Anyone with experience building a house knows it can be a extremely stressful endeavor on a good day, and an outright series of nightmares on a bad one. It’s understandable that as your bottom line keeps rising and your completion date keeps getting pushed back, your desire to see certain parts of your project finished and checked off becomes more and more intense. But beware of quick, cheap fixes that could resurface again and again as major problems throughout the lifespan of your home. The unfortunate truth about shoddy construction shortcuts is that they are quick and inexpensive to implement during building time, but extravagantly expensive and tedious to undo once your home is built!
25 years ago in Holualoa, a particularly moist section of Hawaii that drew many well-to-do retiree home builders, the kitchen fashion of the times was to install custom cut one-piece countertops above cabinets made entirely from pressboard. Pressboard was relatively cheap and (to the delight of busy contractors) relatively quick and easy to install. Impatient owners were glad to see their kitchens develop rapidly and at a fraction of the cost of using dense, resistant and properly treated hardwoods or other alternative materials. Flash forward to the present day, when this same set of now aged homeowners are bending down to open kitchen cabinets beneath their sinks only to find their cabinets come away in their hands as gummy pulp and rotten mush.
Their use of a totally inappropriate building material in the name of upfront savings and speed has also invited legions of termites, cockroaches and other pests that find the rotten cabinets ideal for nesting. Additionally, colonies of toxic mold have spread throughout their kitchens, aided by the cabinet materials themselves and the unsealed spaces caused by perpetual moisture damage to the spongy pressboard. Mold of this kind is not only repugnantly smelly, but also potentially harmful to the respiratory systems of immuno-compromised demographics, such as the elderly. One such homeowner who was told his entire kitchen would have to be redone and that he could expect to pay at least $8000 for the bare minimum of work required to make it safe to be in again. Imagine how often he has wished he had spent a little more time and money upfront to prevent such a disaster!
Though second opinions are usually considered to fall solely within the realm of medicine, asking for advice on building materials, methods or contractor selections from several different sources greatly reduces your risk of being swindled by an inexperienced or hasty contractor or building firm. If you can bring informed questions back to your foreman, you might make them think twice about trying to pull a fast one that will land you in long and expensive repairs in the future. Remember that a little extra money, research and time upfront can more than double your return with peace of mind once your project is finally complete.
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