Homeschool

So You Want To Build Your Dream Home?

By: Lori Barrett

A number of parents and youngsters are unhappy about the state of today’s modern schooling institutions. Disciplinary problems, drugs and gangs are just a sample of the issues that today’s parents and teens are concerned with. If you are thinking about an education alternative, give some consideration to homeschool educating by considering the following information.

Homeschooled adolescents are mainly tutored by one or both parents. The modern school day of eight to three or something in the region can go out the window in some situations. As an alternative, parents may choose to oversee their child’s education every evening after work with the chances of including sections of the weekenSo, You Want
To Build a House.
By: Lori Barrett

It’s the American dream. Owning your own home. More so, the chance to build your dream home. Seeing through from the barren land, the design conception, and into the actual build and completion. Contemplating the anticipated project fills you with joy and excitement.

And then it begins. Do you like roller coasters? Well now you’re on one. The joys of finding just the right cabinetry, to the agony of delays and price increases. While our personal situation turned out to be a very negative experience, dealing with a builder I consider to be unethical and egotistical, I have to say that in the end, if nothing else, we have learned a lot. May what I share about the experience help those who may be entering the arena.

I guess the first and most important thing is to find a builder you can trust. An ethical, knowledgeable, competent person you know you can trust the largest investment of your life to. After interviewing several builders, we thought we were safe with Ken. We talked to 2 other couples who were going to use them. They all believed he would be fine for the job as well. Our mistake? We didn’t take to anybody who he had actually built a house for. We did view 2 homes he had built, but one was for himself, the other a spec home, so there was no relationship between himself and a homeowner. Portraying himself as a “hot shot” builder from California, we have since learned that he is nothing more than a “scheduler.”

How will you know that you have the right builder? Make sure you do talk to previous clients, ask if he was thorough in follow up, returned phone calls, gave advice on the products required for interior completion, was accurate with his pricing, was able to complete the job within the specified time he said, and was respectful.

Our experience with our builder did not include these things. Some of the things we experienced were beyond our imagination. Never did we dream that we would ever want to walk away from this project, or feel such bitterness towards our builder, that we wouldn’t even want to -occupy the home he had set foot in.

Can you imagine leaving your home at 6:30 am to meet with your builder for a regular weekly meeting, only to find out he isn’t there. He Emailed us to cancel at 5:30 am. Who checks their E-mail then? Why didn’t he call with one of the many phone numbers, including our cells? Then to meet the following morning instead, have him sarcastically greet us, smash his fist on our newly installed granite, and tell us we are doing things his way. This is just one of the many experiences with this man.

My girlfriend, who had started to build a home with him just a few months before us told me that there was a period when she just couldn’t bring herself to enter her house as she was so upset from the things that were going wrong.

So your builder is probably the most important key ingredient!

Secondly, make sure you are doing this at a time in your life when you have extra free time. It is very time consuming. Any free day you have, you are scouring the design and building stores. It took us months to find the right slab of granite, and light fixtures were also a challenge. We would find fixtures one weekend, but not purchase them. Then we would go back two weeks later and look at them and discover that they weren’t really what we wanted, we were just settling. So we waited to find the right ones. In one case, I actually replaced installed lights in my guest bath, as new ones had come on the market I liked better after the fact.

Our builder had sent us to his recommended suppliers, but we found better deals elsewhere. We have been told that it is very common for builders to benefit financially from their suppliers.

Additionally, we also had to question his subcontractors. When we started the project, we just automatically used his subs. By the time we were about $60,000 over his estimate, we told him we wanted a couple of quotes from other subs to compare with his. That is when the work slowed down significantly. We actually hired our own subs on numerous occasions just to stay in budget on that line item, and because Ken wouldn’t get us other quotes. Our house was almost complete, yet we didn’t have a septic installed. After several weeks of E-mails asking for quotes from Ken, and continually getting the reply that he is still waiting for them, we took matters into our own hands. Within a day my husband had met with 3 installers, and had somebody start the project 2 days later. Within budget to boot! Obviously, there were reasons Ken didn’t want us to use anyone besides his guy.

We had the same issue for the final grade. We couldn’t get a firm quote from his subcontractor. We didn’t get questions answered as to what kind of fill he was using, etc. They wanted us to agree to an open ended price based on what they found. Not. Again, we took care of the project, and did so competently and within budget.

I am sure you have guessed that the completion date (after being changed many times through the project) was missed. There was an additional $3500.00 to extend the construction loan. Make sure you know the details of that construction loan. We never expected that 9 months from the first draw would not be long enough, nor did our builder tell us it wouldn’t.

Thirdly, make sure your builder has open lines of communication between you, him and the subs and make sure it is in the building contract. We were told emphatically not to speak to his subs. Maybe he was afraid we might learn something he didn’t want us to know , which did actually happen. I believe many of the errors in our home happened because we expressed our desires to Ken, who then had to relay it to the subs. That apparently did not happen accurately. One such example of that is a piece of granite I had cut for my guest bath. It was to fit into a corner, and be rounded in the front to fit the vessel sink. I happened to be there one morning to meet a painter, when this arrived. It was not the piece we had described to our builder. Instead, it had a flat front and a single chiselled edge, not double. On top of that, they were going to install it with two chunks of 2x4 hammered on to the side wall. This would be visible. It was to be floating, but with knotty chunks of wood? So I told them no, and the fight began. To this day I am using a piece of plywood we painted, just so we could have a sink working. Our builder refuses to correct the problem.

We have had several meetings with the Registrar of Contractors, and we are waiting for a date for a hearing. However, the Registrar does not deal with financial issues, so that will have to be dealt with in court.

I could write pages of the continued issues we encountered. I will follow this article up on our web site, www.tucsonwomen.net with more details, photos, contractors names and the results of impeding legal action.

So what was the most important thing we learned? Don’t deal with a builder who is a jerk. Trust your instincts and deal with it before it gets worse. We should have changed builders right from our first meeting when our builder reprimanded me for questioning his very first price increase of $65,000. We also learned that the additional time we took to research things that we questioned our builder on would pay off.

Our advice to those wanting to build:
•Don’t be naive. Ask questions, get informed, talk to other “experts”, not just your builder.
•Don’t accept comments like, “Don’t worry about it, or, we will deal with it later.” Deal with it now!
•Find out what the bottom line $ will be. Will they charge you for moving a light that they didn’t center in the first place like they did me?
•Don’t allow your builder full control of your funds! No matter what they say. Our builder took his own final payment prior to the completion of the house. Think we are getting anything done now?
•Make sure all your requests of your builder, no matter how small, are in writing. Documented E-mail is a great recourse. That way there will be no discrepancies with “I told you that already”.
•Take lots of photos from the beginning to the end, and have them dated.
•Don’t rely on the Registrar of Contractors or Better Business -Bureau for references. We did that with TL Consolidated painting. While they had a clear record then, they certainly didn’t within just a few months after we hired them. They still haven’t cured what the Registrar had told them to.
•Hire your own building inspector. We did. Our builder had told us the house was complete, and the inspector had a list of over 100 items to be fixed, some that wouldn’t even pass code.
•Carefully audit every invoice.
•I often used a tape recorder during our meetings. This is going to be very beneficial for me in court to reveal the discrepencies and misrepresentations.

While I would prefer to promote the positives in everything, I have to say that for us, this wasn’t a positive experience at all. We are currently waiting for a hearing with the Registrar of Contractors, and we expect it will also enter the civil arena. I hope that by sharing this story, you will be more aware of what you may be getting into when choosing to do a custom build, and will then be better prepared and have a much more successful experience.

Another point is the curriculum. Homeschooling parents must select a program of study that works with, not against, their children’s learning capabilities and styles. You see some kids are visual learners while others need more hands-on assistance by assembling things or taking them to bits. And, the curriculum of your choosing will have to be okayed by the local education board. Check out the different variations that can be located online or that circulate among homeschooling groups or appear in your local library. The school superintendent or local press may also be able to help in this area.

It is vitally important to ensure that your children are meeting educational goals and are keeping with their age and grade capabilities. A majority of homeschooled learners actually perform better than their counterparts in conventional schooling, others can fall behind and may not do well in a one on one setting with the parent. It may well be up to the parents, who may have little or no formal education, to ensure the quality and standard of their kids’ education.

Last but not least, be sure to supplement at-home education with field trips, community group activities, and perhaps extracurricular participation in sports, music, or art classes. You can get more info about these from the local community institutions, library , or certain county high schools that provide such services. Home-schooled students are among the brightest and best prepared for college. But take care to make sure that your child receives a quality, top notch education if you decide to choose this option. For further information and advice, contact one of the broad-based home schooling programs or check with the local school board to source other parents in your area who are themselves in the process of homeschool education. If however this turns out to be tough you could easily put an ad in the local press. This way you should be able to find some other homeschooling parents and together the task of homeschool education would hopefully be easier and the end result will be a quality education for your kids.