Poor guy wants to show off his new stuff and gets nothing but grief. lol

Didn't we have someone a while back with the same problem? Or maybe the original OP?

Yeah, my fault. The photo of the ramp is misleading. I got a PM from someone who thought there was standing water "pooling" in the corners. The existing pump empties the whole area within minutes of when the rain stops. Never any standing water. It's only when the rain is coming down HARD that the pump can't keep it drained. The solution is two pumps and a constant supply of electricity to them. I got it handled.

Some of the most successful contractors I know have built the same handful of house plans over and over. They have the costs nailed down to the penny, their subcontractors know exactly what is required and expected, and they can keep on schedule.

Most new construction is a prototype. A brand-new building being created, with all the teething problems that go along with prototypes. The construction industry as a whole has a great record of selling prototypes successfully.

But the guys who stick with known plans have moved into production mode. They've fixed any niggly problems, and eliminated the time wasting head-scratching that accompanies most construction sites.

Then there are the select few, that offer their own financing. Having several people paying monthly, year-round means steady income through construction's typical boom/bust cycles, along with the interest income of 30-year loans on top of selling homes at profitable prices.

I know a few multi-millionaire residential builders. I do not consider them idiots.



Edit: Sorry for the thread drift.

Well, your area is different than what I see in SE Michigan.

Over here the clone home McMansions all have the same flaws repeated over and over again.

One of the most common is combining pre-primed rough sawn cedar trim and corner boards with vinyl siding. The bottom cedar board is topped with a "J-Molding" to hold in place the horizontal vinyl siding above. This forms a little bucket with no weep holes, the water tends to leak out each mitered corner of the sides and infiltrate the building and rot the poorly primed wood. No amount of caulking is going to fix that, and not even house wrap under some of it to protect the crappy OSB underneath.

In short, they have perfected how to get something to look good, rot out in just over the legal threshold, and ready to sell another tragedy in the making to the same customer in less than ten years.

Sort of like when the car companies designed cars to rust out in a few years so they could sell you a new one.

My handi-man builder buddy and I saw a gold mine of repair work in these neighborhoods if that's how you wanted to spend your life. And most of the other repair people just replaced the trim, leaving the rot underneath and the same design flaw to happen again. Very few people wanted to pay extra to change the design so that it would perform better.

Just getting a client that wasn't in shock once we explained the problem was a challenge. What do you mean you want 10k to fix my less than ten year old house? I only know what I can see and it doesn't look that bad................then why did you call us?

A thousand houses, all looking the same, all detailed the same and all rotting out the same. Not custom built prototypes.

Planned obsolescence
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_obsolescence
And that is how it's done.

These are all the rage in Houston lately. Passive and self deploying. Probably way to expensive when your pumps will work.
Self-Closing Flood Barriers

I'm not calling every residential contractor an idiot, I'm just painting the majority of them with that brush.

In the context of this thread, they tend to not design a house that is suitable for the site on which it is built, they build the house of choice on whatever lot is in front of them.

In the commercial world, you start with a site, then design a building that makes sense for that site. The site is modified, prior to construction, to further make it suitable for use.

Residential contractors tend to not do any soil testing before they build the foundations and they tend to not do any more site work than knocking down trees that are in the way and scraping a more-or-less flat spot where the house will sit. Final grading is almost always done at the end of the project and solutions for problems like the one in this thread are often solved in a half-ass manner, because real solutions cost real money and few builders or owners want to pay for them.

JR

this sort of crap is not uncommon.