Chronicles of Nickerson - The Honeymoon Period

It started for us like it has for so many buyers of new homes - with the punchlist. If you have never purchased a newly built home (this is our first), a punchlist is the list of [what you hope are just] nits that you find on your final walk-through with the builder. They have 30 days to fix everything on that list. At the time, our list wasn't unusually long or daunting. And truthfully, with what is happening now, they don't seem so big.

It started to rain.

It had been a surprisingly dry winter. I mean really dry. It was as if the hurricanes had pulled all of the moisture out of the air in central Texas. At the first sign of rain, the house leaked. It started in the garage and around the glass front door.

It rained again. This time the water was coming in to the garage from a different area, around the front door and around one of the windows on the second floor.

It rained again and again. By probably March of this year, we had substantial amounts of water coming in around 2 out of 3 of the windows on the second floor, and around both sliders. All of the leaks initiating on the 3rd floor and revealing themselves on the second floor. Water had been running down the inside of the walls for months.

To add insult to injury on both the leaking and some unresolved floor issues, there were no weep holes in the sliders in the livingroom and the tracks were filling with water every time it rained. The installer came out and drilled holes to let the water out and mistakenly drilled holes through and under the floors, causing all of the water that collected in the tracks to go under the hardwood floors causing cupping.

The leaks around the doors and windows are just growing in size and severity, I'm starting to stress every time it rains. And the leaks, it turns out, were only the beginning. Does karma have a sense of humor? Because I'm not laughing.

Posted at 10:28AM May 31, 2006 by sarad in General  |