Chapter 1
It's difficult for me to write this blog, which is why it's taken me a week to get back to it. Each time I think of our building experience, I want to scream. What should have been a fun and exciting project turned out to be the most horrible (and waste-fully expensive) experience of our lives.
When friends found out we were building, they all shared that same sentiment but we glossed over their warnings since our friends couldn't offer any help except that we should be very careful. What does it mean to be careful? We were careful. We watched everything. We were on the job site every day. We did everything we knew to "be careful" and we had the same horrible experience. In this blog, I'm going to tell you all the things people never told us. Perhaps they didn't know, either.
One thing people always say (your banker included) is to check references. Well, we did. Everyone does. The problem with references is that the references builders will give you are for satisfied customers and frankly, looking back, how do we really know that the references the builder gave us to check were people he actually built houses for?
There's no brand label on a house. All you have is a stranger's say so that the builder did a good job - and we take the stranger's word as gospel. The stranger could be a friend living in a house built by someone else.
So check references, it's the thing to do but don't stop there. Do an internet search of your builder both personally and as a business. Check any of the sub contractors and vendors, too, if he'll give you that information. Check any name or company associated with your builder. You'll be surprised at what you'll find and without having to pay a dime for a search. Here's how we dicovered this.
About a year or so after we moved into our new house, we were reading our local paper and saw that the paper had published a list of persons and businesses who were delinquent in paying their county taxes. There were several hundred names in very small print. We checked the list just to be sure we weren't on it and happened to see our builder's name. That made us check further and we found his business name as well.
This prompted us to do a computer search of his name and company name in our county and several surrounding counties. We also did a state search. Like magic, dozens of court documents popped up and this was just from a simple search. We didn't do a paid search.
In addition to not paying his county taxes, our builder was being sued by everybody - subcontractors he hadn't paid, people he had done shoddy work for, material vendors he owned money to and on top of everything else, he had gone back to court to reopen his divorce (his 2nd) so he could get money back from his ex-wife. We found that his license had expired and he was even being sued by our county for an escrow deposit of $100,00 bond that was no longer on deposit. It was a mess.
Had we seen this, we never would have hired him no matter how wonderful his references. He had a lot of baggage that impacted the way he build our house and how he spent the money we gave him to build it.
Doing an internet search is an eye opener and can save you lots of financial loss and heart ache. You can't hide from the internet.
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