The contractor we had working on the leak under the family room window has put some new building paper over it, and fixed it for now. We have had a few good rain storms and it hasn't leaked. But it's not really a permanent solution, and the rest of our house is still wrong and leaking. The contractor we had is basically a one-man operation, and doesn't have the resources to fix our whole house. So what to do?
We have gone through a lot of stages of how we feel about what has happened to our home.
Grief: How could this happen to our home?
Anger: How can the home builder get away with this? Why isn't the government enforcing the building code?
Desire for revenge: Let's sue them! Call the newspapers! Call the TV reporters!
Worry: Is the mould in our home harming our health? (especially with two children under 4 years old)
Now we have kind of accepted it (although we still have plans to "fight" this issue...more on that later...) and are trying to move forward with fixing the problem.
We found out that a friend of a friend went through a similar issue with their home, so thankfully they have been able to offer us a lot of advice. They put us in touch with an engineer and a contracting company who does a lot work fixing building envelopes. We met with the engineer and the contractor, and have decided that we will have to remove all the stucco from our home, replace the building envelope, and re-clad our home. This will likely cost over $100,000.
We are "lucky": we bought our house before the Calgary real estate boom, so we have built up a fair bit of equity in our home. We can afford to fix this properly. This will not bankrupt us. We worry that others in this situation may not be so lucky. We worry that this may be an issue for many houses built in the last ~15 years. For us, it is a major inconvenience, and means that we will have to delay other plans due to this large unexpected expense. But we heard on the news about a leaky condo here in Calgary, and people having to come up with money to pay to fix it, and some were saying it would bankrupt them. It's terrible that home builders can get away with this.
Some single family homeowners may just put a band-aid on the problem and sell the house, and leave it for the next person to fix. We're not sure if the previous owners of our house knew about the problems or not. We suspect they may have known about some leaks, but may not have know the cause of the problem or that it was so extensive. We are planning to stay in this house for a long time, so we have decided to fix the issue and make sure it is done right - and in the process make the house look just like we want it to! (trying to put a positive spin on things)
So we have a contractor and a designer, and we are in the process of choosing colours, whether we want stucco or siding, etc. We have also decided to get new windows, since there have been a lot of advances in window technology over the past few years, and probably new shingles too, since they are only 15 year shingles and our house is 13 years old. Things we weren't planning to do right now, but in the long run it makes sense to do while we are re-doing the rest of the house.
The contractor can't get started until (probably) late September. It will take about 2 months to fix the outside of our house, and then we will have to worry about the inside. If we want stucco, the house will likely have to sit over the winter with only the building paper, because they can't apply stucco in cold and/or wet weather.
In the meantime, our family room floor was down to the plywood subfloor....wating for the hardwood. We don't want to put the hardwood in until the exterior is fixed, as we don't want to risk damage to the hardwood. So we bought a cheap piece of carpet and "installed" it ourselves, and moved our furniture back into the family room. At least now the kids have a place to play, and my husband has his TV back :-)
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