We’ve been owners of a DR Horton home for seven days now, and last night DR Horton suffered a big blow in terms of our confidence in choosing them as a builder. We’re officially suffering and mad now.

The short list of things we complained about before yesterday:

• We closed on a house without a gas meter. No hot water or ability to cook for two days.
• One of our two central air units does not heat our home. We’re cold whenever we’re downstairs.
• A long list of scratches, dents, bad texturing, crappy painting, and concrete debris on our exterior walkways

But yesterday was the worst, a complete failure by DR Horton on several levels:

• Our water main was ruptured, and we have no water as of this morning. No shower. No toilet. Stinky Eric. Stinky Ellie.

…Yup, ruptured water main, but that’s not even the best part, so lets hear it from the beginning. Ellie and I come home yesterday pleased to see a new tree in our front yard. It looks like whoever put it in did a bad job though, as it looks like they need to fill in some soil and patch up the sod a bit. We tell ourselves that they are probably going to finish the job tomorrow.

After watching some television, we come to realize that our water is shut off. We call the water company, thinking it’s our fault, a billing issue or something like that. Our account is fine and our water is active. We troubleshoot with a water representative and it turns out our water had be shutoff from coming into the house. I turn the crank, Ellie and I walk up towards the front door, only to find water totally gushing out of where the tree was planted. I rush down and turn off the water. It was probably 10 gallons of water in a matter of 10-15 seconds.

We’re pissed. So much is going through our heads. We reconstruct what happened while we were at work:

• Subcontractor plants tree and severs our water main
• Subcontractor goes “Oh Shit!” and turns off the water
• Subcontractor leaves

Umm…does anything seem wrong about this chain of events? Where is the call to the super? Where is the call to us? Why did we have to figure this out, in the dark, all by ourselves?

Tangent: Let me tell you about the homebuilder two-step. When something goes wrong, you tell the homeowner as little as possible and you may or may not fix the problem. When the homeowner discovers that everything is fubar, you blame it on your subcontractors, removing all heat from yourself.

To homebuilders: YOU ARE ONLY AS GOOD AS YOUR SUBCONTRACTORS! Stop blaming them, you paid for them! Get better ones or better yet: DO IT YOURSELF! If I had a company that built a product, what value do I add by farming the work out to other companies? What makes you any better than your competitor who hires the same contractors? Farm out your payroll, your human resources, your coffee service, whatever: but why subcontract that which makes your product YOURS. Had it been your guy who planted a tree, I assume your guy would have told his boss, who would have called out one of your plumbers to fix the problem. Maybe it’s impossible, but in my opinion the only way to call your product superior is if you are the one who is building it!

End Tangent!

Well folks, it only gets worse. We called our super, called the DR Horton “emergency” line. We wait two hours to actually talk to a DR Horton employee. Our super says, paraphrasing: “damn those vendors, damn them, I’m gonna teach them a thing or two why didn’t they tell me blah blah blah blah blah” (see the homebuilder two-step) “I’m gonna get a plumber out there tonight, here is their number, they are our plumbing subcontractor.” We call the plumber, tell them the situation, they say they can’t come out after dark. We call back the super and he says he’s gonna try his best. Two hours pass and the plumber calls and tells us that they can’t come out until morning…

That’s it. Where was our call from the super telling us he’s sorry that he couldn’t get the plumber our tonight? Where was our offer for a hotel for the night? Nothing. What the hell were we to do? I’m speechless! (but only for this paragraph)

So we come outside today and there is no plumber. I look down the hole and can see that there is about 2-3 inches of pipe completely missing. Totally severed. It better be fixed today. It better be a quality job. I don’t want to see water gushing from that spot 5 years from now. But of course how can we trust DR Horton, they don’t even do the work? It’s all about passing the buck.

That’s all for now