Babysitting Your Contractor | These two holes in the concrete block shouldn’t be there. Also, note the sloppy mortar joints and missing mortar. Copyright 2021 Tim Carter

Babysitting Your Contractor - An Unexpected Surprise

In the autumn of 1993, when I started Ask the Builder, I knew I’d become a clearinghouse of homeowner complaints, misery, and frustration. Homeowners from all across the fruited plains of the USA might understand I was an independent voice and someone that didn’t have a dog in the fight. That prediction came true and lately I’m seeing a deeply disturbing trend.

You should be keenly interested in this column whether you’re going to hire a handyman to do a two-hour job or you’re getting ready to build a new home. Based on the incoming email I receive, you must take a far more active roll in your projects than you ever have before. It needs to be done before the bidding begins, just before you sign the contract, and as the job progresses.

CLICK or TAP HERE to get FREE BIDS from local room-addition builders.

$500,000 Room Addition Running Off the Rails

Less than two weeks ago, a visitor to my website invested in one of my paid consultation phone calls. He had hired a contractor to build a two-story room addition on his home. The contract price was just under $500,000.00. That’s a vast sum of money to put out and hope all goes well.

The topic of the call centered around the quality of the footings that were just poured. While the workmanship was not perfect, it was acceptable based on the photos he sent me. Just after this, the problems began.

It’s important to realize the homeowner paid an architect to draw a fairly complete set of plans including details showing exactly how some things should be installed. One of the details showed the foundation drain tile in relationship with the footing. The drain tile was supposed to be place alongside the outside of the footing and covered with washed gravel.

Within the past twenty-four hours, this homeowner scheduled another call. The concrete block walls had been laid and the foundation drain tile had yet to be installed. The contractor created ugly gaping holes in the bottom of the walls. Had he looked at the plans he would see the holes would allow water to pour across the new basement floor.

The holes in the foundation were unnecessary. A simple 4-inch pipe should have been placed under the footing that allowed water outside the foundation to get to the washed gravel under the slab. This water would then flow unimpeded to the sump pump.

CLICK or TAP HERE to purchase a set of excellent blueprints that show you the DETAILS that SHOULD BE ON YOUR PLANS.

My Daughter's New Dream Home Nightmare

Let’s now get personal. Three years ago, my daughter was in the final stages of drawing her new house plans. I helped her with all sorts of details in the drawings. She drew hundreds of specific elevations of both the inside of the house as well as the outside.

I had impressed on her that you must have excellent plans for any job as the plans communicate to the builder and his subs what you want. She and her husband are busy and it would be impossible for them to be on the job site each day babysitting the builder and his subs.

Each of these pages showed exactly where light fixtures would be, electrical outlets, ventilation hoods, the height of shower faucets, etc. As the house was being built, each day errors were discovered where things were either forgotten or in the wrong place. Working with this disorganized builder was a nightmare, to say the least.

The first and foremost problem in my opinion is that you and millions of other homeowners are far too trusting. You trust the builder and his subs. You feel they always have your best interests at heart. Based on the thousands of complaints I get per year, you’d be wrong. Gone are the days where most contractors and subs are proud enough of their work they’d autograph it.

In my daughter’s case, the builder admitted he just gave the plans a cursory look in the bidding stage and never really looked at them again. Can you believe that? He also made a grave mistake and never gave a set of the plans to his lead carpenter early in the job. With a set of plans, the carpenter could look at them the night before or over a weekend and see what challenges lay ahead instead of guessing while the crew is dilly-dallying around him waiting for a decision.

Plans are the Core Communication Tool

I believe the same thing is going on with the homeowner building the room addition. The evidence strongly suggests that no one is paying attention to the plans. From your point of view, you make the assumption that the builder has a full understanding of all the details of the plans as well as his subs. Stop doing that or verify he does.

You must have a deep understanding of the plans yourself. Armed with this knowledge, you need to have a meeting with your builders going over each page of the plans before they bid the job. You need to then have a meeting with the builder you decide to use before you sign the contract. You take his bid and you go item by item in the bid looking at the plans to make sure what he bid is what’s on the plan.

You then need to meet with the builder at least once a week to make sure he and his subs understand critical aspects of the job. You need to talk with the builder or his subs and go over what the plans show and make sure they understand what is expected. I know, you never thought this would be necessary, but trust me, it’s the only way you’re going to get what you’re paying for. Unless you can find a builder like me.

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Building on Granite Bedrock | Hundreds of pounds of dynamite were used to pulverize millions of pounds of solid granite to create this pad to build a home. It’s just the beginning of the challenges. Copyright 2021 Tim Carter

Building on Granite Bedrock - It's Hard and Expensive

I live in central New Hampshire and its nickname is The Granite State. Trust me, they don't call it that for nothing! My own house sits directly on top of one of the enormous granite plutons that can be found beneath the forests and streams of the second-most beautiful state in the USA. As I type this I'm sitting on top of the Meredith Porphyritic Granite. A giant piece of this solid bedrock is right next to my driveway. What a perfect place to live when you realize my college major was geology.

This granite formed 340 million years ago about 80 miles beneath the surface of the planet along the edge of a tectonic plate. Giant blobs of this molten rock slowly floated up to the surface over millions of years cooling ever so slowly during its journey. A pluton resembles a hot air balloon both in shape and movement. Many geologists consider the Meredith Porphyritic Granite to be the most beautiful rock in all of New England because of its massive feldspar crystals and mica inclusions.

Meredith Porphyritic Granite - a giant feldspar crystal is up top and wraps around behind the sample. Mica inclusions are common as are smaller mica flecks. This was exposed to sunlight for the first time in 340 million years in late June of 2021. The sample was collected at: 43.575129, -71.540072 (ChapStick for size comparison)

Read the first few chapters in this astonishing book meant for homeowners like you, not geologists, to grasp exactly how granite is formed from seafloor sediments that are sucked down underneath the edge of a continent. Rough Hewn Land is an amazing, easy, and fun read. Wait until you see how the author makes fun of his wife in some of the photo captions. She must have a great sense of humor!

Rough Hewn Land by Keith Heyer Meldahl - I read this twice it was so good. CLICK or TAP HERE or THE BOOK COVER now to have this in your hands in days or minutes should you be a Kindle user.

About a month ago, I was eating breakfast and I thought I heard a sonic boom. Just north of where I live military planes routinely practice flying over the White Mountains, and I thought one had gone astray and was making a fast tight turn to get back to where he should have been.

It turns out I was wrong and a new home site was being prepared above my house. A blasting company employing hundreds of pounds of dynamite was in the process of pulverizing tens of millions of pounds of this Meredith Porphyritic Granite shaking my house every other day for three weeks.

My Blasting Ledge column has more on using dynamite or TNT for blasting bedrock.

Is Blasting Granite Bedrock Expensive?

You have to want to build badly if you decide to go to all this trouble to blast solid rock. First and foremost blasting is expensive. Two previous owners of the land above me went bankrupt trying to prepare the site for a house. They ran out of money and sold the land to the next person in line. It appears the current landowner has much deeper pockets as the blasting is complete and he’s about to pour a footing.

It’s one thing to build a smaller lighthouse on solid rock, but it’s quite another to build a typical residential home on top of solid bedrock. You may be thinking of buying land to build your dream home. If so, be sure to review the soil map to check the depth of the soil on the lot you want. These soil maps are usually available online at no cost.

What Challenges Does Building on Granite Present?

Building on bedrock makes some tasks that are normally simple become painfully difficult. Let’s run down the list.

Digging any hole or trench requires blasting. In normal deep clay soil, an excavator can dig a 10-foot deep 2-foot-wide trench for a sewer line in an hour or two. Forget about doing this in solid rock. There’s no way you’ll discover city sewers in most places where you have solid rock just inches beneath the surface. It’s just too expensive to install sewers in these conditions.

This means you’ll probably have to blast out an area for your septic tank. What kind of special septic design will be required for the leach field that must be perched above the solid rock? This is something you want to talk about with a septic designer before you make an offer on the building lot.

Did you want underground electricity into your new home? The National Electrical Code is quite specific about how deep these lines must be buried. Will you have to blast that trench too?

How will you get your foundation drain tile to daylight? The last thing you want to be doing is blasting a pit into solid bedrock where your basement will be. Have you ever seen photos of spent quarries and how they’re filled with water? Your basement will become an unwanted indoor swimming pool.

How will the water line get from the well to your house? Will a trench have to be chiseled with a monster jackhammer on an excavator’s arm?

How much fill dirt will you have to truck in as well as topsoil to create enough soil to grow plants, bushes, and trees?

Should I Be Worried about Radon in Granite?

Yes, you should be worried about radon in granite. What about radon? Be sure to check the online map for the likelihood of radon. Blasting fractures the rock beneath your new home. This can funnel radon into your home. If you feel this might happen, you can deal with it fairly inexpensively using a passive radon collection and exhaust system.

An interconnected network of perforated 4-inch pipes needs to be placed within the gravel under your crawlspace or basement slab. I’d surround the inside of the footing with this piping and then put pipes across the floor every 6 or 8 feet that connect with the outer band of pipes. Be sure to install a high-performance vapor barrier over the pipes and gravel before pouring the concrete floor. This material should meet or exceed ASTM E 1745.

Radon Collection Piping |The white pipe is perforated and radon will flow into it. This new house sits on solid granite. There are many other pipes still to be installed that will connect with the ones you see. The green vertical pipe will eventually extend up through the house to the roof. Copyright 2021 Tim Carter

Strategically place one or two 4-inch pipes that connect to the under-slab pipes and then poke out of the slab. These will eventually be connected to 4-inch PVC pipes that run up through interior walls and out the roof. Flash these pipes as you would any plumbing vent pipe.

When the wind blows across the top of these radon vent pipes, it creates a vacuum and sucks the radon out of the ground below your home.

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