Is Waterset worth the price?

[MortonR]

Originally Posted by mrviking

I did a lot of work with those two builders. I think those two were a few of the better production builders.
Suarez use to have the best superintendents out on the job sites in the 90's. Things changed when the two brothers split.

We built with Morrison in 1996 and were on them almost daily for compliance and quality issues. Now understand that we've built homes before ourselves with someone else acting as the GC, so we're a bit more discerning than most home buyers, but some of the stuff we saw was simply lousy and lazy efforts on the part of the subs.

That and they hardly followed their contract. We redlined a number of items on the plans and changed the specs on some things, all of which were reviewed and approved by their people. When it came to the actual work, it was like the subs never saw the plans and were just going to blow out another copy of that model home. For example, we specified that drywall would be screwed and not nailed. The morning the drywall guys showed up, they were in there nailing away. We stopped them immediately, called the super, and pointed out the part of the specs that stated "screws, not nails". Five minutes later, the drywall guys were back in the house with their screw guns happily screwing all the drywall in place. Had we not been there the whole house would have had nailed drywall.

We had to explain to them that we weren't being jerks, we were just holding them in compliance with the specs and plans the way they were written and approved. It got so bad that they banned us from the job site the last couple of weeks. That was a mistake on their part, as we had a huge list of fixes on the final punch that delayed occupancy by a couple of weeks. Had they just fixed the stuff when we caught it things would have gone much smoother.

We live in a Suarez home from the same time period now, and while there are still a lot of things I see that grate on me, the Suarez home seems a bit better designed and engineered than the Morrison.

RM