Housewrecked 3 (NINE WARNING SIGNS)

Serious defects often present themselves in telltale ways. If you see one or more of the following problems in your home, hire an engineer to investigate.

1. Deep cracks in the foundation or basement walls. They can be signs that the foundation was laid on a poorly compacted base or poorly graded soil.

2. Sagging floors or leaning walls. A shifting foundation or structural problems with support beams could be to blame.

3. Windows and doors that never sit well in frames or close properly. House-framing problems may be at issue. If the beams, studs, and joists weren’t correctly sized or assembled, the whole house may not hang together well.

4. Cracks in interior walls. Wide cracks could signal a foundation problem. Generally, though, fine cracks are cosmetic, the result of normal aging.

5. Water damage. Warning signs include mold, rot, and insect infestation in exterior walls; staining, swelling and discoloration on interior walls; and a musty odor. Possible causes: improperly installed roofing, no flashing around penetrations and joints, no moisture barrier in a climate that requires it, lack of a drainage space behind brick or siding, poorly installed windows and doors, holes in siding, and trapped water-vapor condensation from heating and air conditioning.

6. Flooding, sewer and drain backups, and switched hot and cold water. Flooding and backups may result from poorly graded land or faulty sewer and water-main connections. Switched spigots may signal improperly installed plumbing.

7. Excessive heating or cooling bills. Rooms that don’t get warm or cool enough can be another signal that air ducts may be leaky or improperly connected.

8. Shorting or dead outlets. The electrical system may be installed incorrectly.

9. Lack of required permits. This indicates that building authorities have not performed the required inspections.

Why the problems? Many experts point to the country’s 10-year housing and real-estate boom. The top 100 U.S. home builders together sold an estimated 1,000 new homes a day in 2002, or one-third of all new-home sales.

That pace strained production. While home builders nurture the image of painstaking traditional craftsmanship, most new homes today are produced as if on an assembly line. Building affordable homes means being acutely aware of time and costs. Those builders that are public companies have the added pressure of shareholders to satisfy, industry executives and former employees say. Builders are completing homes in 90 to 120 days. A decade ago, the range was 120 to 200 days, according to one industry study.

“We were shooting for 60 days,” says Jim Banks, a former supervisor for an Ohio-area builder and a contributor to “HomeBuilding Pitfalls,” a book on how to avoid buying a defective tract home. “The quicker you do it, though, the more mistakes get made. Production supervisors aren’t working on just one home. They have 8 or 12 going at a time.”

Shortages of skilled tradespeople sometimes contribute to the problem of shoddy construction. In fast-growing areas, including parts of California, Florida, Nevada, and Texas, a lack of framers, plumbers, roofers, and electricians means that less-skilled or unskilled laborers may be performing this work, industry observers say. Lack of training and language barriers between construction supervisors and workers can also contribute to poor workmanship.

To lower housing costs, builders now often substitute new, less-expensive
materials for those they used in the past, industry experts say. For example, oriented strand board, a pressed-wood product made from small strands of wood, has replaced plywood as sheathing.

Some new products are better than those they replace, building representatives say. But some may not work well with other housing components or may not last as long as traditional ones. And some new materials are problematic, lawsuits suggest. For example, plastic polybutylene pipe has been the subject of product-defect lawsuits because
of leaks.

Also, homes are more complicated to build today because of regulations that, among other things, require homes to conserve energy.

“Home building is a complex process,” says Donna Reichle, NAHB spokeswoman. “It’s not reasonable to expect a house to be 100 percent perfect on the day that they move in.” But builders value their reputations, she says, so they generally strive to fix problems.