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You’re in what you thought would be your dream house — until it wasn’t.
The living room ceiling has been ripped out after sewage water backed up and flooded the upstairs bathroom. With the drywall gone, you can spot loose nails and concerning gaps between the floor joists. Rainwater seeps through the cracks around the front door.
Insects crawl through the window frames — even though the windows were reinstalled because they weren’t installed properly in the first place. And most of your bathrooms are unusable, awaiting repairs the builder promised more than a year ago.
It feels like a nightmare — but it’s reality, according to Danielle Antonucci, who invited a Hunterbrook Media reporter to the home she and her husband bought just four years ago in Sarasota, Florida, built by the nation’s largest homebuilder, D.R. Horton ($DHI). In an email provided to Hunterbrook, Antonucci desperately pleaded with D.R. Horton to address the numerous defects rendering their home nearly uninhabitable: “I keep getting the response that this matter has been escalated to the Sarasota office,” she wrote. “It has been 21 months!”
Oh man, let me tell you. We built our house a few years ago and it was an ordeal. After a while I just stopped asking the builder to fix things because I knew it would be faster and better to fix them myself or get someone else to fix them. It has added tens of thousands of dollars to the cost of the home, and all of that has come out of our own pocket, we didn’t get to roll all those extra costs into the mortgage loan.
Some of the corners they cut were unbelievable. They didn’t put any insulation in our attic. None. Our master shower drain was just draining directly into the crawl space, not hooked up the drain pipe at all. There was also no insulation in the crawl space, nor was there a vapor barrier. Poor workmanship everywhere, the floors especially are ass.
Several people have told me I should sue the builder, and I probably should, but I’d have to pay for a lawyer, and it would probably take months and months. It’s an expense and a hassle I don’t want, so instead I just tell everyone to never, ever use Taylor Homes of Nashville. Ever. Even though, every other builder is probably just as bad.
That’s the sort of stuff that should’ve made the city refuse to issue a certificate of occupancy. Where was the building department inspector in all this‽
We live in a rural area, outside any city boundary. The county doesn’t have any building codes, and there were only a handful of state codes we had to adhere to.
I should have paid for a home inspection before we took the keys, but we were in a hurry to move in. The build took so much longer than we had planned for that the construction loan matured, went to long term, so we were paying both rent and a mortgage.
… It’s like we forgot, as a whole society, how to build houses. What the fuck is wrong with us. Jesus fucking CHRIST.
I’m never giving up this house. My grandparents bought it in 1953. I can’t imagine any “production” house will ever be as good as this one and it’s not like this one is even particularly great. Basic competency is becoming rarer by the year.
We as a society did not forget how to build good houses, write good software, design good vehicles, or anything like that.
We just stopped caring about it because the core purpose for any business is to increase revenue, decrease costs, grow, and absorb market share (exceptions being niche and boutique places that price accordingly). And may of us as individuals think we should run our own finances in a similar way.
For instance, let’s say I can build 100 shitty crooked houses with the cheapest and non-background-checked workers, with the same time and money invested that it takes you to build 50 beautifully crafted and solid homes with your team of experienced carpenters. I can sell my shitty homes for 20% less than you since the home buyers are also mostly shopping on price and stats, then I am going to win and once you’re out of business I will be building 150 shitty crooked houses at a time.
The problem is these builders don’t want to pay for competency. They’d rather pay immigrants pennies on the dollar for shoddy work. They charge the same for the houses and just pocket the difference. We get a shitty house and the builder gets greater profits.
…yeah that strat isn’t gonna carry water much longer the way shit’s going lately >_>;;;
IANAL, but I’m wondering if for your situation you’d have more success with a whole string of Small Claims court. A quick Google search for your area says this:
“You can ask for up to $25,000 in most small claims actions in the Tennessee General Sessions Court.”
I’m betting nearly every one of your findings and fixes you had to pay for would be under that. There’s no lawyer needed to file them, as you can do them yourself, and for the builder to have to defend it, they’ll have to send their expensive lawyer to each court proceeding. If they don’t show, you could get a default judgment and just win outright with no battle for the legal judgment. Now, collecting may be a different problem though. You could keep one claim going all the time so you don’t have to do them all at once (and make it worth it for them to put a billable lawyer on it".
June:
TheDemonBuer v. DR Horton - civil suit from breach of contract “missing attic insulation” claim of $12,485
August:
TheDemonBuer v. DR Horton - civil suit from breach of contract “missing main drain connection” claim of $7,434
etc.
If you string this out long enough, one of two things will happen:
One thing my inlaws ran into with this issue is that the contractor had worked with literally every lawyer in our town and the surrounding ones, so no one could take their case because conflict of interest.
But as far as paying a lawyer, they’d likely also lump their fees into the lawsuit.
Yup. Find a lawyer willing to work on contingency, and let them take the wheel.
Almost all lawyers will do this for this type of case, but you might be able to get away with paying a flat fee for them to send a strongly worded letter.
But, since most contractors are crooks, you’ll probably have to go to court. It really depends on your contract, though. You might have to go to arbitration, which is where getting a 3rd party inspection can be a life saver.
My inlaws had a garage built to house their RV and boat, and the contractor never once inspected his subcontractors’ work. They had it inspected, and it took the inspector 6 hours to take pictures of everything that was wrong. The report was like 120 pages long. They refused to pay the rest they owed him (they had already paid $90k), and he sued them for it.
They showed up in court with their contract, and the judge told him to fuck off, because the contract said they had to arbitrate before going to court.
Unfortunately, the contractor won the war of attrition, and they ended up with an unfinished piece of shit garage because they gave up fighting.