The Pulte Homes Experience - Methods of Repairs

Method of Repairs

   Before I can explain the repair process used, I feel that I should explain how Pulte builds homes. Pulte themselves do not build the house. Rather what they do is hire individual sub-contractors to build the home in phases. What I mean is that a crew would be hired to pour the footers, then a different crew may get hired to build the foundation. Another crew would frame the house while yet another crew would do the electrical. Each phase is done this way all the way down to trimmers and painters. So, many times, one crew can not start their phase until the previous crew is done. I assume that the sub-contractors are paid per job and not per hour but I can not be certain about that. My problems stemmed from the framer of my home. His work is the inferior product that the rest of the house was built upon. Once the framer was done, the electrician and plumbers came in. After that the dry waller, then the trim carpenter. If the house is framed improperly (like my home was) the dry wall will not lay correctly. If the drywall is not right, the trim work will not lay right. Each layer of construction depends on the integrity of the previous jobber. That being said, the following is how my house was repaired.

   The method first employed by the sub-contractors to repair walls was at best odd. Bowed and uneven walls were the main complaint. I had identified walls that had visually large bows in them. Most would expect that the dry wall would be removed, the source of the bow would be found and then repaired by replacing the bowed stud. Then new dry wall would be installed and the wall would then be painted. This is not how it was done.

At the point of the high spot of the wall, a window or hole was cut into the wall. At that point the exposed stud was then cut and the stud would be pushed back enough to make the high point level with the area being repaired. Then a sister stud would be nailed to the old stud (See the diagram).

In theory, I guess that should have worked but it did not. Most studs are 8’ long. If the top and bottom of the stud are left stationary, and then pivoted in the middle, the law of physics would make one assume that the top and bottom of the stud has to now be pulling away from the dry wall that has been left in place. What I started complaining about was that yes the original bow is now gone, but I now have a new problem in the wall. In addition to this, many times the bow spanned several studs. These contractors would just address the highest spot leaving the other portion of the bow behind. What would result is that I now have low spots above the repaired area and still have a bow to the left and right of the area. End result was a "rippled" wall. This was called "repaired".

   Another Pulte favorite "repair" involved using lots of caulking. Because the walls were so badly framed, our walls were wavy and bowed. The base molding would not lay flat against the wall when it was nailed into place. What the final result was that we had many large gaps between the wall and the molding. Well how do we fix this? They filled the gaps with caulking and then painted over the caulking. Again in theory this sounds ok. Problem is that wood, especially new wood, expands and contracts with the change in humidity in the room. Very shortly after we moved in the house, the caulking starting separating away from the walls. The real problem was that the walls were so badly framed that the gaps were too large for the caulk to be effective. When I complained about the amount of caulk that was used, I was told "it is normal to caulk moldings. You need to recaulk those gaps. It’s normal maintenance". Has anyone ever heard of caulking interior trim moldings as "normal maintenance"? If you have, please e-mail me and set me straight!

   My staircase in the foyer to the second floor was installed improperly. Instead of being flush against the wall, it was installed on an angle. That is, the bottom portion of the staircase was flush to the wall, but it was away from the wall at the top. To get a perspective of what I mean, imagine yourself at the bottom of the steps looking up to the second floor. The stairs, instead of being parallel to the wall, went in a right to left direction. How do you fix this. Well Pulte decided the best way would be to take long wood screws, and drive them through four steps of the stair stringer forcing the stringer back flush to the wall. Again this sounds all well and good. But consider this the stair case is a pre-fab stair case. Refer to the picture below to understand the components.

Stringer. Two per staircase. The steps and risers fit into them
The riser. That is the back portion of a stairs
The step or tread. This is what you actually step on
Even though hard to see in this photo, the arrows point to wedges that are used to support and help hold the step and riser into place. The step and riser fit into slots or dado joints that are cut out of the stringer

   Now lets go through some basic science. If this was the stair case, the stringer in the foreground would represent the stringer against the wall. The stringer in the background would be the stringer facing the open area of the foyer. Now remember that wall stringer was forced away from the foyer side to be pushed against the wall. The one stringer has to stay stationary because it is attached to the short wall hiding the stairs themselves. That little wall is nailed to the floor. What happens to the stairs after the distance between the stringers is expanded by moving them apart? The steps and riser can’t make themselves longer. So what happens is that the steps and riser are pulled out of the dado joints. This is what happened to my stair case. Now the top steps are loose and they squeak. The underside of the stairs had to be removed and the steps had to be supported by nailing blocks of wood to the stringer under the steps. Problem is that the top 3 steps were not supported because Pulte did not want to tear out a portion of the hall ceiling to gain access to that part of the stairs.

   So how do you fix a floor that has a variety of high and low spots. Pulte Homes are experts at this. They tried 3 different times to repair my kitchen floor. The first time they tried to fix one hump in the entrance to the kitchen from the foyer, they pulled up my vinyl floor, cut out the sub floor, then one of the Pulte service managers took some sort of grinder and ground down the floor joist. Then he replace my sub floor (which was supposed to be tongue and groove flooring, but now no longer would be) and rolled the vinyl back down. That was neat except Einstein ground down the joist too much. I went from a 3/4 inch high spot to a 1/2 inch valley. Now comes one of the mysteries of home repair. A different service manager had now been assigned to oversee the repair work on my home. This new guy, lets call him Harold, was supposed to be the savior. Somehow, don’t ask me how, he managed to "repair" that same spot. His final work reproduced the original 3/4 inch hump in the exact same spot though. Don’t know how he managed to do it, but he did! The third time this same spot was repaired almost worked. Pulte finally agreed that they could not fix this hump. So as a compromise, they offered to replace my vinyl floor with ceramic tile. Part of the installation process would be to add a base of a concrete or mortar to the sub-floor. They would flow it out so it would fill the low spots. Then they laid the tile down on top of the cement. Like I said, this almost worked. Most of the other spots leveled out fairly well but the original hump still survived. Instead of a 3/4 inch hump, it’s now a 1/2 inch hump. In Pulte’s world, this is now fixed!

   Interior doors were another problem I had. When the doors were closed, the gaps around the doors were very uneven. Large gaps in some areas, door hitting the jamb in other areas. This does not sound like much except consider this. All homes settle over time. A house will actually move and twist over years. If a new home has normal movement, this could cause the doors to become difficult to operate. As I am writing this, I guess I could see how this problem can be hard to understand. Try this. Go to a door in any room in your home. Close the door and look at the spacing between the door and the door frame. Are the gaps around the door even? Well, like I said, mine are not. Here is how Pulte fixed my doors. The diagram here shows a door opening with the door not installed.

Points to the opening or hole in the wall
Points to the door frame or jamb

Points (the black squares) to the shims that would be used to square the frame

   When a door is installed into an opening, the opening is larger than the frame. Shims are used to adjust and secure the frame to the opening. My doors hit the frame because the frame is not square. Adding or removing shims is the process used to perform the squaring. Then the job is completed by covering the opening with case molding. Now if the doors need to be reset properly, most people would assume that the molding would be removed and the shims would be adjusted (added or removed) using a level, and square the frame. Pulte likes to do this process another way. Why remove the molding when you can just take nails and hammer them into the jamb and force the frame back? And since were at saving time and money, why bother to even cover the nail holes? Everyone has holes in their door jambs, right?

   Ready for more? What do you think would be a good way to repair a load bearing wall that is out of plumb and concave? Let me explain. Lets pretend that the diagram below is the left rear corner of my house.

   The back wall of the house has the "V" shape. Pulte figures the best way to attack this problem is forget that maybe there is something wrong. No, instead, they just peeled off the aluminum siding, added plywood to the back wall and reinstalled the siding. Problem solved, right! What do you think about your new house getting a bandaid repair like this? Top dollar for a house, and mickey mouse repairs!

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