You Should NOT Build a New House if… (Part 6) You Insist on Perfection

Are you like me? Do you like for everything to be perfect? When you see a pothole in the road, do you want it filled in immediately? Or better yet, have the road repaved? When you see a hole in a shirt, do you want it to be repaired quickly? Or better yet, have the shirt replaced? When you forget something, do you want to bash your brain in to teach it a lesson? Or better yet, reroute your neurons so they no longer take the wrong exit or run into a ditch?

I hate imperfections. You’d think that after having put up with many imperfections in my almost 61 years of life, I’d be used to them by now. But I am not. In fact, I think I hate them even more now than I used to. If my aversion to imperfections continues to grow, then by the time I reach the age of 75, I may have to be put into pure white sterile room with no doors disturbing the walls’ perfection. And please leave me a gun so I can blow my brains out should the wall paint ever begin to crack.

If you are a perfectionist like me and you want to build a new house, you have two choices: blindfold yourself each time you visit the house or DON’T BUILD IT!! Well, actually there is a third option, but it won’t be easy. It’s the option I opted for. Get it through your think head that there will be many imperfections while building the house and just GET OVER IT! Whew, it’s hard to say, let alone actually do. It will require a lot of mental energy, so be sure to carry a portable generator around with you while construction progresses.

I could tell you about the time I visited the house and discovered they had put water and drainage lines in a wall where no water or drainage was needed, but I won’t.

I could tell you about the time I visited the house and discovered someone had knocked a hole in our freshly installed sheetrock, but I won’t.

I could tell you about the time I visited the house and discovered that the newly installed kitchen cabinets were partially covering one of the can lights, but I won’t.

I could tell you about the time I visited the house and discovered there was a hole all the way through the partial wall above a column near the dining room, but I won’t.

I could tell you about the time I visited the house and discovered a leak at the water line to the laundry room and how I visited many more times over the following weeks and it was still leaking, but I won’t.

I could tell you about the time I visited the house and discovered that some workers had pulled their van up beside the house on wet freshly laid sod leaving a trail of ruts behind, but I won’t.

I could tell you about the time I visited the house and discovered that the wrong French doors to the library had been installed, but I won’t.

I could tell you about the downspout near our bedroom window that has a leak on the upper elbow that creates a continuous thunking noise when water drops hit the lower elbow, but I won’t.

I could tell you about the dirt and mud flowing into our yard from a neighboring empty lot during a downpour, but I won’t.

And the reason I’m not going to tell you about these things is that I know you too are a perfectionist and the very mention of these things would make you squeamish or even make your blood boil. I simply cannot bring myself to do that to a friend. I’m too much of a perfectionist.

You Should NOT Build a New House if… (Part 5) You Have a Busy Schedule

Imagine you are at work and preparing an important report for your boss. The deadline is the end of the day. Suddenly your phone rings, jarring you from your intense concentration. It’s the builders of your new house. They tell you that the carpenters are at your house and need for you to come by and make a few important decisions. You tell them that you are busy today and ask if you can meet them tomorrow. The answer comes back. No, they will be on another job for the next week or so, but they need to order supplies based on your decisions. What do you do?

Fortunately, I never faced such a dilemma (or should that be dilemmum since it’s singular?). Why? Because I was retired. Oh sure, I was still doing part time work, but my schedule was pretty flexible, so I never really faced having to decide between whose demands I should heed first. But let it be known that if you work a full time job, especially one that requires long hours, you will probably face these types of issues frequently.

You’d think that if you hired a builder to handle the day-to-day interfacing with contractors, and you’d made many decisions ahead of time, you’d avoid these changes-need-to-be-made-and-a-decision-is-needed-immediately types of issues. But NOOOOooooOOOO! They still come up. So if you’re planning to build a house and you work a full-time job with rigid hours, plan ahead about how you’re going to handle them when they come up.

Sometimes making decisions well in advance doesn’t even ameliorate the situation. Kathy and I had picked out our hardwood and tile months in advance of when they would be installed. And guess what? When the time rolled around to order the flooring, both had been discontinued. So, it was back to the drawing board. Not being artists, this was difficult for us. Yet we had to decide all over again on different flooring.

It’s not just when you’re called that you need to break away from your regularly scheduled routine and go to your under-construction house. Many times you just want to be there to see what’s happening. You don’t want a mistake to go unseen until it’s too late. Usually we could simply go to the house at the end of the day and investigate what had been done and make a punch list for the builder. Other times it was best to be there while the workers were there to discuss things before they got started. For instance, one day we went by after the painters had been there and discovered that they were beginning to paint one wing of the house the wrong color. Fortunately they had only painted one room incorrectly, so it wasn’t that big a fix. Even so, had we been there before they started we could have saved them some time.

Besides me being retired, we were fortunate in another respect. A neighbor across the street from our new house was fairly diligent about keeping an eye on what was being done during construction and filled us in on anything he felt was not right. Many people dislike neighbors who stick their noses into other people’s business, but in this case, we liked it.

We are pleased to report that essentially all the mistakes we discovered were able to be corrected. However, there was one that could not be fixed without major work. We have many pocket doors throughout the house. One separates a hallway from the laundry room. While inspecting the house late in the game (about 13 minutes and 15 seconds into the fourth quarter to be precise), I realized that that door opened and closed roughly. There was something wrong with the rail it hung from. We had the door guys look at it. They messed around with the rail as best they could, but could only improve its functionality by a minor amount. They said the only thing more they could do was to tear out the wall and replace the rail. I just couldn’t believe it. You’d think that if we can put man on the moon (we can still do that, can’t we?), there’d be some type of limited charge directional dynamite or C4 that would knock out the door and the rail without doing harm to the wall so that they could be replaced. But apparently there is not. I guess I’ll just have to wait a couple of years for 3D printing technology to come up with a solution.