Ask the Architect

How do some contractors sleep at night?

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Q. We did construction about five years ago and had water problems immediately. Our children’s bedrooms are cold in the winter and the ceilings have stained, even after the contractor came back twice and said everything was fixed. Needless to say, we don’t want that guy back a third time, but how can we fix this problem? We had a few other contractors over and think we found the right person, but what do we do to not go through all this again?

A. You did the right thing by reaching out to an independent professional for advice and, in your case, oversight. I hate hearing about people paying too much or not getting satisfaction, so I looked at the problems. Because architects detail buildings to prevent or eliminate these problems, we should be contacted in cases like this, but the majority of us are designing buildings, not troubleshooting. I sometimes feel like a country doctor when I’m pulled away from a design deadline to “deliver a calf,” or so it seems, but these mysteries are always, always, solvable. Sometimes the solution is very expensive, like starting all over, which nobody likes to hear, and sometimes a reasonable expense is possible.

In your case, there were many problems. The contractor didn’t follow the plans, a common mistake. The lack of redundancy as the materials were stripped away was noticed immediately. The electrician didn’t use insulated recessed lighting, so they pulled the insulation about 8 inches away from the fixture in all directions, which is like sleeping with a window open on a winter night. The adjoining roofs and walls of your extension had a 3-inch instead of a 24-inch overlap of waterproofing membrane going up the walls and roofs, and the overhang wasn’t an overhang at all. The siding below the roof edge was protruding out further than the roof edge, so rainwater runs down inside the exterior wall cavity. Roof extensions kick the water away to prevent this from happening.

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