Homeowners Demanding Repairs at New Tract
Maybe it was the vaulted ceilings or all those extra little touches, such as the arched doorways, but Karen Culver remembers walking through the Mission Viejo house and thinking: Now this is the way to design a home.
“It was not one of the box-type houses,” Culver said. “It had lot of angles, columns and curved staircases. The design was so attractive, you couldn’t help but like it.”
But that was a year ago. Today, six months after buying the $200,000 home, Culver’s fascination with design has given way to a deep concern over the structural quality of the house into which she has sunk her life savings.
Problems include the ceramic tiles that keep falling off the roof, the cracks that have appeared on the front porch, the bent window frames and the scratched glass.
“And we have a wall in our master bedroom that isn’t straight,” said Robert Pompeo, who co-owns the house with Culver. “The wall literally has waves in it. It has so many waves it looks like Lake Mission Viejo.”
Pompeo and Culver, whose three-bedroom, 2,300-square-foot home sits on Whitebark Street, are organizing homeowners of the Ventana tract community to force the builder, Barratt American in Irvine, into making what Pompeo estimated would amount to thousands of dollars in repairs on dozens of homes.
On Saturday, more than 50 of the approximately 130 homeowners in the Ventana tract met at the Pompeo-Culver household to put their complaints in writing. They said they would file those complaints with the county building inspector’s office.
“We want the county to come reinspect these homes to make sure the roofs are safe,” said Pompeo, a Northrop engineer.
Pompeo’s neighbors had similar stories of cracked and falling roof tiles, poorly installed interior decorative tiles, peeling paint and leaky windows.
“It seems that there is a list a mile long of things that are wrong,” said Deborah Stanton, who lives on Foxtail. “We moved last May, and it has been one thing after another.”
Stanton’s husband, a Navy lieutenant, is stationed on the aircraft carrier Midway in the Persian Gulf.
“He’s out there fighting for his country and he’s not sure if he wants to come home and face all these problems with this house,” his wife said. “It has made me physically ill.”
Tim Hamilton, Barratt’s sales and marketing director, said he was not aware of the problems encountered by Pompeo, Stanton and other tract residents but promised each would receive swift and individual attention.
“In any large project, you are bound to have some cases where people’s expectations of quality are greater than the industry can provide,” he said. “These houses have all been built to code and have been approved by the county, given certificates of occupancy.”
“We have probably four of our staff people who have bought in the project and live there and are happy and delighted in their homes. I think that it is inevitable from time to time that when you are in a new home there will be call-backs.”
Hamilton said the only problems he had been aware of were the recent cases in which roof tiles were blown off during heavy winds last month.
According to Barratt officials, about 100 homes in the area lost tiles when winds of 83 m.p.h. hit the Ventana tract, which sits on a small hill.
Subcontractors Hired
In those cases, Hamilton said, the Barratt company paid subcontractors to repair the roofs.
“Fifty percent of the work has been done, and our commitment is to finish the roofs,” he said. “(But) let’s just address the roofs. Instead of referring the clients to their insurance companies and letting them fight their way with them, we tried to help.
“We have made arrangements with the subcontractors to repair those roofs and bring them back to standard,” at Barratt’s expense, he said.
But Pompeo said the response from Barratt to their complaints has been less than satisfactory.
“We are having major problems with just about everything in these homes, and we are not getting any help from these Barratt people,” Pompeo said. “I have concrete on the front porch that is cracking, and they tell me that if the cracks aren’t wide enough to put a nickel in, then that is acceptable.
“I say horse pucky. I don’t want cracks in my concrete and my bedroom walls waving like a lake. I paid $200,000, and for this?”
Scott Hebert, a project coordinator for Columbia Savings & Loan, moved into his Barratt home on Ponderosa in late November. He had been there less than a month when the storm hit.
‘Could Have Been Killed’
“I was in the bedroom listening to the radio when tiles started crashing off the roof. And then, this huge piece of metal flashing, a roof vent, came crashing through my window. It was incredible. I found out later that the flashing had never been nailed down on the roof. Somebody could have been killed,” he said.
Hebert said he had also found a large crack in a concrete slab and part of his sheet rock stained by water leaking from a balcony.
“There just seem to be many, many things wrong,” he said. “It looks like a lot of sloppy work. And this house is only 3 months old.”
Another resident, electronic sales representative Kirby Hiscox, said he had paid $4,000 extra in his $200,000 home for special decorative tile but found that it had been installed incorrectly.
“For one thing, the grain was supposed to run from left to right and it wasn’t,” he said. “And then there were some tiles that were higher or lower than the others. You could literally stub your toe walking across it.”
Hiscox said a Barratt representative refused to redo the tile job and offered only to grind down the tiles that were too high.
“I paid $4,000 extra for this,” Hiscox said. “Can you imagine? Paying extra for this?
“The most disappointing thing is that this is such a beautiful house, and you spend all this money on a home and they give you all this rah-rah song and dance about what a great builder they are and how these designs have won all these awards. And then you get stuck with this.”
