Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Design-Build & Takoma Village

[Kay Argyle (argyle]

> --  I actually have  a question here --  I'd be interested in hearing
other
> folks's move in stories.  Right now we have a LOT of things tiny and big
> that need attention from light face plates to plumbing.  It feels like a
> never ending list of "fix its"  What have others experienced at move in?
> How "perfectly" finished was your community?  I heard that some folks in
> Nyland were w/out phone service for FOUR months after move in.  --... >
Ann Z.

The "punch list" (items that weren't finished correctly) for our unit was
two pages long single-spaced -- that's for one unit out of twenty-six. 
Most items were minor, and most of them were taken care of by the
contractor's rep.  There were at least three times during construction that
my roommate caught something major that didn't match the drawings, in time
for us to ask for it to be ripped out and redone -- part of our foundation
the wrong shape, windows the wrong size, and roof trusses the wrong angle. 
We visited the site three to four evenings/weekends a week, for most of a
year, looking at everything that was done each step of construction.

There are some major problems with other units that were not taken care of,
and at this point (two years after move-in) are unlikely to be.  Some
things are just plain unfixable short of bulldozing, like the fact that the
foundations should have been at least six inches higher to meet code for
adequate clearance above grade.

Most of us had phone service within a month or two of move-in, but the
phone company had to come back the next summer to bury all the phone lines
it left trailing across people's yards and across the central pedestrian
path.

Kay
Wasatch Commons
SLC