Cohousing-L Mailing List: Resolving post-construction issues, design errors, dealing with faulty construction, production and equipment problems.

[S. Kashdan (skashdan]

Hello fellow cohousers, this is Sylvie Kashdan of  Jackson Place Cohousing
in Seattle, Washington again.

As a very new cohousing community, we have lots of questions, and not many
answers to contribute right now.  So, we really appreciate all the help that
more experienced communities can pass along.  Thanks to everyone who gave
past help.  And thanks in advance for any help you might be able to give.
We will try to do more of the same in the future.

This week we are hoping to get some hints on the most effective ways of
resolving post-construction issues, design errors,  dealing with faulty
construction, production and equipment.  It's a hard set of things for me to
dig out of the archives, and get some helpful specifics, so please bear with
me.  We have a team dealing directly with our architect and contractor, but
it is a really challenging task and we all would appreciate knowing how
others have dealt with similar issues.

The construction of Jackson Place Cohousing was completed in December, 2001,
and now all of our units are sold, and almost all of  us are moved in.

Our project was self-developed, by which I mean that our members, rather
than a separate company, played the major role in selecting the architect
and contractor, planning the facilities and defining individual and common
options. Most of us have had to start nearly from scratch in learning about
and understanding the ins and outs of putting up a project.

Now we are well into our first year of occupancy, and we have some questions
about resolving post-construction issues, design errors,  dealing with
faulty construction, production and equipment, etc. We hope some of you out
there who built your projects in a similar way might be able to help us by
telling us about your experiences and solutions you were able to find.

We'd be interested to know what role your architect played in resolving
post-construction issues.  For example:

What types of design and construction problems was your architect willing to
help fix?

What types of problems were only the responsibility of the contractor?

What types of problems were you forced to deal with on your own?

Finally, did your architect play a role in resolving problems after the
"punchlist" items (the things the architect picked out as needing fixing
before giving final payment to the contractor) were all resolved?

Anything else you could tell us about dealing with the post-construction
contractor warranty period would be a big help.

You can answer me either on list or at
skashdan [at] scn.org

Coheartedly,

Sylvie Kashdan
Jackson Place Cohousing
800 Hiawatha Place South
Seattle, WA 98144
www.seattlecohousing.org
Where our vegetable and herb gardens are flourishing, we have two new babies
and another on the way, children are running everywhere and we've already
had parties, a play and musical performances in our common house...so some
things are going quite well.


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