Ongoing repairs to the house

[mtbc]

I bought my house last fall and there is still plenty more to be done as it increasingly turns out to have been not so much remodeled as to have had issues concealed. Most of the issues are not awful, there are just so very many of them that they sum to several person-months of work.

For example, last week we added new window to the list in discovering that the frame of one of them largely consists of rotten wood, caulk, and wood filler, freshly painted over: one can just push it and it bends. A fair few of the recent discoveries have centered around water leaks and rotten wood, though it also turns out that some of the thicker painting also hides termite damage. A fair fraction of the not-rotten wood is sparsely nailed together, often into nothing substantial, where some longer screws or suchlike may have been warranted. For example, some of the baseboard can be pulled off the wall with one's hand. Other pieces of wood simply separate as they change shape over time: for instance, the deck, largely made of untreated wood, was slowly pulling itself apart. The next unknown to investigate is, why the floor near a couple of corners feels damp, those corners being at the base of the wall where the house's circuit breaker box is.

In the longer term, this house should work out, the location is great for what I need for some years yet, the neighbors on each side are nice, etc. Nonetheless, this has to be one of my worst purchase mistakes ever and I will come out from these repairs with my savings left far short of what I need for other purposes. Perhaps this is the cost of my naively using a home inspector recommended by my realtor. Continuing to hemorrhage money, month after month, instead of settling into my new house, certainly exacts an ongoing toll on my mental health. I avoid luxuries like an $8 per month Disney+ subscription yet feel the opposite of frugal in typically paying contractors around $400 per person-day, doubly painful in my remembering how hard my parents worked and saved for the money I inherited from them. But, reflecting on the repairs that I am having done, it would be foolish to delay them, better to fix these issues sooner rather than later. The house is now mine and I must make the best of it.

Comments

[emperor]

Mmm, that sounds very frustrating. I guess you don't have useful recourse against the inspector who should presumably have found these issues?

[mtbc]

A good question! Alas, I'd guess not. Even without any evidence of the inspector having been bribed, had I better documented per-issue the before and after and cost, I may even also had something actionable against the seller who perhaps underdisclosed, they did the shoddy work, literally painting over underlying problems, plumbing with pipes not even glued or threads sealed, running bathroom extractor fan ducts not even through the insulation, so they must have known. However, at most times subsequently, there has been a manageable amount known, it's just that issues kept being discovered so the remaining distance to the end keeps on increasing. With more foresight I would have not gotten so far without anybody having any clear record of the myriad work. But, with enough foresight for that necessity, I would certainly not have bought the house in the first place.

While many of the issues were superficially hidden, it's also plausible that the inspector is quite at fault in that the handyman was quite shocked and, in his previous stint as an inspector, would have given this house a hard fail on multiple counts, let alone mentioning other urgent issues that were fairly immediately apparent to him as he looked around. (For being younger than me, he has a surprising range of previous qualified-professional stints, everything from asbestos removal from radioactive areas to being a certified master car mechanic, he's even a licensed radiographer; he stopped being a house inspector after enough people didn't like being told their dream home is a disaster. Though, he did start construction jobs at age fourteen.) But, no good record now exists of that before state, at least enough to persuade a court whose defendant isn't readily agreeing.

[wpadmirer]

What a miserable situation! I wish you had some way of recouping some of these losses from the realtor/building inspector combo.

[dewline]

I'm sorry for the pains you're now dealing with. Hoping that the troubles get solved to your satisfaction as fast and as affordably as possible.

[mindstalk]

I'm sorry to hear all that.

I wonder if it's worth simply demolishing and replacing the house. I suspect not, given your limited finances and what I hear is a rising cost of construction (expensive timber) and having to trust the new builders, but perhaps worth at least thinking about. Or demolishing and putting a manufactured home on... though zoning might forbid that. Or getting a manufactured home to also put on the land, but ditto.

[mtbc]

Yes, rising construction costs and limited finances, new homes are now very expensive. Fortunately, the house is (now) basically structurally sound and has a number of good properties: I have everything from new kitchen appliances to new roof shingles to, at least upstairs, fairly new windows; also, original floors and walls still largely intact. It's just that there's a lot of necessary extra work to finish the job off, largely for energy efficiency (drafts, insulation, etc.) and to prevent subsequent deterioration (water leaks, wood preservation/capping, etc.). Also, the old structure would be expensive to dispose of, being constructed from cemesto panels (i.e. asbestos).