Try not to read too much into my complaints about my new house yet. This is a complex system, with lots of parts. The house certainly works better than any Microsoft product so far. The real test of the builder will be how well he resolves the various problems.
I spoke to the electrician today.
1. The backup generator didn't start because it didn't have a battery. (This strikes me as a "Duh!" sort of point, but I must confess that I didn't think about this, either.) He is going to get that on January 2 (the 1st not being a good day to hit stores for automobile batteries).
2. The jetted tub doesn't work because Rod is in the habit of tripping the GFI (Ground Fault Interrupter) in the bathroom when he is done, to make sure that someone doesn't ignorantly start the jets without filling the tub with water. I didn't even notice the GFI switch. I suppose that I should have thought about that.
3. The telephone and cable wiring that has no connectors was because Rod's son was supposed to walk through the house and make sure that they didn't miss anything. Whoops! Rod will take care of that on the 2nd.
4. The connectors lying on the floor are waiting for the appropriate wall plate. Rod will take care of that on the 2nd, also.
My wife and I went up there on the morning of December 31, and the power is back on. At least there's no great danger of the house getting so cold as to freeze the pipes--it is very well insulated.
We have not been happy about the interior painting, which is especially apparent in the dining room, which is pink. My son-in-law worked as a professional painter for the University of Idaho, and both he and my daughter immediately noticed how poorly the interior is painted.
My son-in-law also figured out why. The interior was sprayed--not rolled--and he thinks that the paint was overdiluted to get it to spray smoothly. Unfortunately, when you spray onto gypsum board, the results are never quite as good as rolling full viscosity paint. Here's a wall in the family room. Because the paint isn't dramatically different from the color of the underlying gypsum board, it isn't spectacularly obvious, but you can see striping.
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A little more obvious is the dining room, where the pink is sufficiently different from the gray of the gypsum board to make the horizontal striping obvious.
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You also can't just take a brush or roller to a wall that was sprayed; you have to feather in the boundaries, or you get results like this, in the hall.
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Additionally, when you roll a wall, you usually start by cutting in the corners with a brush, and then roll into the corners. The brush knocks out the spider webs. Spraying just gives you paint globs on the spider webs. (Sorry, the pictures of the paint-encased spider webs didn't come out.)
Because even three spray coats of paint is so thin, we already have places where paint has been scraped from corners--and we have moved no furniture yet! I suspect that this was the electrician rubbing against the wall while installing switches.
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And what is this hole in the paint? It is too high for anyone to have run into the wall, and chipped the paint. It almost looks like someone painted over a bug, but it overcame the fumes and flew away.
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This could have happened to anyone (although anyone would have used an eraser). The mirrors guy had marked the dimensions--and forgot that his scratch pad wasn't going to be covered by the mirrors.
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We are sufficiently disappointed with the painting that we are going to push the builder to roll one coat of paint at least on the walls. I believe that he found it impossible to hire painters (and he spent more than a month trying to find anyone to do this), so he ended up spraying it himself--and it looks like he might have been better off telling us that he needed to wait for painting subcontractors. I wouldn't have been happy, of course, but I am not happy with these results, either.
Another annoyance: in addition to the wind whistle at the top hinge part of the front door, which includes a bit of a draft as well as noise, there is a similar problem at the kitchen exterior door, at the top opposite the hinges. It is a large enough gap between frame, weatherstripping, and door, that you can actually see some light through it.
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The water coming into the garage can be solved, I think, by just pouring a small amount of concrete outside the garage, where I have a piece of broken concrete sitting, to force water into the drain.
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Last house project entry.
UPDATE: The builder says that he sprayed the dining room twice, and rolled it once. He thinks that what we are seeing is a weird lighting effect problem, not a paint problem--although he admits his wife also noticed that it looked like a bad paint job.
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