That's really unacceptable.

Unless you have held up the build through changes and non-payment or there have been permit hangups, you should have scrapped that builder a year ago.

It takes me seven months from start to finish to build up to 4,400 sf (6-7 baths, multiple fps) with totally finished basement.

Once you get into the 8,000 sf+ range around here there are custom finishes involved that may take up to to a year to complete. But I've seen even 20,000 sf+ customs taking no more than 14 months.

Our builder, who we know personally and trust explicitly
is taking advantage of that relationship. Or should be in another trade.

Unless, of course, you're building some Ted Turner-style ranch.

(I do like the Holiday flare for the portable!)

Sorry to hear that montanapacnw. I've actually been wondering why some homes seems to take FOREVER to build. I was actually shocked when the builders I checked out told me their estimated time, all somewhere between 5-8 mos.

A friend who just built a similar size custom home took 15 mos! Well, they built at another county, that may be it. Slow paperwork? I'm guessing. lol.

We started in October 2010. We were supposed to be done in July. Then maybe November. Then maybe for Christmas. Now hopefully the end of January.

We don't really care because we are living in other properties that we're keeping anyway so it isn't costing us anything extra. So, we haven't pushed our builder and I think that causes us to get pushed to the back burner a bit as compared to other people who push more. Could be happening to you if you are laid back about the deadlines.

The bigger contributing factors for us, however, have been serious weather issues plus changes we made.

Our house is a bit over 5000 sq. feet so not huge. However, it is easy to see why it is taking so long- custom finishes and intricate detail work.

I don't necessarily think it is a bad thing for the build to take time and I wouldn't jump to the conclusion your builder is bad, unless there's really no reason for the delays except lack of effort.

I wouldn't jump to the conclusion your builder is bad

The quality may well be there. But he's seven months beyond his own leisurely schedule. And that was measured from when the foundation was in!

This kind of soaked-in-molasses schedule is positively Caribbean.

Building cuts into his wittlin' time out on the porch with ol' blue!

Way too late to swap builders now, tough it out and be thankful that you have a builder who you can trust. Hang on, the finish line is in site.

I think deadlines (at least deadlines we BELIEVE in) help us to focus on completing a task. With no deadlines, it is easy to postpone work on that task and spend our time on other things that seem more urgent or more immediately interesting. As a deadline approaches however, most of us experience an adrenalin rush that not only makes us more alert and able to focus on the job at hand but gives us the energy to keep working at it even if we have to forego sleep... just to meet the deadline.

The biggest problem in your situation is that the deadlines you're talking about are YOUR deadlines but apparently not your builder's! And, since you're not in control of meeting the deadlines, all they are doing is increasing your level of stress with no payoff. All you get is a sense of disappointment when your builder fails to meet the deadlines. I think you need to find a way of making your builder internalize a deadline to finish your house so that HE feels the adrenalin.

I did a search on your name to find your previous posts and get a sense of why it might be taking so long for your home to be finished. The first post I found from you was in September 2010 where you mentioned that the foundation had been poured in December 2009!

Wow! I thought, that is TWO FULL YEARS. At that point, I was tempted to chime in to agree wholeheartedly with Worthy and even to suggest that it was long post time for you to get a new builder. But then, looking at some more of your posts, I realized that you are building at a fairly high elevation where winter sets in early and lingers late and you probably have a rather limited number of daylight hours in the winter plus days when roads are closed due to ice and snow. ( You mentioned in your Sept 2010 post that you'd already had a couple of snowfalls in August of that year. BRRRR! But your views are delicious!)

Obviously, cold snowy or cold rainy weather is going to slow things down until a house is fully dried in. And, if roads are impassible to large trucks for much of the year, that could slow your build considerably even after you're dried in and most of the remaining work is "inside". I'm a southerner so see very little snow but I can imagine that small vehicles might be able to get up mountain roads that have only had narrow lanes plowed while larger trucks can't get up. So, if the truck delivering your cabinets can't get up the mountain, then your cabinets can't be installed.

Since you mentioned "Christmas eve in the new house" tho, I'm assuming you're not building at such a high elevation that they close the roads for months at a time. But, just looking at your portapotty picture tells me that there are no doubt days when roads are totally impassible. When workmen can't make the trip nothing gets done even if all materials are on site.

So, it seems like weather in your area may account for SOME of the slow-going that you've experienced so I won't go so far as to say that your builder is totally taking advantage of your relationship and is "blowing you off." And, he does seem to be doing some beautiful work. But, I do think you need to somehow get HIM to internalize some deadlines with regard to finishing your home.

Now that it looks like the only things left to be done on your home are all "interior work," work ought to be going forward EVERY single day until the job is completely done unless the road are closed to all traffic so that workmen can't get there. If roads regularly become impassible to large trucks in the winter, that just means that your builder should plan ahead and get all materials on-site when the weather is good and roads are clear even if that means having them delivered to a storage facility at a lower altitude and them putting everything on a truck and moving it all up the mountain the next very time that roads are clear for a large truck.

It looks like your garage is "finished" and there is no reason why various materials can't be stored in the garage until he's ready to install them. Not sure what all still needs to be done on the interior of your home but even buckets of paint can be kept on-site as long as you have heat so that it doesn't freeze. Wood flooring should also be stored in the house with the HVAC on so that it can acclimatize before installation. But, pretty much everything else (tile, cabinets, trim, electrical and plumbing fixtures won't be harmed at all by spending time in an unheated garage even in below freezing weather.

I will tell you that I fired my GC when our home was at the dried-in stage. I took over as GC and it took me 11 months to finish it so we could move in. The house is 3200 sq ft heated/cooled plus a 900 sq ft semi-attached garage. It is a neo-Victorian with 3 full baths and two half baths, hardwood and tile floors throughout and lots of wood trim. About 3 months of the 11 was spent fighting with my banker to get him to agree to let us take down the rest of our approved loan without having to hire another builder so that we could get started so you can't really count that. So, 7 months to go from dried-in to move-in which is no land speed record but, having never built a home, I had to figure out what needed to be done and in what order various jobs should be done, then find and vet subcontractors to do each task and learn enough about each job to make sure it was done right before I paid for it. Plus, in order to save money, DH and I did many of the smaller tasks ourselves (i.e., painting walls, staining woodwork, hanging interior doors, installing mirrors and towel racks and cabinets knobs, plus all the CLEANING).... all the while continuing to work full-time at our real jobs.

Based on the photos you posted in October, I would have estimated that you were less than month out from being finished, so Christmas should certainly have been especially if you had a builder that was really trying to meet that deadlines and making your home a priority. That you're STILL not ready to move in tells me that your builder isn't making finishing your home a top priority.

So, while I can understand that you don't want to ruin the good relationship you have with your builder, it might be time for you to throw just a little bit of a hissy-fit. Just enough to let your builder know that underneath that nice, laid-back exterior you've shown thus far, there lurks a monster that he would really rather NOT have to deal with. Then, calm down and talk about setting some REAL DEADLINES. But keep your voice just strained enough that he realizes you've been pushed as far as you will go and that you're holding yourself back from ripping into him. And, once he gives you a new deadline, insist that he break it down into smaller steps for you with individual deadlines to prove that the overall deadline is realistic. And, once you have those, insist that he call or email you every single evening (Mon-Fri) with a quick update on exactly what got done that day so that you can see he is staying on track. You don't have to be harsh and totally unyielding but it is time to be a little bit less laid back!

Or, maybe you and your spouse could pull a variation of the good cop/bad cop routine. Stage a "major fight" between the two of you that you allow your builder to overhear wherein spouse screams hysterically at you that she (he?) is sick and tired of this long drawn-out building crap and that if this house is NOT finished so that you can move in by such-and-such a date, she is "out of here" and you're going to have hell-to-pay getting the loan to close (or whatever) so that builder can be paid IF she walks out and files for divorce. If your builder is a half-way decent guy, he is not going to want to be responsible for causing a divorce. And he is not going to like the idea that your spouse filing for a divorce could cause a delay in him getting his final payments once he does finish the house. Maybe the combination will cause him to give finishing your home a higher priority.

Good luck and I definitely don't want to see that decorated porta-potty again NEXT year.

"Or, maybe you and your spouse could pull a variation of the good cop/bad cop routine. Stage a "major fight" between the two of you that you allow your builder to overhear wherein spouse screams hysterically at you that she (he?) is sick and tired of this long" ..............

Nice script for a hollywood "B" movie, but not likely to have an effect in the real world!

There was a poster on this forum who built in Wyoming and the delays were due to help, subs or otherwise, not showing up. Appearenlty they'd get a little jingle in their pockets, hang out in the saloons until broke, then go back to work some of the time. Might be a familiar scenario there in Montana?

Bevangel as usual gives great advise, (with the exception of the hollywood playout, imo). You expect honesty from your builder, be real and honest yourself and have a sit down with your builder and put the squeeze on. Your laying it out for folks on this forum, lay it all out to your builder about what's on your mind...getting your build done!

Posted by montanapacnw (My Page) on
Mon, Jun 6, 11 at 21:12

We are probably 2+ months from completion

Thank you all for so much support and advice. I spent the entire day at the job site, as we are doing the interior painting (long story but $48,000 seemed way, way too much for the final coat of exterior paint, plus primer and one coat on the interior [no trim included in the quote] so we rejected that bid and did the interior ourselves; it may be shockingly high elsewhere but it's within the realm of normal cost here), and I spent much of it thinking of where we, or things in general, went wrong. Painting gives you a lot of time to think.

You've raised a lot of interesting points. Yes, weather was a factor. We always intended to pour the foundation, then put it to bed for the winter and get a head start the next spring without waiting for the ground to dry out. However, it was a very late spring that year so that was delay number one, of at least a month. We are at a high elevation and last year was an abundant and early year for snow. Because the builder and crew agreed to travel a long distance for this job (it's the second house we've built with this builder and we knew we wanted him or wouldn't have built), we agreed they would work 4 ten-hour days per week, stay here, and then travel home for a long weekend. They were away from their families for 4 days a week, and it's the only house they were working on so I don't think there was any intentional foot-dragging. Since they were staying locally, the snow didn't have an effect on their travel, but it certainly was the next of the delays we encountered. It was snowing heavily before we were weathered-in, and that meant time clearing snow nearly every day, both inside the house and out. So, we got several months behind because of that I think. Then there was a delay with the plumber who was chosen for his expertise in geo-thermal, as well as being a good plumber, but had many other commitments and that held up the electrician, etc. In hindsight, I think that's where we should have had the hissy-fit and insisted that the plumber either get his butt over to the sight or we should have found an alternative plumber. There was also a long delay in getting the roof on, because of a severe hail storm the year we started the build that caused roofers to be booked for hail-damaged roof replacements up to two years out. We didn't have damage, but the roofers simply weren't available. That, however, didn't cause a domino effect of delays.

Well, water under the bridge except that it might help others realize that when things start to slip you need to act at that moment and not get frustrated waiting for someone to make you the priority.

I think beagles is absolutely correct: our house is 100% custom and the builder is a perfectionist. Those two things also contribute to delays, not because of changes but because many things are determined as we go along and the level of detail is substantial. We have also used a lot of reclaimed wood, coming from DH's family dairy barn, for flooring, cabinets and a few accent pieces. Time spent to kiln dry, cut, mill for flooring, install and finish seems to be much longer than for standard lumber, so probably our choice to use the reclaimed wood gets put in our column as a delay cause. That being said, the sentimental aspect of keeping the barn in the family is something we wouldn't have foregone.

Okay then, on a proactive note, what now needs to be done? The list, as I write this down I now realize, is quite short. And there doesn't seem to be much that I can pressure the builder to help with; his hands-on work is nearly finished and the subs are mostly in progress or scheduled.
- The plumber and assistant are there finally hooking up showers, faucets and maybe giving us running water.
- We're waiting on the flooring subs to finish the stairway, but it's difficult for them to work if other subs are using the stairs.
- We're waiting on a bit of tile for the fireplace and the entry floor; that's supposed to happen later this week.
- I've taken it upon myself to coordinate countertops and am pulling my hair out trying to get a date from a sheet metal shop for a small bit on a hutch, but the concrete countertops are ready for installation and the island countertop is scheduled for the earliest install date that was available (early Jan.).
- We'll be doing the final cleaning (another cost saving attempt) but that can't be started until the stairs are sanded. And until that's done, it would be a mistake to move any furniture in.

It seems like a short list, but given that most of the waiting would be because of the stairs, it becomes clear that we need to get that done and make the other subs work around the flooring sub's timetable. I'll be having a talk today with the builder to clue him in on my conclusions.

Still, maybe we'll be able to stay there Christmas Eve, but it will be more of a camp-out by the fireplace, in a couple of Papa-Bear chairs, some cognac, watching the fireworks at the resort. Actually, that doesn't sound too bad, does it?

P.S. Bevangel, my hat's off to you being able to do the painting and "small" tasks while you're working. We spent two weeks of every month this summer working on things like that and I'm exhausted, am still working on them, and I don't have to go to work every Monday!

"Unless, of course, you're building some Ted Turner-style ranch."

worthy- you'd be surprised that Ted's houses are actually very modest. The amount of land, not so much (he's the second largest landowner in the US, beaten only by the federal government). If there's a big house, it's because it's been there for 80 to 100 years. I can probably find photos.

You'd be surprised how low-key the man is for being that rich and (in)famous.

montanapacnw- sounds like you have a good grip on where you are and how it ended up that way. I know it's frustrating but power through and it'll all fade away once it's done. I'm sitting here 6 years after a painful remodel and it finally doesn't drive me nuts any more. If I saw our contractor, I might even hesitate a moment before looking for the nearest baseball bat. ;-)