The downside of McMansions
Thursday August 23, 2007
Categories: Consumerism
Remember the guy in "Crunchy Cons" who said his father-in-law, an engineer, used to walk him through neighborhoods where they were constructing McMansions and point out to him the crappy workmanship. And tell him that those houses were going to...
Filed Under: foreclosures, McMansions
Add to Del.icio.us
Add to Technorati
Add to Digg
Add to Newsvine
Add to Facebook
Add to StumbleUpon
Advertisement
Advertisement
Search This Blog
Recent Posts
About Crunchy Con
Rod Dreher is an editorial columnist for the Dallas Morning News, and author of "Crunchy Cons" (Crown Forum), a nonfiction book about conservatives, most of them religious, whose faith and political convictions sometimes put them at odds with mainstream conservatives. The views expressed in this blog are his own.
Subscribe
Archives
Blogs Worth Reading
- Front Porch Republic
- The American Conservative
- Patrick Deneen
- Conventional Folly
- The American Scene
- First Things
- Andrew Sullivan
- The Plank
- Eunomia
- Get Religion
- Postmodern Conservative
- Alex Massie
- The Corner
- Contentions
- Sharon Astyk
- Barry Ritholtz
- The Oil Drum
- Mere Comments
- First Principles (ISI)
- Brian Kaller
I like to describe McMansions as comparable to going to Home Depot or Lowes and ordering paint. When you see an orange that catches your fancy you ask for some of that. Then you see a shade of green that takes you back to the day. You add that. On and on it goes. You see all these wonderful colors and you want a little of each.
When you get done and the paint is all mixed everyone seems to be surprised when the final color always is a sorry brown. It's the same with a house, a life, or a car, anytime you put everything into it invariably it ends up deserving a flushing.
I can't tell you how many times I've walked into a home to give an estimate on something or another and felt like I'd walked into a home design magazine index of the hot things to do to have a cool house. It's a shame. One of my clients once explained to me that some people only have taste in their mouthes.
The lack of quality in construction these days is because of two phenomenoms. The first is back in the day the man of the house did some kind of construction work. He might not be a master of all trades but he knew enough about construction to know quality when he saw it.
The second and most dastardly thing is everything today is about appearances. People don't care about quality, they only care about how things look. This has cultivated the methodology of the way things are done today. I used to be surprised when I was the only person in charge of what I did doing the work. Now I'm surprised when I'm not. I did a big project at a muli-million dollar home a year or so ago and had the owner tell me I was the only craftsman they'd had on the job in over two years of construction. Everyone else showed up with laborers, laid out the work, and then left until late in the afternoon or the next morning.
The saddest thing about this from my perspective is someone with the money and the desire to get real quality has almost an impossible time finding it. The people with the skills to do quality work can't compete with the pointer and his crew of laborers doing cookie cutter stuff. There isn't the demand for the skilled labor and so they've disappeared from the scene. It's heart breaking. It really hurts the heart to walk into a room and see good wood or great stone installed with no concept of fit and finish.
Sorry for the rant but the topic is close to my heart.
The mother of one of my daughter's friends told me that they had the same thing with the unconnected drain in their upscale house (H--------, I think). It seems like such a basic thing to get right. H-------- came and fixed it at once. They were satisfied.
On the other hand we're in a 40 y.o. not McMansion watching things fall apart - we're going to have to have concrete injected under the sinking front porch slab, and all the 20 y.o. cabinet doors in the kitchen are committing suicide one by one (never never never install laminated particle board doors, which are too heavy for those adjustable hinges that work loose until the top one is free and the pins in the bottom one snap.) And no one is going to come fix it for us, unless we pay them.
We once lived in townhouses where all the washing machine hoses (second floor) developed aneurysms at the same time.
Four children are hard on a house anyway. The oldest one doesn't know his strength and has no sense (do you know you can snap off the drain pipe of the bathroom sink by pushing up to make yourself real heavy on the scale? and curtain rods aren't designed for chinning? and you can burn a hole in a Corian countertop?) The littlest one just draws on walls and occasionally cuts the fringes off the rugs...
Having made the mistake once of working for an arbitration firm, I can see why homeowners with major defects in their houses feel they're walking into negotiations with both hands tied behind their back.
I have a 1400 square foot 1940's era house in an old neighborhood at the center of a mid-sized town (Texas panhandle). It's literally built like a tank. There was untouched white oak under the carpet when I moved in and a huge back yard, but it's in need of a serious insulation upgrade. Despite the small size, it seems like my energy usage is way out of kilter - nearly $285.00 last month alone (that does include water and garbage, really everything but gas) - but I'm not sure how to diagnose the problem. I plan on blowing some insulation into the attic and perhaps injecting it into the walls, as I get the cash. I've also heard that it's possible to blow/apply a kind of "sticky" insulation on the underside (it's pier & beam house). It doesn't seem like we're real energy hogs, so I'm a bit perplexed by the amount of the bill. (I've had midsummer bills in excess of $300.00 in the past). Does that amount seem out of line to anyone else??
Sorry to venture off thread in discussing insulation/energy consumption issues, but it seems to be the one benefit to newer, bigger houses, including McMansions . . .
Having made the mistake once of working for an arbitration firm, I can see why homeowners with major defects in their houses feel they're walking into negotiations with both hands tied behind their back.
Yes; mandatory arbitration clauses are evil. Basically, you're entering into a binding legal agreement that says "Head you win, tails I lose."
Oh, and we get to do it 5 states away from whereever you live now.
Neither the MSNBC piece's author, nor any of the commenters so far, has been able to mention the 800 lb. gorilla in the room: a sizable number of those workmen who provided the labor army to construct the McMansions now falling apart were illegal aliens. Ask a contractor you trust to be honest about it and you'll hear about how, in the rush to cut costs and get these new developments up and running in double-quick time, they resorted to hiring Guatemalan and Mexican peasants who knew as much going into the job about putting up drywall or laying down floors as Lindsay Lohan. Some of them perhaps got enough on the job experience to have eventually learned, so if you are considering buying one of these places in "Chesterfield Oaks" or somesuch, snap up one of the last ones completed, not the initial models. But the contractors who've spoken have said in most cases, the seasonal labor employed to build the various Tollbrothersburgs were finally paid off only marginally more skilled than when they started. As with everything, caveat emptor.
This is a good reason not bail out on a well built, old house, even if it is energy inefficient.
harvey lacey writes: "The saddest thing about this from my perspective is someone with the money and the desire to get real quality has almost an impossible time finding it."
Try something like Angie's List. Before we starting using that resource and when we pulled contacts out of the Yellow Pages, about 80-90% of the contractors from whom we requested estimates (and took off work to meet) were complete no-shows. We've had no problems with contractors pulled up on Angie's List.
House flippers are no better, and maybe worse, than builders of new homes.
We bought a small home built in 1948 a few months ago. The lady who owned it before us lived there only 15 months because she decided to move back from where she's from. The house is mainly fine, but we keep finding corners that got cut. There's a register in the hardwoods that doesn't connect to the HVAC anymore - the bottom is now just a box covered in sheet metal. Also, one kitchen cabinet literally fell of the wall as we started to fill it. The laboreres had just attached it to the sheetrock with regular screws.
Things could be way worse, but it does make me wonder what will come next. And when I see shows like "Flip that House," I am now deeply skeptical about what the ultimate buyers really get.
Sorry, I should have added that the lady before us brought it from a house flipper, I think. Our neighborhood is "up-and-coming" (read: gentrifying), so there are tons of flips going on. It continues even with the slump. Now they normally tear down the tiny homes and replace them with McMansions that loom over the smaller homes below.
Our family has long called those McMansion developments "cell-blocks for free people" because they are so lacking in character. Back in the late 90s there was a straight-line wind, something like an inland hurricane, that swept through the Twin Cities. 100+year old oaks and elms were uprooted. My old house, Arts and Crafts from the 20s, and all those of my neighbors withstood the storms, the only damage coming from trees that hit houses. On the far side of the storm, a Yup-scale development full of new McMansions, the roofs were ripped off like pieces of paper. Apparently the developers didn't even bother to use long enough nails to hold the things down.
At this point, the only new house I'd live in is one we built by hand.
I'd like a Craftsmen Bungalow built in the 20s. Beautiful and built to last, with some history.
My friend just had her house painted. She said that only the supervisor spoke English. The rest spoke spanish to each other. She felt creeped out by this. This is normal now in our area. Most of the construction workers don't speak English as their primary language. This is not to say that they can't do good work. But one has to wonder how well they know the area's building codes.
Post a Comment
By submitting these comments, I agree to the beliefnet.com terms of service, rules of conduct and privacy policy (the "agreements"). I understand and agree that any content I post is licensed to beliefnet.com and may be used by beliefnet.com in accordance with the agreements.