Florida

Our visit to Independence today surprised us with a fully insulated home (ignoring things like still missing patio doors, and a damaged window!):

So depending on how many work days there are, it’s possible that sheetrock will be completed this coming week!

However, not everything is going so well. In truth we’re not really frustrated, but it made for a nice bit of alliteration in the post title! But it is quite disappointing how some of Lennar’s construction processes have affected us.
It appears that Lennar primarily relies on a quality process of “do the same as last time” which no doubt works ok for repeated construction, but does not work for our Brandywine home which is rare on this estate. So we have various construction crews that have never built this style before, and either the provided documentation is insufficient, or it’s not followed.
Either way, we’ve had a number of errors in the home build, that so far have added at least 7 weeks to the build time – our original (too optimistic) closing date of late November has pushed out to mid December, mid January, and now I would not be surprised to see it slip to February.

An early delay was insufficient structure in the block wall supports for the upstairs patio; here’s a before/after comparison:

There was also a delay for electrical wiring, caused I believe by a disagreement over whether the upstairs hall was actually a hall or a room (requiring more electrical outlets); this was eventually solved simply by adding a few more outlets, but again it added a few weeks to the construction.

Last week there was additional framing support added, and this week, we learned that the stairs had to be re-constructed; now, on today’s visit we’ve seen what is perhaps the worst failure (or at least maybe the most costly). Related to the additional framing, more supports have been added to carry the roof in the upstairs walls (you can see one beam to the left of the window in this picture), and they’ve badly damaged the stucco in a few places:

So the next step for our home’s exterior would seem to be the removal and replacement of all the exterior stucco (there’s an additional question about the thickness of what is there)!

It’s surely not a cost effective process to build this way, and it does leave us hoping that the final quality will be ok …