Worked residential construction for a summer a while back… nothing on a specific company, but to the industry in general: abso-fucking-lutely do not buy a house that was built after the year 2000-ish. I only personally saw the tip of the iceberg, but every single dude I worked under who did that shit as a career told a similar cautionary tale about how the early '00s saw a an unprecedented deep-dive into the cheapest labor using the cheapest materials to build the cheapest contracts. You get houses that look pretty for a couple years, but the things are borderline disposable.
Don’t buy shit built too early either - the electrical work on old-old construction is one misstep from the mouse in your wall away from burning the entire fucking house down.
Got the impression that construction from the 60s-80s is the sweet spot.
Anyone with more thorough or more recent experience, feel free to chime in.
Used to paint garage floors for new construction in the early ‘00s and can absolutely concur with this assessment. Supposedly “concrete” columns nothing more than PVC pipe sprayed with a layer of cement and then stucco for texture; “crushed coral” window frames just high density foam sprayed to look like coral. These were homes being marketed as luxury but built exactly like the cheap apartments that were also popping up everywhere. Foundations are now cracking, exteriors peeling away and revealing extensive mildew…
Worked residential construction for a summer a while back… nothing on a specific company, but to the industry in general: abso-fucking-lutely do not buy a house that was built after the year 2000-ish. I only personally saw the tip of the iceberg, but every single dude I worked under who did that shit as a career told a similar cautionary tale about how the early '00s saw a an unprecedented deep-dive into the cheapest labor using the cheapest materials to build the cheapest contracts. You get houses that look pretty for a couple years, but the things are borderline disposable.
Don’t buy shit built too early either - the electrical work on old-old construction is one misstep from the mouse in your wall away from burning the entire fucking house down.
Got the impression that construction from the 60s-80s is the sweet spot.
Anyone with more thorough or more recent experience, feel free to chime in.
Used to paint garage floors for new construction in the early ‘00s and can absolutely concur with this assessment. Supposedly “concrete” columns nothing more than PVC pipe sprayed with a layer of cement and then stucco for texture; “crushed coral” window frames just high density foam sprayed to look like coral. These were homes being marketed as luxury but built exactly like the cheap apartments that were also popping up everywhere. Foundations are now cracking, exteriors peeling away and revealing extensive mildew…