuttling anything that will fit into a car to the new house.  What you get when you do that is not only bone tired, you also get 2 houses that aren't really fit to be lived in because the one that you're accustomed to has been so stripped of essentials and is left with a sad echo and the new house just has boxes of essential and familiar things strewn everywhere.  We'll get it all straightened out, but it'll take time.

We had the new house independently inspected and thankfully there were no show stoppers, just some minor adjustments required.  So far everybody agrees (independent inspector, local soils and drainage expert) that the wet spots in the garage are not the onset of the kind of flooding we endured most every winter in Seattle, they're the rains of last summer that were absorbed by the concrete slab during construction and are evaporating through the garage floor.  Summer is the rainy season here but to be safe I went over the pictures I took of the build from last summer and sure enough, puddles and mud everywhere.

We've endured 2+ years of planning and construction and are now enduring the chaos of the big move, hopefully our last.  My dream is that by this 4th of July we will have unboxed and found everything (a place for everything and everything in its place), our old house will have sold and I'll be sitting on the deck with a beer and staring off into the distance at the mountains to the north.

Home Stretch

The outside is nearly complete, minus landscaping and a driveway.  Endless winter and record rain and snow has been holding off the pouring of the driveway.  Work to dot every "i" and cross every "t" on the inside continues.

When we committed to a custom house there was much that I didn't understand and much more that I could not predict.  Lumber became scarce (and of course scarce = expensive) because during the lockdowns too many people decided to do home improvement projects at the same time.  

The 2021 freeze that crippled the wind driven power grid in Texas rippled into a long lasting shortage of resins, and resins go into everything in home construction such as plastic pipe, caulking, sealants, adhesives, flooring, roofing and paint so all of those and more were in short supply with jacked up prices.  International shipping and port problems meant that valves and other essential cheap bits from China couldn't get here.  $7 a gallon diesel fuel and a truck driver shortage made moving materials from port or factory to jobsite hit and miss and more expensive.  It's been a 2+ year long mess of once in a lifetime unanticipated consequences.  But we're finally approaching the finish line.

Not only were there building material shortages that nobody predicted but there was also a pecking order concerning who got any of the available scarce building supplies.  Tract home builders got first dibs because they bought in bulk and had existing long term contracts with suppliers. Our builder got what was left over, when he could get it.  

The city building department got overwhelmed with permit requests from the big tract builders and developers so individual one off projects like ours went to the back of the bus.  I know from having worked at the Seattle building department that permits are a profit center for a city so developers and tract builders got their permits first.  

We had to order our garage doors a year in advance due to a nationwide garage door shortage.  We applied for our construction loan/mortgage during a low interest rate driven building boom so that resulted in a multi month financial colonoscopy, the reward for that being a low interest rate for these inflationary times. 

On the plus side the build has taken so long that the Covid driven appliance shortage ended before we were ready to pull the trigger on appliances.  I just didn't have the knowledge or experience to be able to predict any of these things.  We never did anything like this before, we were a bit naïve.  I thought that you design, order and pay for a house and it gets built.  Like I said, naïve.  

Let There Be Light!

 

Lights are being installed and circuits are being made hot.  Behold, first light!  Kitchen lighting!

The house now has heat, garage doors and openers and attic insulation.  Still to come: appliances, plumbing fixtures, driveway, decking material and roof tiles.

House Construction Beginning to Look More House-Like

 

Hurry up and wait.  There's still a long way to go.  The interior walls are painted.  Inside there's no flooring, plumbing fixtures, electricity or lighting, appliances, roof tiles and no insulation yet in the attic.  The deck has no surface, only exposed joists.  Our move-in date has moved from mid January to mid February to mid March.  There's supposedly still problems getting materials and labor and there's another snow storm on the way that will once again turn the construction site into a muddy mess so my personal prediction of a move in date is around April tax time.

Our New Home Takes Shape

Little by little our new home is taking shape.  It looks big.  But much of that bigness is the extra deep 3 car garage on the right.  We had an extra 4' of depth added to the 2 car garage at our present house and found it super useful so we added 4' here too.  So, why a 3 car garage for 2 people?  Simple, while we'll be free of a suffocating HOA the CC&R for the property doesn't dictate much but they do say that a 3 car garage is the minimum for this property.  The new house going up just above us is more like a small multi structure compound, it will have a 5 car garage.

So, how about the views?  This will be the view from what will be large windows looking to the west from the living room (imagine no dumpster).

Here's the view from the kitchen window.  There will be a post there but not the support beams that you see here.  And again, no dumpster (it moves with each pickup).

Here's the view from the deck.  One of the City's lakes will be visible from the deck.

We Had A Nice House

We have a nice house in a nice neighborhood.  But some of our neighbors got homesick and sold their homes and went back where they came from.    

The neighborhood changed further when Covid arrived.  This was when people started to disinfect their groceries and Amazon deliveries.  People were afraid.  I was afraid.  Interaction among neighbors on the street was reduced to awkward conversations at the mail kiosk when people stood 20' apart and loudly asked how each other were coping with the threat of the virus and the isolation of the defacto lockdowns (there were no official government mandated lockdowns here).  More than once I concluded these conversations with, "OK, see you next year!"  I was only half joking.  We had a nice house but eventually whatever cohesiveness this neighborhood had succumbed to Covid.

Meanwhile, Covid was no joke.  Several people in this neighborhood got it and had long hospital stays and longer recoveries.  One of my wife's friends died.

I began to think that I was getting a preview of our later years, when we will further bow to Father Time and have slowed down even more.  What if Covid never stopped and we had to spend much of time self confined?  Wouldn't it be nice to live in a house to prepare for that time?  We looked at a few homes about 20 miles away, many had sewer grinder pumps (meaning no connection to city sewer), no natural gas connection or no cell signal.  

And then this piece of land became available.

Standing on the land we had just purchased.  Click here for larger picture

• It was 3 blocks from where we were living
• It had a view.  The homes across the street are restricted from building up by their HOA.
• Nearly an acre so we'll have plenty of lebensraum from neighbors and street traffic.
• Had municipal water and sewer, high speed Internet access and natural gas hookups.

But that was only the beginning.  In early 2021 the economy was still wobbly.  To sell or to build?  We spent a few months waiting to see what would happen and finally decided to build a new home on the land.  First we had to figure out what kind of home we wanted.  And then we had to find someone to build it.

I knew that whatever we build we'd need to have a deck and big windows in order to capitalize on views like this.  If I'm going to spend a great deal of time as a homebody because of age or infirmity I want something better to look at than Netflix or Prime video. 

Click here for larger picture and to see the snow capped peaks