A Walk Through Poem

In leu of the exciting day to come tomorrow (our pre-settlement walk through), I decided to get a little poetic tonight:

Twas' the night before our walk through, and all through our new house Not a creature was stirring, not even the cleaning crew The light fixtures were hung in every room with care In hopes that Jeff and Olivia soon would move there The windows were sparkling all clean and pure While countertops glistened and for gleamed sure With Olivia in Kentucky and I in my PJs, Had just hung up the phone and said goodbye for a few days

Eric and I did our scheduled pre-official-walk-through walk through. I'd have to say that we're been really lucky to have Eric around to help with this house-buying thing. In fact, if it weren't for Eric and Brian, we probably wouldn't be closing on our very first house on Monday. Thanks, guys.

So what did we find tonight? Well, we found a good many things that need fixin'. Many of them are simple dry wall problems: a rough place on the wall, a closet that needs some more paint, etc. The worst problem is that the frame for one of our windows in the great room appears to be bent. We had noticed that it looked strange before, but we marked it a few days ago and they replaced the window. We failed to notice that the actual frame of that window is bent. Not sure if they'll have to replace the entire window or not. Hopefully they can just bend it back in shape.

The other big issue is still the hardwood in the foyer/hallway/dinette. Yes, the contractor came back and installed the hardwood in our hallway, but things still aren't peachy. What's the problem? The problem is that the contractor didn't bother to take the room divider wood piece out. Instead, he just butted the new wood peices up to that divider piece. But, they're not all butted up against it flush. Nope, some of them are good, some others have a large gap. Either way, it's definitely NOT the way we had envisioned our foyer/hallway/dinette would look. It's also definitely NOT the way the model looks. The hardwood in the model does not have any kind of divider between the two rooms, and the wood flows smoothly between the rooms.

So I called our community supervisor, Patrick, today to tell him that we still were not satisfied with the floor. I can't put into words how much I dreaded making thhat phone call. Again, I felt guilty complaining about this (now major) problem. But, I realized that if I didn't get this fixed that I would walk through that room every day for the next ___ years and grit my teeth and beat myself up for not getting it fixed. I had to really convince myself to make the phone call.

Luckily, Patrick was open to my complaints as usual. He did mention that it's impossible to make hardwood perfect (without gaps), but I told him that I didn't expect total perfection, I just wanted our floor to look like the model's floor. He said that they (Ryan Homes) are not in the business of making people unhappy, but rather they are in the business of making people happy and if this would make me happy then it would be fixed. He did say that it would not be able to be fixed until early next week or so, but I assured him that this was okay since we weren't planning on moving in until the next weekend. So, it's going to be fixed. I hung up the phone and immediately felt a huge weight lifted from my shoulders. Painful as it was (and will be for them), I had done the right thing.

Well, thus ends my book for tonight. The walk through is at 10am tomorrow. This is great because I get to sleep in a little late.

Posted by Jeff at September 27, 2002 12:02 AM