Spinoff from the garage thread.

Have had a very hard time getting roofing for my covered patio project. City required it to be white single ply, like my house is. They also required I strip off the shingles off the existing ramada (the thing we're connecting to the house to make it all one giant covered patio) and replace them with matching roofing.

They are right, shingles aren't technically approved per code for this low of a slope (although I installed the shingles on the ramada as it originally had zero roofing when we moved in / the OSB and rafters were rotting away). But I just spent a full day pulling every last shingle and there wasn't a single sign of water intrusion anywhere after 3 years. It was 100% water tight (which bugs me more to tear it all out).

But their primary complaint is that it had to be "architecturally compatible" with the house (which is their open ended way of having the ability to judgment call any request). In this case they required an exact match.


No big deal, I'll just order a roll of EPDM like the house has and learn how to install it. Wow, what a mess. Its almost impossible to buy online (they're big rolls, so I get it), so I started calling around local roofing places. After 2 dozen calls, the places either don't carry it at all or won't sell it to the "general public". You need to be a Pro certified with that roofing system.

I did find one online retailer that was based out of my metro that supposedly offers will call / local pickup. Of course that option is broken on their website, no one responds to phone or email, and you can't visit the warehouse as there is no storefront. Even better, they quoted $5000 for LTL truck delivery of the $2k worth of materials I needed. Right...

Finally ended up ordering TPO instead (looks the same - a big roll of white rubber, but installation is different as its seam welded instead of glued). Not thrilled as Ive never welded this stuff before, but I guess its as good a time to learn as any. Oddly enough I had to order it from Menards (which as some may know is nowhere near the West half of the US). But still, their shipping was $500 and the total was cheaper than anywhere else I found (plus I get the current promo 11% rebate via in store credit).


But the "only for pros" comment bugged me. Over the past 10-15 years, I've been consistently disappointed with "Pros". I've got a reel (short video) saved on FB exactly about this. It's a guy installing various things in his house saying how his friends always ask how he knows how to do everything - why he doesn't just hire it all out. His response is "because if I don't F'ing do it, someone else will F it up, then I'll have to F'ing do it". That really resonated with me as Ive probably got 20 stories of exactly that.

So I figured I'd share some short stories over the years in this thread (one story per post to make it easier to follow) about just that - "Pros" that screwed up a job that I had to come back and redo.

 

First story is tied to this exact topic - single ply roofing.

As mentioned previously, my house has a flat roof (ultra low slope). The front and sides have short parapet walls above the roof, and the back is open for the water to drain off. So the whole roof is covered with a white rubber material - EPDM. Same stuff you see on those giant flat roof commercial buildings (except ours just drains off the back vs a bunch of built in drains all over).

This is the stuff thats been impossible to obtain because these places won't sell it to the general public / anyone who hasn't went to their special certification class (despite practically all of these manufacturers posting their instructions freely online - its not ultra complicated stuff to do).

When we bought the house, the inspector flagged a seam that had come open. The previous owners wanted nothing to do with fixing anything, so they just gave us a cash settlement to not do any work. So I go up there to fix it, and realize how poorly it was installed. It's an inside 90 corner where two parapet walls meet. The installers just cut the corner straight up and globbed some caulk over the resulting seam. The seam had broken open because the caulk didn't really bond. The installers also hadn't properly cut the corner (youre supposed to use either a pre molded 90, or wrap the excess from one side under the other so you have a lap joint instead of a butt joint).

The epdm runs a foot or so up the wall to a termination bar as its supposed to. But all vertical surfaces are supposed to be glued (even if you chose spaced mechanical fasteners for the flat part). There wasn't a drop of glue - the roofing was just hanging by the termination bar.

So I ended up spreading as much adhesive as I could behind it to hold it in place and applied a sealer rated for EPDM use that chemically bonds to it.

The roofing company that did the work clearly never read the install manual which blows me away as this is literally their profession / career.

 

Story 2 is more about the roof (again, part of why it bugs me that I have to be certified to even be considered to be allowed to buy the stuff).

When we moved in, half of the back roof had little dirty spots every 10" or so along the drip edge. Never knew what those were from.

Unfortunately, we found out the hard way - the roof / drip edge wasn't installed properly. We had a typical monsoon storm (not talking tornado / hurricane level winds, but heavy "normal" storm winds), and it blew up a big chunk of a different part of the back roof.

Again, the installers hadn't put it on properly. The drip edge was held on with too few very short fasteners. They also hadn't installed the EPDM properly. The just laid it over the drip edge, cut it flush, and slapped a single bead of adhesive under it. That's not approved by any epdm/tpo manufacturer, and of course it easily separated like a zipper when it met a chunk of drip edge with a few extra nails in it.

Luckily the fasteners on the other end of the EPDM sheet held so it didn't blow away, just folded back on itself. But I quickly learned what those dirty blobs were on the other half - caulk blobs covering the tops of the screw heads (screws through the rubber and drip edge) to hold it in place. Unfortunately, I couldn't see any other way to fix it either (without redoing the permiter sheet of EPDM correctly with new material) so I ended up doing the same thing. It does make me wonder who added the screws - was that a contractor repair job or a homeowner DIY (desperate because its pouring rain and theyve got exposed wood roof decking).

I did reach out to the previous owners (in hopes there was a warranty). They had a receipt from what appeared to be a licensed roofing contractor, but of course it looks like this place hasn't existed for at least half a decade, so that's a dead end.


Pic of the roof folded back on itself after the storm:

 

Story 3 is from the time we were selling our first house.

We'd moved everything out to a rental house so we could clean / prep everything as best we could. Selected a realtor and asked for any easy suggestions to improve property value. We didn't have a specific timeline to sell (but obviously didn't want to sit on a vacant house forever), so we could make some basic changes if it helped bring more money.

Her #1 suggestion by far was 'update the kitchen'. The house was a 2007 build (that we got for cheap as a foreclosure shortly after the crash). Still had the stock white kitchen paint, white appliances (now with a tinge of yellow due to age), and natural light wood cabinets. Luckily it had still popular granite-like counters.

Easy enough, I'll buy and install basic stainless appliances myself (which came out great), and the realtor "had a guy" that was her go-to painter. He could paint the walls light gray, spray the cabinets white, and spray the island cabinets dark gray so they'd pop against the white. The quote was a bit on the high side (as Im sure the realtor got a kickback), but he came highly reccomnded by her and was available ASAP with a 1 day turnaround time. Turnaround time was important as we already had carpet lined up for install the day after and they had to pass through the kitchen, but he swore he had to do it this day as it was the only one free on his schedule.

Guy asks me 'how early can I start?', and I agree to meet him down there at 5 am (it was about a 45 min drive for me and I had nothing else to do in the empty house other than clean some odds and ends to keep busy all day). Dude rolls in at literally 1030. "Sorry, had to find someone to jump start the van, then had to wait until Ace opened to buy a new paint gun as my old one is broken". Off to a great start... (plus Ace opens at like 7am and is barely 10 mins away...)

I occupy myself for the day and am out cleaning up in the garage around 345 when I see this dude hauling stuff out to his van. Assuming he's done (I stayed out of their way all day, so I had no idea how far he got), I went to chat. He said they're done for the day and will have to come back tomorrow. Wtf... We really got into it and he threatened to not come back at all. He said he doesn't usually do spray jobs, but only took it because my wife asked - lol what? I ended up having to push the carpets out nearly 2 weeks to give this joker time to finish. He also refused to take a single penny off the quote - said he'd take us to court if we didn't pay in full (which we obviously didn't have time to deal with when selling a house). In the end, it cost him 10s of thousands of dollars - we have a lot of friends in the area (who have a lot of family), and the stories were enough to convince more than a dozen of them to pick someone else for their paint projects.

He did finish the next day, but the result was very poor for a "Pro".
Below are some examples.

Overspray inside the cabinets:


Painted over all of the rubber bump stops. Every single one stuck and peeled paint off the mating surface:

Numerous chips and dings that appear to have happened post spray that he touched up with a brush - note this is right at eye level too.

Looks like they hand painted the gray walls. Couldn't even be bothered to take the cover plates off. I get this stuff picks off fairly easily, but the customer should never be doing this. This is also a countertop outlet - right in plain sight.

Other fun not pictured:
-Left about 20 total feet of painters tape that we had to remove across various spots
-drilled holes in all cabinet door edges to hang them to spray outside without any regard to what side was visible to the user (ie about 75% of the lower cabinet doors had a new 3/16" hole in the top of the face trim
-Surface finish was all over the place. With the light reflecting off the cabinets at an angle, some spots were smooth, others looked sand blasted (ie got too far away and paint was drying before it hit).​
-About 2 dozen paint drips on the tile. Again, easy to fix (besides the few that hit the grout), but really ticks you off after paying that kind of money for a pro.

 

One more for the night. Not so much one that I had to 'redo' myself, but something I had to intervene on that I shouldn't have needed to.

When selling our first home, one of the biggest selling features was that the city had just added a huge community complex just 2 streets over on what used to be a vacant lot. It was a really nice setup- community gym, skate park, pool, tennis courts, dog park, 3 kids parks, etc. One of my few requests to the realtor was to mention the proximity and add a few pics of it (as many other local sales had done). If you weren't from this city, it wasn't obvious that this thing existed, especially if you drove in to the house from the north side of the subdivision. Google maps hadn't even added the satellite images yet.

The house posting goes live and there's not a single picture or mention of this park. Wtf. We had literally 3 or 4 requests for the whole process and you can't be bothered to at least make sure you covered those bases? (Or tell us why not to do it if you disagree)

She said it would take a few days to fix because her professional photographer didn't live in that area, so he'd have to come back to get shots of it. But she'd make sure he did.

She did finally add pics and text almost a week later and the results were frankly embarrassing. Someone (never figured out who exactly as she was very evasive of the questions) literally pulled up the website for this community place and took pictures of the website images with their crappy cell phone. It wasn't that they took real pictures from the same angles - they literally took pictures of the pictures on a low resolution display- it had the same people in the same spots. They didn't even appear to be screen shots of the images as some were slightly crooked left or right - they were almost certainly a cell phone picture of some kind of laptop/desktop monitor.

I told her to immediately remove the pictures (the text was fine) as it was embarrassing and an eyesore, especially right next to actual professional pictures of the house. I grabbed a few screen shots before they were pulled down - it looked even more absurd as full screen images rather than the thumbnail / reel view shown below. Included one shot with an actual pro house picture to show the stark difference.



The top pic in the one below isn't altered either - thats exactly how it was posted in the listing. I think someone had clicked on the image prior to taking the picture which tinted it all blue.

Also, if you open the picture below full size on your phone, you can literally see the individual pixels.

 

Another story - HVAC this time.

The house we moved into has an older AC unit- probably 15-20 years old, so I fully expected issues. But luckily it runs just fine for the first year or so. Then it suddenly has issues Sunday night before a work trip.

Runs constantly and won't shut off, even when the desired temperature is met. Only way to get it to stop is to flip thr breaker off. Get up there and the culprit is pretty obvious - the contactor has failed as it has permanent continuity across the input to output terminals. Great - but where am I going to get a contactor on a Sunday night?

Forced to have the wife hire an HVAC person as Im away for almost a week and the temps are high enough she can't just leave it off. Guy comes out- $400 (ugh...)- fixes it and leaves. Good to go.

Fast forward a few days and I'm at the airport ready to come home. Get a call from the wife - AC is totally dead. Not the same issue as before, 100% dead. Great...

Get home after a long travel day, open the side of the cabinet and the failure is obvious - there's a new black streak down the cabinet wall and a big black spot on the bottom of the AC housing. On top of that black spot - one of the two input power wires that had fallen out of the new contactor.

No clue what the dude was thinking - the other power main screw was so loose that my kid could've got it tighter (I was able to pull it out also without loosening the screw). Just the vibration from operation must've worked the first wire out.

Easy fix at least, and not worth the hassle of calling the HVAC place back out to fix their work (although I did let them know). But still - I paid $400 for 15 minutes of work and a $40 part, and he can't be bothered to make sure each one of the handful of steps is done correctly?

 

Fun read.. Would "fun" be the correct description? Anyway, seeing as we just bought our first house a couple months ago, this stuff catches my interest. -Says the guy paying a "pro" for a bathroom remodel. Lol youre really making me question my decisions.

 

The thing is that there are plenty of good places / workers out there. We have had a handful of very positive experiences through the years. Unfortunately for us, we've been unlucky far more times than we've been lucky at this point.

The plumber we hired for a few specific repairs that I wasnt comfortable with (one being a copper water line feeding an outside tap leaking in the center of a 10" thick concrete block wall) was fantastic. It was a one man show, but the dude was polite, eager to please, and did very nice looking work.


The lesson I struggle to learn is how to sift through the good and the bad. Knowing the issues with the BBB system, I tend to rely on Google reviews and local forum/FB searches. The downside with small companies is that (at least out here), the vast majority are relatively new and although they have good reviews- they don't have many of them. So if they've got a 4 or 5, but under 25 reviews- are those all of their friends / family making false reviews? Big companies for me tend to be even harder as so many of them sub out the work - so even if they've got 1000 generally good reviews, your job could be literally the first one with this new sub. That was the case with the HVAC company we hired.

It doesn't help that our trade labor pool out here is so shallow. Demand for workers outstrips supply, so its possible to put a bunch of effort into vetting a place only to find out they're 6 mo out (or not taking new customers at all as Ive had a few places tell me).


I'm starting to think this skill is the real value of a GC. I used to think planning/ scheduling was their purpose - but outside of flippers, the schedule on a typical residential job frankly isn't that important. Its not catastrophic if theres a few days of safety gap between trades coming in so there's no reason to have people tripping over each other to save 2 or 3 days in the overall timeline.

But their network/ connections are their real value. They work with these places every single day and know exactly what places they can trust and which to avoid. Theyve also got a big carrot to incentivise the places they work with- more work. As a homeowner, a major reno is likely a once in a lifetime event, so companies know out of the gate that you're not going to be a $50k/ yr stream of income. So contractors tend to do better in order to try to secure more work from a GC.

 

A professional plumber friend asked me once "What makes an expert an expert". It's a great question to think about. I have been raised with a very DIY attitude. It comes from a combo of cost savings, doing it right (because you will have the most pride in the end result) and "what is the professional doing that you cannot do yourself". With the RIGHT professional, it can be skills to save time. Such as I can hang/mud/tape drywall. I don't do enough of it to build skills to be fast at it, I am also a bit OCD and want it RIGHT. I have seen professionals who have done OUTSTANDING drywall work that is fast, perfect and LASTS (no issues years later). That being said, working on cars, I enjoy. Home remodeling/construction, I can do.... I am slowly creeping into the part of my life where I start to ask "is this how I want to spend my time vs it is worth paying for someone else's time".
In 2019, I had a house built. Some of the nonsense with that! I will share some highlights....

The mud work for the drywall in my new home is horrible! So many outside corner joints with fine cracks along the outside corner bead and screw holes showing. And when they did the 1-year walk through and repair, I was stuck painting the repairs. Some repairs are worse than the before and others had the same problems happen again. HORRIBLE!

I am also NOT impressed with how the concrete driveway is holding up. And there is NO warranty on that. In the first month or so a crack formed in it. And little corners from the relief cuts are chipping away.

I am used to what might be more old school plumbing (not talking copper vs CPVC or PEX), I am talking all plumbing connection going in the wall cavity. I said nothing and when my plumber friend saw this, he lit up and said "that is the mark of a lazy ****ing plumber". I asked him "why". He said this shows the plumber chose to put the supply lines in the floor because he did not want to take a small bit of extra time to add a 90* and stub the line out. So the trickle down is that it affects the guy putting in cabinets and vanities, the extra goofing that has to be done to seat those because the plumber took a short cut.
Side note, I am not sure how all PEX installs are done, but I kinda miss the clean look of copper lines. Because PEX is pliable/bendable, there are areas liberties are taken that would not happen with copper. Plus, watch the shape change of the hot water line when you flow water through it (expand and contract).


Not sure if it is truly required, but not sure how you feel, I would want an extra stud for that last nailer fin of the shower.


OH, but the next day they added a stud
And the day after that, they put one in that actually went floor to ceiling!


For as much as I paid for this house to be built, I had this garbage pulled out. It was not load bearing, but that stud could be used else where. Not to mention, I had them remove some REALLY warped lumber. Studs that bowed OUT into the room OR warped so much that 16 on center did not exist!


Notice the plumber moved the water lines.... Notice lack of the metal nail stop plates. 3 times I told my contact at the building company. Drywall went up and I found the first punctured line before they energized it. And then before I got the keys, I finally found and confronted them with the building code violation.


Because someone did not trim a piece of OSB Plywood, just force the drywall in and zip 100 screws to hold it. Ugh! I never got this changed. They clearly packed it with mud.



Downspouts. A bunch mounted high and would promote ground erosion as rain water drains. And how about a OSCHA violation with a trip hazard of a splash block on the sidewalk (even worse, does not flow the water with the grade of the property). I was told they do it this way and then when the home owner does there landscaping, they adjust it as they want. Why start with a trip hazard into your nice new home!!





So there are some annoyances (not all) with building an entire house!

 

That is a good question. I'll definitely say it can't just be years of experience alone. For every person I know that is devoted to professional development and becomes a little more skilled every day, I know another that uses that knowledge to find new ways to take shoddy shortcuts and to figure out what places don't get checked at all so they can either do a poor job or skip the job altogether because they know it won't/ can't be checked.

That's one area of my improvement projects that I'm iffy on. When adding a side driveway (to ultimately lead to a new garage), I paid to have someone do it (as Id never done that much concrete in one shot). The guy was great to work with - worked quick, price was reasonable, the hole in his schedule matched our need, but ultimately I'm not happy for two reasons:
1- he was adamant about not messing with rebar. He said the slab was thick enough that it wouldn't ever move around (6"). Sure enough, the sidewalk extension chunk has shifted down 1/2" and one of the control joints between slabs has 1/4" delta on one side. Admittedly, thats probably tied in part to drainage issues that I'm working to resolve (which I never had before as this area was all dirt), but it wouldn't have happened if he'd have done rebar.
2- The last square of the last slab has cracked all over. Something went wrong that caused the concrete truck to be late. So instead of pouring at 6 am, they were starting at 2pm, in August, well over 100F. The last square they finished was starting to set by the time they got to it and I think they just over worked it after the set had started. The cracks aren't awful yet, but there are 4 cracks on this square roughly meeting in the middle. Sucks to see on a brand new driveway.

Wow, I've never seen an end shimmed stud before. That is pretty lazy...

It's amazing what they'll try to pull in areas they think will get covered up before the buyer ever sees it. I follow a new home inspector named Cy Porter that works in the PHX metro. He's got an excellent series of FB Reels on this exact thing for new builds. I'm blown away by some of the ridiculous (and sometimes flat out dangerous - especially some of the electrical stuff) things new builder contractors think they can get away with.

I'm honestly starting to get to the point where I can say I enjoy some home remodeling stuff. I used to enjoy none as our previous house was nearly a brand new build (we bought it a few years old as a foreclosure after the crash), but there wasn't really anything to do besides minor maintenance.

With this new house being a pile of junk, we've scaled up the reno projects tremendously. While I'm still mediocre at best in any trade bucket - I'm starting to get a lot of satisfaction out of having a friend / family member come over and notice how nicely redone X is (not knowing we did that project 100% ourselves).

I also like that its been more of a family thing. Cars for me has always been a solo activity (which isn't bad either - everyone needs some ME time), but I do feel bad when I start racking up double digit hours in a single week on bigger projects and the family only sees me for dinner and bed. With these construction jobs, my wife is there by my side whenever she's able (anything not on the roof, lol), and even my daughter gets in on maybe 10% of the work too. So while I'm sure my family would rather be doing something else, I do think we're spending a lot more time truly together (not just in the same house doing different things) because of it.




Thanks for sharing the pics/ stories - that's exactly the kind if stuff I'm talking about! Some of those are pretty absurd!