Over the past year, I’ve been hired as a consultant to guide several people through new home construction projects via phone and video calls. Should you be thinking of tackling a new home build yourself, I thought you might benefit from a few short stories about these other homeowners I’ve worked with.
Avoidable mistakes
Fifteen months ago, a woman hired me to be her virtual general contractor. (GC). She told me she was going to be the on-site GC, but figured she needed someone with actual experience to provide backup assistance. Six months ago, I discovered there was a second GC on the job she hadn’t told me about. As you might imagine, things got awkward.
The woman made critical mistakes early in the process long before she hired me. She and her husband had bought an existing home and decided to tear it down, building a new house on the existing foundation. They hired an architect. Using the homeowners’ dreams and ideas, this architect toiled on a plan that had several major flaws. The biggest being the roof design.
The roof was to be a huge slanted surface that mimicked the home’s steep driveway. The massive beams, thick sheathing that doubled as a finished interior ceiling, and the thick closed-cell foam required to insulate the roof cost more than $100,000. That price doesn’t include the huge crane required to position the beams or later to build the roof.
A crack in the existing foundation was not spotted until days before the framing was to begin. The floor trusses ordered for the job were placed too close to one another. The list of mistakes that caused major issues continued to grow by the day. A first-floor bathroom had to be redesigned on the fly because the layout put a toilet directly on top of one of the floor trusses.
All of this could have been avoided if the woman had hired me before talking to an architect. Fortunately, the couple made it clear to me they had an unlimited budget to take care of fixing mistakes.
Not many have an unlimited budget.
Off by inches
Next up is a man building a house in Idaho. He’s on a tight budget and decided to do all of the plumbing. He discovered I’ve been a master plumber since 1981 and felt I could help long distance. I drew his riser diagram so he could get a permit. We then started to do regular video calls so I could tell him exactly how to install the pipes under his concrete slab.
This homeowner was using a general contractor, but just in the last week, we discovered the foundation was poured out of square by 2 inches. While you may think this is no big deal, it can lead to serious issues. In this man’s case, quite a few of the pipes poking up through the concrete slab are no longer in the center of the exterior and interior walls where they should be.
How could this have been prevented? If you decide to roll up your sleeves and get involved in a home building project, you need to be very careful about placing trust in people you’ve never worked with before. This homeowner could have determined that the foundation was out of square when the footing was poured. It would have taken about 30 minutes to establish the square corners of the foundation on top of the hard concrete footing.
Using a simple calculator or a free one online, this man could have calculated the diagonal measurements that ensure the foundation is square. He could have purchased a 100-foot tape measure and in minutes marked on the footings the precise corners of the foundation.
Then, once the foundation forms were set, he could have once again checked them before the concrete was poured. Had he hired me months before, I would have given him a checklist of things to do at these early stages of construction.
One of the things on the checklist is making sure the top of the foundation is correct. Most builders place foundations too deep into the ground. When this happens, it’s very hard for the grade to slope away from the house in all directions.
The building code is quite clear and the ground must slope away from the foundation a minimum of 6 inches in the first 10 horizontal feet away from the house. What’s more, you should have a minimum of 6 inches of foundation exposed all the way around the house.
Think of all the things you don’t know what look for before you get into a very deep financial mess, and remember to ask for help.
Tim Carter has worked as a home improvement professional for more than 30 years. To submit a question or to learn more, visit AsktheBuilder.com.